If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.

Whats crazy is Hangouts is still going (in the form of Chat and Meet). I’ve had the same group chat going with a few buddies on it for years and years now. And it is still better than anything outside of Signal in my opinion for messaging.

I still don’t understand how Google thought it had a chance at success. They had the same model as Onlive had 10 years prior. It ended up failing for much the same reasons.

I wouldn’t be able to find a use for Alexa if they were paying me $10/month to use it.

Dunno how it is Apples fault that he didn’t take the time to understand how the tools that he uses work.

If I plow my car into a crowd of people because I mistake the gas for the brake that is not GM’s fault.

I mean Android, and Samsung in particular, borrow from Apple all the time as well. Hell Samsung frequently bad mouths Apples for the anti-consumer choices one year then follows suit and does the same thing in a year or 2 themselves.

These kinds of takes are not the flex some seem to think they are in my opinion.

But they did use their mouse for valid company business, so it is all OK.

Well yeah, its using the same dataset as MS copilot.

Spitting out inaccurate (I wish the media would stop feeding into calling it something that sounds less bad like hallucinations) answers is nothing something that will go away until the LLM gains the ability to decern context.

I wonder how long it will be before they start giving discounts on tickets for interacting with the ads a certain number of times during the flight.

The real game now is how long will it last before the hype and with the the floor falls out of “AI” and a good chunk of their stock gains with it.

The most damning thing to call it is “inaccurate”. Nothing will drive the average person away from a companies information gathering products faster than associating it with being inaccurate more times than not. That is why they are inventing different things to call it. It sounds less bad to say “my LLM hallucinates sometimes” than it does to say “my LLM is inaccurate sometimes“.

More likely they will just slowly rebrand search to more AI type things. Then slowly retire the non-AI parts in the background.

Then it sounds like the “web” tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.

If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.

Disclaimer: The below rant does not include things like healthcare where choice in the market is either not a thing or not possible. Lest someone think I am being absolutist. It is purely railing against the average consumer widget, not grandmas oxygen tank refills.

That depends on how many people want them.

Companies will make, or stop making/doing, nearly anything if the money for doing it goes away. But not enough people want “dumbphones” bad enough to stop buying “smartphones”.

Just like not enough people want small phones to stop buying the big ones. Or not enough people want the price of Netflix to go down to stop paying for Netflix, etc. Consumers in general need to learn the power of and build up the mental discipline to do without when the available options aren’t what they want. Apple, Google, etc can’t force you to buy it from them after all.

Companies prey on the inability of the consumer to go without when they find the terms of the deal distasteful to great success. Large chunks of every companies marketing department think about nothing else.

The real “sin” in all of this is there not being enough smaller players around to fill those smaller segments, because we kept buying from the company that bought up all of the competition years ago despite finding those practices distasteful.

Companies, and politicians, have figured out that the average majority is all bark and no bite. And the average majority would be wise to start to figure that out.

Crypto is a textbook example of why we as a society can’t have nice things. To many people are selfish and self serving, and not enough people are willing to ostracize those types of people from society for such actions.

I use AWS to host a far amount of servers and some micro services and for them if you don’t build the backup into your architecture design and the live data gets corrupted, etc you are screwed.

They give you the tools to built it all, but it is up to you as the sysadmin/engineer/ dev to actually use those tools.

Good thing seeing that a game is published or developed by EA, or one of its subsidiaries, is 9 times out of 10 enough for me to not bother with the game to begin with. They don’t make a thing that is worth dealing with them to get to play.

That company burned all of its good will and trust with me years ago. So sure go ahead and put as many ads as you want EA. I know for sure I won’t be seeing them.

No way in hell would I do that if I had that kind of knowledge. Look what happened to Snowden for doing something like that.

He would still spend the remainder of his life in federal prison or be executed if he ever steps back on US soil or the soil of someone with an extradition treaty that is looking to get some brownie points.

That wouldn’t happen to all of them, but I bet you there are some working on some classified mess that would be found and made an example of in short order to shut the others up.

As much as some of us may dislike it when a company does these kinds of things. You can’t really blame them for following the laws of the country that they are headquartered in.

You can blame them for operating there to begin with in cases like Apple in China, but you could hardly blame them for following the laws of the US where they are headquartered for example.

If the law of the land where the headquarters is requires them to give up the data they do have to partner nations then they don’t really have much choice in the long run if they want to continue to exist.