What we used to have, 15 years ago, was a really well functioning google. You could be lazy with your queries and still find what you wanted in the first two or three hits. Sometimes it was eerily accurate and figuring out what you were actually searching for. Modern google is just not there even with AI answers which is supposed to be infinitely better at natural language processing.
I think that played a somewhat smaller role than Google seemingly gradually starting to take its position for granted and so everything became more focused on revenue generation and less focused on providing the highest quality experiences or results.
Beyond result quality it's absurd that it took LLMs to get meaningful natural language search. Google could have been working on that for many years, even if in a comparably simple manner, but seemingly never even bothered to try, even though that was always obviously going to be the next big step in search.
We used to have an endless supply of new search engines, so "SEO" was not viable. Then Google got a monopoly on search, DoubleClick reverse-acquired Google, and here we are.
Batteries can freeze solid. It takes energy to keep them warm with an heater. Then there’s cabin heating which is usually warmed by heat from combustion in a gas engine.
Well, the article touched on how smaller phone makers and middle tier startups, are being squeezed out. Big tech and their surveillance economy is only going to tighten their grip now.
You’ll get downvoted for your second statement. I think investors are struggling to see how AI turns into more money for consumers if it. It’s one thing to exclaim how your productivity is up, but does that translate into more profit and larger customer base if you’re a business? I very much doubt consumers will pay more than dollars a month for an LLM and I also very much doubt the ad market can grow large enough to cover the spend on that (ad market is plenty big and driven by other economic factors)
Many people are spending significantly more time every day engaging with AI chatbots than they spend engaging with Google, and Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world.
By that exact logic Tiktok should be the most valuable company on the world, yet its not even in top 10. Attention doesn't automatically generate profit especially since most of these companies are yet to monetize attention. They are still burning billions and the public opinion on this outside of tech bubble is very negative. It wouldn't surprise me if the money on the internet falls to pre-2020 levels in next few years. Subscription pricing model is also becoming increasingly cumbersome for companies and individuals which is another worrying trend.
This is Musk, yet again, pulling themes from sci-fi books. He has that vision of ushering in the "future" which is good for dragging us forward but also he fails a lot. His open letter cited the Kardashev scale and his vision for getting us forward like in the novel accelerando.
It definitely was snappy. I used it on school computers that were Pentium (1?) with about as much RAM as my current L2 cache (16MB). Dirty rectangles and win32 primitives. Very responsive. It also came with VB6 where you could write your own interpreted code very easily to do all kinds of stuff.
Apple did create a boolean for that. They call it lockdown mode.
> Lockdown Mode is an optional, extreme protection that’s designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats. Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature.
When Lockdown Mode is enabled, your device won’t function like it typically does. To reduce the attack surface that potentially could be exploited by highly targeted mercenary spyware, certain apps, websites, and features are strictly limited for security and some experiences might not be available at all.
If Pegasus can break the iOS security model, there’s no reason to think it politely respects Lockdown Mode.
It’s basically an admission the model failed, with features turned off so users feel like they’re doing something about it.
Lockdown mode works by reducing the surface area of possible exploits. I don't think there's any failures here. Apple puts a lot of effort into resolving web-based exploits, but they can also prevent entire classes of exploits by just blocking you from opening any URL in iMessage. It's safer, but most users wouldn't accept that trade-off.
If you did RTFA for this story, you’ll see on page 67 what I pasted with a link to the support article describing to end users exactly what’s blocked. It does greatly reduce the attack surface.
> There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that.
I don’t think typing code was ever the problem here. I’m doubtful this got any cheaper.
There's a big difference between typing assembler, cobol or whatever; or typing something more modern in terms of what the resulting code does. And also there's a good reason why programmers aren't paid in characters/words/lines/bytes whatever per hour: they are mostly not typing but thinking. The amount of thinking they do is a constant. The amount of typing they do is a constant. But there's a big step change in productivity for the resulting stuff.
This part absolutely isn't necessary because it's a wrong idea no matter who is in charge.
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