Baldr

There was a time Google were orders of magnitude better than anyone else. Now with Google basically just pushing ads at the top and SEO articles taking over, the other search engines aren’t worse.

In any case, I find that DuckDuckGo is already enough for 90% of my searches and hence it’s my default. This simple fact made my dependency on Google very low nowadays, basically Gmail and Google Maps are the main thing I still use.

I only fall back to Google Search when I want something more tailored to my country news, something in my language or when I’m searching for something around me (like a store, business etc. which are all on Google Maps). These other search engines seem to be good mostly for English content and struggle to filter for things like “This search should be about country Y”.

I’m a practical person, so I don’t resort to extremist views like “100% free of Google”, but I guess these little gestures compound over time. Recently I’ve been also changing some services to use a different email (a private one) other than my Gmail address, just to avoid centralizing everything on Google, and so I’ve been effectively diversifying the services I depend on, which is good.

These men are more than powerful enough to go against Trump

I wouldn’t say that, remember a CEO is just a position. If any of them goes against Trump, they can easily be replaced. Except maybe Zuck.

“I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States,” said Cook, referring to Apple’s pledge to put $600 billion into US manufacturing. Given that Apple made that commitment under threat of crippling tariffs on smartphones

Also interesting to see that this has created a political divide:

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon had a conniption over the dinner earlier in the day. He dedicated a significant portion of his speech Thursday at the far-right National Conservatism Conference to attacking Big Tech “oligarchs,” and during an episode of his podcast he claimed the person who arranged the dinner should be “perp-walked” out of the White House. article

I think none of these people are happy to be shown in public as weak and submissive, but they must have been told to play the game.

When the scene is open to the public, you can already know it’s all a theater.

Non paywalled article: https://archive.is/2BltD

Best thing is that it works flawlessly on the mobile apps as well, and Wikipedia also has a 1 million most relevant articles or so, which is just a few gigabytes.

Encyclopedia Brittanica wasn’t designed to be addicting and offer misinformation for one.

They can’t close the source code as long as they use the Linux kernel, right? Besides, Android is popular among other companies because they can customize part of it as they see fit.

This change isn’t really that drastic, because Android never really followed the open source way of doing things. The article even explains that this won’t change much even for ROM developers, since they’re not creating releases based on “work in progress” branches.

Really the only difference is that Google will spare the work of merging two separate branches often and solving conflicts that might as well be turning into a nightmare as the code base has grown.

I think we’re naturally a bit suspicious of freeware as “misleading” because so many old software used to be just vectors to install malware (mostly spam) alongside it. At least for me, I only trust it either if it is open source or it has a sustainable business model.

…so might as well say that “agent” is simply the next buzzword, since people aren’t so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more

This is exactly the reason for the emphasis on it.

The reality is that the LLMs are impressive and nice to play with. But investors want to know where the big money will come from, and for companies, LLMs aren’t that useful in their current state, I think one of the biggest use for them is extracting information from documents with lots of text.

So “agents” are supposed to be LLMs executing actions instead of just outputting text (such as calling APIs). Which doesn’t seem like the best idea considering they’re not great at all at making decisions—despite these companies try to paint them as capable of such.

If they actually wanted quality documents for people to use, they would be advocating for Standard Ebooks or something.

Or… you know… have PDFs that aren’t pictures of handwritten text?

Yeah, none of that would be a problem if the car isn’t connected to anything (WiFi, Bluetooth etc.)

This is why technically software is a liability. The less code you need, the better, since every line of code is a potential vulnerability and something to maintain, update, etc.

But is it that different than the podcasts voices Google already generate with NotebookLM since a while ago?

Don’t any linux DE have something like a shortcuts app?

I like how monorepo is at the bottom.

As a programmer myself, collaborating on projects can often be more complex than simply “adding features.” It’s not uncommon to encounter challenges such as mismatched preferences in technologies, differing architectural choices, or even divergent design aesthetics that can dampen interest. Besides that, the original creator may not even appreciate the proposed changes and could reject them.