I have thought that for a while and assumed that was apples approach to AI. Wait until everyone burns through investor cash, invents the better tech, and can monetize. Then copy that business model and polish it, or buy out the competition and polish. That’s usually apples move and it makes sense for google to do something similar.
This is my experience as well. String trimmer battery went out (still in warranty and replaced) but my gas string trimmer I use at a bigger property came home with me and worked great. She’s only 15 years old, the battery was 6 months. I love my battery blower and string trimmer, but the gas ones are going strong but typically stay at the ranch property due to it being a bigger property to maintain. I would also need 3-4 battery’s out there to keep up with maintaining it, the gas is a whole lot cheaper than a grands worth of battery’s.
In my city in Northern California our downtown uses an app for parking now. I don’t use it so it’s still an option, but you have to goto a kiosk, enter your license plate number, and pay with card. It’s made the downtown more of a ghost town (admittedly it was already dying) and the boomers with cash just don’t go. The younger 20somethings all complain “boomers are too stupid to use an app” and have no concern for privacy apparently. Welcome to the future I guess.
I have more parking apps on my phone than any other type of app. I begrudgingly download them for some semblance of convenience, but get annoyed that I'm logging in each time as it may be months since I used it, and towns changing apps means I likely have some high percentage of void apps that I keep around just in case. Living in New England doesn't help with lots of small towns, but even Cambridge has multiple apps depending on if you are parking on the street vs in a garage.
I hear some take pride in being “digital native” and only knowing a world where smartphones are a ubiquitous part of your life.
I’m quite content having grown up without being always online. The childhood I had where what I did between school time and when my parents expected me home for dinner were mine alone. Every event was not recorded by 50+ cameras with bad seats and posted online for nobody to watch.
A truly excellent time to be alive that I doubt we will see again
My wife changed carriers and for a day had lost her phone number. She was texting our son (who is in middle school) and his response was “prove it’s you”.
So digital native kids have learned to not trust people on the internet, don’t use your real name in an alias, etc.
“They were trained not to value privacy” is not what they are being taught in school.
Jumping in with one persons anecdotal evidence but I loved when I can pay $10 a month for Netflix when it had everything or almost everything I could watch and I quit pirating. When the content from other networks got pulled and the prices starting getting jacked up I went back to the seven seas. A good service with good quality at a decent price is awesome but 10 different services all trying to gouge me for $15-$20 a month with no guarantee the content I like won’t be removed in a few months is ludicrous and led me right back to not paying anything.
I'm almost in the same boat, except I never stopped pirating. By the time I decided to consider Netflix to see if the added convenience was worth it, the enshittification had already begun, so I just continued as I was. I'm definitely not in the "won't pay no matter what" camp, but I am pretty price-sensitive and I have a fairly high bar of satisfaction, which Steam and GOG meet but music and video streaming do not. I definitely think Gaben is mistaken, and that for most people it's both service and price. Steam would not have been as successful in reducing piracy in the PC market without all the discounts, all else being equal.
This is the rub, tech is able to track you based on your browser, viewport size, os, location (a vpn still has a location if you aren’t rotating) and more. I use Firefox for privacy and just that measure alone rules out 97% of internet traffic and zeros down who I am within 3%. How private am I if I default to that 3%. 1440p monitor and a half screen Firefox viewport? Now we’re building an advertising profile!
If targeted advertising is your main threat, then you are lucky to _currently_ live in a country whose government _currently_ does not consider you an enemy or potential enemy. Many people are not that lucky and many people will become unlucky despite not changing anything about themselves.
That’s what I do, the jetkvm has its “own” mini hdmi that follows it as I have moved it from different machines. Buying one cable wasn’t the end of the world (I was able to snag the jetkvm for $70 during its kickstarter and a $10 cord) and I use it constantly so it’s never collecting dust
I like the comparison of Meshtastic being the replacement for CB, it fits pretty well since they are both decentralized and made to run without a lot of underlying infrastructure and both work well to communicate in emergency’s.
I think this is the real problem. If it’s unsourced, how can I verify the LLM isn’t hallucinating. That being said I started running open web ui to host models locally and have heard that some will source their content(I don’t know which, I haven’t hosted them yet) so that is promising. I also like hosting deep seek locally and being able to review its logic process so I can assess how it arrived at its conclusions. All that to say, I still use a traditional search (self hosted version of searxng) for 95% of my search. I like llms for bouncing ideas around, but not for finding accurate results quickly
