A million years ago I thought there was probably some synergy between my gmail account and getting better, personalized search results. That never was realized, but oh well. I can't even recall the last time I used google for anything. I use Kagi for search now but even then it's use is pretty minimal. Now that the need for search engines is being replaced.... why would I ever use a google product? What value does the brand "google" even bring to the table in 2026? Other than Kagi I haven't been actively trying to "degoogle" but the lack of interesting or useful products is really striking for such a large company. The last thing I want is yet another google app yeeting marketing telemetry back to the google mothership.

>On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
 
You're living in 2023 if you think any company worth their salt is still scraping the live internet for quality content. Everyone has their own curated library already Nobody has been scraping en masse for at least two years, unless there's a blog article about bleeding edge science research or something. Even then they will probably just scrape the scientific paper itself, rather than coverage of it.

I've been on google fi for... I dunno, probably at least a decade now? Maybe more. They just mail me a phone, I turn it on, and it figures everything out. I get a new phone ever 2 years or so. I couldn't tell you what the inside of a phone store looks like because I've never needed to go into one.

>the AI bubble is going to burst and
 
Kimi K3 docs and tooling, and weights, dropped this morning. Kimi is selling K3 tokens at $3/million tokens and if you're running it using GB300 gpu racks @ $6 million each... the math mostly checks out. Anthropic is selling what some people call roughly equivalent Fable tokens at $50/million each. I don't think AI is going anywhere, but valuation of companies like Anthropic, OpenAI in the $500b-$1T range isn't sustainable when "open" models sell tokens at a profit at $3/million tokens.
 
Open Weight models have been catching up to SOTA for a while but the lead OpenAI and Anthropic have, has been eroding quite rapidly and their ability to charge a premium for their product may not continue indefinitely at this point.
 
Again I'm not saying AI isn't useful, just that the bubble is largely based on valuation and Kimi K3 is.... well positioned to pop that bubble.

we're about to buy a $2400 m4 pro mac mini to grind away at a useful but low-medium priority task in perpetuity using one of the qwen 3.6 models. The ROI vs haiku api cost is less than 5 months. SOTA models are cool but a quantized 30B class model can do most any batched work if structured carefully, and you have a fairly flexible failure budget

The big issue is GDDR6 memory which is pretty new and there's not a ton of capacity already, and it's all been bought out through the end of 2028. Plants take 3 years to come online and are expensive (Read: risky) to build if the demand falls off
 
I would love to be able to buy a 4TB GDDR7 machine and never have to use cloud services again, but it's not happening before 2035

Move further south, I guess. The rest of the country is much warmer, more livable, and doesn't freeze solid for three months out of the year. The fact that you have to change your clocks twice a year to cope with it isn't my problem.

Given your user ID # I think you know the reason(s)

It is like, $20 a month and far, far cheaper than cable or whatever. I don't like paying for services, but I don't like dealing with ads even more. If there's an option for an ad-free experience, I will always take that option.

Basically everyone who works in a regulated industry, or industry that should be does, yes.

I've been paying for Kagi ($10/mo?) now for over a year across both personal and work devices and I don't miss it at all. The only time I still use google is if I need to buy a product and want to see what is available besides what is on amazon, i'll seach "toaster oven" to get inundated with ads (and then 12-48 hours later see ads for toaster oven across all my social medias and youtube). Turning off the googs cold-turkey and then selectively using it, it's been very interesting to see what kind of targeted ads I see.

Jet fuel is set to skyrocket by August and I don't think jet travel will remain affordable for most of society. Looking at the proportion of the airplane that is Economy Plus, or Economy Plus-Plus, about 5%, I don't think there's enough demand for a tremendous amount of supersonic travel between any two cities besides perhaps NYC and LA, and NYC and Atlanta/Miami

Get paid to fight AI
 
Honestly, AI is going to slow hiring, and then companies will stop hiring new positions. I don't think it's going to be an obvious "we are laying off 20% of the company due to AI being amaze-balls". Yeah yeah like 30 very large companies are laying off employees saying it's due to AI but... if you look at their public finances they're flat growth whereas S&P 500 is up 999% (or whatever, it's a lot) so they're saying what they have to say to keep their job as CEO.
 
My prediction is 97% of "job replacement" by AI will simply be the slow march of progress as the one really talented guy on his team, slowly replaces his coworker's workstreams via automation, something that was going to happen anyways, just 10 years later than the current timeline. You can't really legislate that kind of slow motion trainwreck. It's very easy to do quarter after quarter of 499 employees reduction in workforce to avoid layoff public notices etc. And businesses will win in the courts under "public notices for less than 499 employees is excessive burden on businesses" etc etc.

This is what happened
 
LLM trained on security breaches are getting real good at finding tiny security flaws, probably unwinding years or even decades of intentional security flaws for various agencies

There hasn't been a single improvement to android i needed/wanted since my Nexus 5 back in....2013. I just want vanilla android, no changes, particularly to the UI, and security updates, for the next 60 years. I just don't give a fuck about whatever feature the UI/UX designer trying to justify their job, is trying to squeeze into a mature product at this point. Go fuck yourself, UI/UX dude at google. I hate you, you actively make my life worse.