Project Gemini

Why do programmers have so little imagination when it comes to names? It should almost never be the case that project names conflict

Ask Google, this project predates the LLM.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

“There are only two hard things in computer science. Cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.”

Too small for Google to care about.

You forgot the "and off by one errors"

For one, the project started in 2019 https://geminiprotocol.net/history/ So, I guess Google should rename their LLM?

For another, to do that we'd have to follow something like the prescription drug naming process https://globalhealthnow.org/2024-07/why-do-prescription-drug...

That way, instead of "Gemini", they could have named it something like "Cymbalta", "Xeljanz" or "Cialis" :P

They all watched the same movies or read the same books

You forgot "Off by one errors."

Back when I was a Googler, I used to play a little game where I would think of a random word and then check if there was a Google internal project code named for it. It was a bit hard finding stuff that wasn't some system or project, and often there would be multiple ones. I actually found one that I thought would be a nice name and reserved the go link for it, but naming anything after it never panned out, when I finally got to design a system from scratch my manager wanted a boring descriptive name like "consolidated data system" (it was a bit more specific but that was the vibe).

Side note: I noticed that more "boring" and less sexy projects had cooler names a lot of the time, and my theory was that people were compensating for doing unsexy work.

Large tech molochs don't care about any name, it seems. Their power and weight makes the name point to them. Seek on "Amazon" and find that, oh the 7th Wonder of Nature the "Amazon rainforest" is ranked second after some random Big Tech company run by a guy named Jeff. The "lungs of the earth" vs. cheap package delivery and AWS dashboards.

My favorite form is when someone shouts "concurrency" in the middle of the sentence.

Google eats their own with names. Their latest and greatest AI framewofk is Agent Development Kit (ADK). Not to be confused with the Android Development Kit...

I would add also hearing this quip every time either of those things come up un conversation.

"It should almost never be the case that project names conflict"

My corollary to this is "You should never reach for a language you are not fluent in for a name. Especially, just stop it with using Japanese words to name stuff please ffs"

"There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors"

Why single out programmers? Name collisions happen in constantly, across every single industry.

It turns out that there really aren't that many possible project names before you get into the made-up "that sounds stupid" words.

> It should almost never be the case that project names conflict

Sure, if you want projects to have the same naming strategy as Chinese Amazon Marketplace vendors.

Away from that, significance in naming begins to cluster quite quickly.

I reserved go/poop years ago, but the ability to name a project with that name is diminishing

Fun fact: one of the first 10 bugs filed on the Go programming language was "Hey, I've been working on a programming language named Go for the last 10 years, please pick another name." https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

What happens to your go links when you leave Google?

This one is still up. I just checked it. I was underwhelmed by where it linked to.

At least the internal name of that kit is a cool name. So we should blame the Cloud marketing people who likely don't know about Android since they're Cloud people.

> You should never reach for a language you are not fluent in for a name

I agree, but that still doesn't stop funny name related issues between languages. One of my favourites was Pidora (a Fedora release for the RPI) which caused offence to some Russian speakers.

Please no more "Project Espresso" nonsense that is entirely meaningless to anyone reading this.

Pick a descriptive name. Everyone else who is not in your team will thank you.

I remember a comment on here years ago from someone in GCP who mentioned that they did not control the "Cloud" namespace. So any VP could launch a new project and call it cloud something and make people very confused about why it wasn't showing up in the cloud dashboard and API.

Do you have a pile of projects lying around with good names? Coming up with a good one is hard and getting harder every day.

I've always wondered if he meant coming up with good names or if he meant ensuring that names, however they're chosen, reliably resolve to the named thing.

Heh good point. Coq comes to mind too...there was something else recently that sounded terrible in French..."Bitchat" maybe?

I mean, yeah. What percentage of searches for "Amazon" in today's world do you think is going to not be about acquiring cheap shit very quickly? I would expect the tech company to be a better answer than most when someone searches for Amazon. Searching for "the amazon" gives the expected results as that's how it is more commonly referred. So it does seems like your search query as performed was just a bad search

Can't wait for Google to announce a humanoid robot project called "Google Android"...

An alternate take that I tend to agree with:

https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-nam...

I bet it would be a few percent less and the world would be a fraction of a percent better if the first result was the rainforest.

I wonder how much they pay Google for the top spot.

you'll probably find a Google expense for the same value of Amazon services so that no money ever trades hands, but both companies' valuations are inflated

Amazon does not need to pay Google for this. There is no world where Google puts an organic result about the rainforest in the top spot, because it's not what most users are looking for.

At most there might be a world where Google puts someone else's ad above the organic results.

Try being Microsoft and having two different LLM products and an entire office suite named Copilot.

Well, we also know Google isn't trying to help the user leave Google's site as quickly as possible, because they get more ad money when the user clicks on a few pages or does a few searches before finding what they want.

There is no such thing as a good name. A name is good or not only in relation to the reasons why you want that name. Different teams, orgs, etc have different reasons to name systems. Traditionally, tech names have been in English or English sounding bisyllabic mostly (Game Boy, Windows, Office, Adobe, XBox) with PlayStation being unusually long for a name competing in the anglosphere. But examples like the Bard to Gemini change, Veo (Spanish), Claude (French) break the pattern, even then you still have DeepSeek, Lyria and ChatGPT.

The engineering team at Deep Mind does have penchant for names in foreign languages as seen in Veo, Lyria and Gemini.

Oh I see. When you said:

> Why do programmers have so little imagination when it comes to names?

I assumed that you had a better than average method that you could share. But I guess you answered your own question:

> There is no such thing as a good name.