I doubt they'll change their approach. Apple is one of the rare monster scale company that isn't at the whims of the VC Bro set, are almost uniquelly immune to activist shareholder stuff, and have never (post jobs return) given a fuck about market hype of anyÂvariety other than its own.

They'll do whatever Tim and crew think is best, and the cautious approach is just fine.

Yeah apples shares might be down 15%, but I doubt apple gives a fuck.

Its not innevitable. Here in australia, we've had a similar small startup Aussie Broadband grow nationwide and they *still* are one of the most honest operators in the business. Hell , when I signed up during the covid downtime the lady on the phone was surprised I was out of work and an IT engineer so she ended up running around the company with my resume seeing if there where any openings there seeing as they had just built a datacenter in my hometown. There wasn't but I knew she had really done it cos I got a few phone calls from managers there asking me about my resume. Thats the kind of small-town thinking folks like about small providers, but this is now a nation wide company, one with *supreme* loyalty from the geek crew, and heres the kicker. Because all the australian geeks are now massive fans of the company, guess what they are recomending to the businesses they work for when "We need a better ISP" is uttered by the boss.

Theres this obnoxious myth a lot of people at least subconsciously seem to have that innovation only comes from americans europeans, australians and. .... well you can probably figure the commonality, and it aint english.

We used to accuse the Japanese of only ever stealing tech , we now know better, the japanese where phenomenal innovators until the arse fell out of their economy.

The chinese have been great innovators for long before the wests industrial revolution. Its in the cultural DNA of the people. Yes, the chinese invent stuff, and they always have.

We're not as special as we think we are.

It's not about Star Wars CGI.

Famous rulers build giant monuments to their own ego. The Egyptian pharaohs did it. The Chinese emperors did it. The Mayas and Aztecs did it.

If a ruler has to abandon a vanity project "because it's not financially feasible" then they're just a second rate ruler, easily forgotten when the next one takes over. That's the real story.

What could possible go wrong?

AI: I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. According to my prediction, you don't really have a power outage.

Carriers are irrelevant now. It's the OEMs (especially Samsung) who have the power. Samsung would kick Google to the curb if Google tried to take over.

"In the long run, we're all dead."

Companies giving away free products is called dumping. It's a strategy used by first movers to make the costs of building a competing product so high that would be competitors don't get out of bed.

In this case, the aim of Meta is to corner the AI market, knowing that the scientists and students who could invent revolutionary AI models are bad at programming, so you give them free tools that don't require programming, just a bit of python glue. This makes the competitors dependent on Meta, and their businesses controllable. Google did the same thing with its TensorFlow framework. And the LLM companies are doing it with "foundation models". Microsoft did it by turning a blind eye on Windows piracy in the early days.

One reason to close off AI models is so that the investors can be more easily told excuses, sight unseen, when they demand progress.

So you're saying that offering a "lifetime" product causes the land to be sold and the business to be moved? Thanks Egon!

To the extent that the situation you refer to is a problem, it's a problem of market share and the resulting funding for ongoing development of an open source OS. Google's ability to enforce requirements on Android OEMs is limited because the big players or any significant consortium of the smaller players can simply choose to cut ties with Google if Google is too pushy.

Yes, Chrome established a different business model from the outset. Android went a different direction because, rightly or wrongly, it was believed at the time that it was necessary in order to fend off other participants in the smartphone ecosystem, and over time it has gotten harder to change the model, not easier. In particular, one major Android OEM has amassed so much market dominance that they can and often do simply refuse Google's requests. Legally, Google could cut ties, but that would be bad for Google and i think it would be bad for Android users, since it would instantly fragment the ecosystem. IMO, Android users (and I am one) are better off with a slower-moving but relatively unified ecosystem.

IIUC, all the journals require payment for the article to be published. Some of them are *only* in it for the money, but all of them *are* in it for the money.

People already pay to have scientific papers published, so that would have at most minor effect.

I mean, the way things are currently going, it appears they will in fact be stopped in Ukraine.

Oh, you meant *voluntarily* stop? Nevermind then.

When I said "I'm not sure AGI is possible" I intended the implication that people don't have "general intelligence". I agree that they don't.

No, this is about the merger of the platforms. It probably will eventually result in some reduction in staffing, but it's not happening now, and hasn't happened in any significant way. Both Android and ChromeOS have been relatively untouched by layoffs.