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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

> Google plans to use AI to consume and replace the open web.

They've been boiling the frog here for a long time. The "open web" is a euphemism for the Google Chrome monoculture walled-garden-in-waiting. Google exert so much influence there that building on the web is in practice barely different than building on say iOS. You can do what you want if you don't want to make money, but if you do then you will have to play along with the big G.

My hunch is Google never psychologically recovered from Facebook absolutely wiping out G+, and they have been on a mission to ensure nothing like that ever happens again.

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> My hunch is Google never psychologically recovered from Facebook absolutely wiping out G+, and they have been on a mission to ensure nothing like that ever happens again.

Same for Microsoft with phones.

That's why Google and Microsoft are trying to use AI to crush us while Apple is like "I'm pretty content with how much money I make".

Ye, Apple just doesn't support PWAs fully because they're "pretty content with the money they may from the app store".

Apple web app support for home screen apps is better than Android PWA today.

Prime example being push notification support, where Android has random 10 minute latencies added because they don't want to fix the service worker startup problem.

> Apple web app support for home screen apps is better than Android PWA today.

No, it's not, Apple hides it behind a "share" link that had nothing to do with installing a PWA, the most incongruent UX in the whole OS, God knows why

> Apple is like "I'm pretty content with how much money I make".

What a laughably silly depiction of a multi-trillion dollar company.

Their predatory app store policies, defended (and lost) in court, paint a completely different picture. Just one of dozens of examples.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-executive-outright-lied...

I mostly meant it in the context of why they are so behind in AI... Sorry for the nuance.

Ahh, acknowledged. However, please understand, they also have a massive AI division. It was led for years by John G. He just got ousted from the position. They're just not very good at AI in their own walled garden. It's not for a lack of trying.

Ironically, they're not "good" at it because they're fighting their own privacy and security features in IOS and MacOS. Siri can't do everything because there isn't a full pants-down mode for OS features.

"Siri, adjust my schedule to work in a 30 minute walk this afternoon."

"Siri, find a photo of a Koala, turn it into a cartoon, and make a logo for my Github project."

Coordinated actions are what we're looking for, but they blow through all of the app security walls. Even if Apple's software could act like this, I don't think I'd use it. If it could do these things, it could also do things like broadcast my private files to everyone in my contact list... etc.

We have to get dramatically more sophisticated about security with agents than we are now.

You might be interested in Sky, which is supposedly coming later this year:

https://sky.app/

(Check the link to the MacStories article at the bottom to get a great overview of the capabilities.)

Also, Siri / Apple Intelligence is bound to the local processing power as everything is handled on-device - compared to other AIs that can use the computing power of a whole datacentre.

>My hunch is Google never psychologically recovered from Facebook absolutely wiping out G+, and they have been on a mission to ensure nothing like that ever happens again.

That's an orthogonal issue to me. IMHO, modern Google never really cared about social media platforms because it never really understood them. Otherwise it would have bought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, early on before they became industry titans, the same way they bought Youtube, Maps, etc in the early days.

They've been coasting for so long on the search ad revenue money printer, that they're blind to everything else going on around them, so they're always reacting instead of proactive, but always too late.

> That's an orthogonal issue to me. IMHO, modern Google never really cared about social media platforms because it never really understood them.

Caring (or at least wanting in) and not understanding are perfectly compatible.

I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end.

> Otherwise it would have bought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, early on before they became industry titans

That only works if:

1. they see it coming

2. the in-house competition effort does not remain politically unassailable

3. until the competitor is too big for google to realistically acquire it

>That only works if: 1. they see it coming

Zuckerberg saw them coming though. That's why he owns a social media empire now, and wants to either own or destroy Tiktok as well. Musk saw it coming with Twatter, hell, even Bezos saw it coming, that why Amazon bought Twitch.

Google leadership just doesn't understand social media, otherwise they would have bought a rising platform instead of building one from scratch that flopped with zero user base. Social media platforms are all about the existing user base, not about the tech behind it. That's why G+ failed despite being technically superior in some aspects.

>I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end

It's irrelevant what old googlers think. Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on dying platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead. Buying youtube was the right business decision because it was the more popular platform, instead of trying to make Google Video happen, as it would have had the same faith as G+, and those old googlers would have probably been laid off instead of being moved to work on Youtube. Programmers don't always make good business decisions.

> Zuckerberg saw them coming though [...] even Bezos saw it coming, that why Amazon bought Twitch.

Which pertains to my reply... how?

> Musk saw it coming with Twatter

Musk saw nothing coming. He bought twitter in 2022 after getting baited into making a binding offer. Twitter was a household name at least a decade before that: news networks had direct twitter interactions and mentions at least as far back as the 2012 election.

And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.

> Google leadership just doesn't understand social media

Have you considered actually reading replies instead of going off with whatever your pet assertions are?

> That's irrelevant what old googlers think.

It's very relevant to your assertion that "google never really cared".

> Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm replying to.

> > Musk saw it coming with Twatter

> And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.

I'd just stick with "he tried to back out of it and had to be sued to buy it" as evidence that musk didn't forsee anything. It is a bit (darkly) amusing that the document required him to buy the company buy not pay the severance listed in it when firing people.

Although if Grok was a standalone company I think it's hard to argue it'd valued less than 44 billion so Musk really lucked into a great deal. He also really lucked into Biden not stepping down earlier so the Democrats would run an actual competitive primary.

Grok is from xAI, a company he separately funded. It wasn’t part of the acquisition of Twitter.

> [1] xAI was founded by Musk on March 9, 2023

> [2] Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022

xAI would've just been an AI division of Twitter if Musk wasn't worried that Twitter was going to go bankrupt and take the company (xAI) with it (Twitter). It's extremely suspicious that Grok was available to paying X subscribers and not some other arrangement.

"Separately" funded is pretty thin. It's the same group of people funding xAI [3] as Twitter acquisition [4].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#2022%E2%80%93present

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)#Financial_histor...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

the funniest part here is that if G+ is part of the reason, they still don't understand why people didn't want to use it, making any decisions which follow wrong &/or misguided. while I'm not terribly in favor of breaking up companies, there is far too much incentive for Google, given its ad business (which is really what the company now is), to have any voice in the future of the Web. Chrome must be spun off, & firewalls put in place between the ad side & the search side of things (unless, of course, they really are just a govt subsidiary & this has been the plan all along, but there would have to be tangible proof of that).

> they still don't understand why people didn't want to use it

That's what OP is saying. Google knows it doesn't understand, knows it cannot compete on even ground, so it is pulling every lever of its monopoly so that no other entrant can ever rise from the web. Only serfs, no lords.

Only serfing, no surfing

Yes, the warnings were there for more than a decade. And yet these websites were still kowtowing to Google !

I doubt that the USA will do anything to rein in their platforms though : they're too convenient as a form of soft power. (Of course, you never know with Trump.)

So it's probably time to cut off the USA from the Internet. Let them stew in the bed they made. The timing is good too, with Trump having even managed to piss of Canada !!

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However, this won't solve an issue with search engines : just yesterday I was using Kagi, and it was still a miserable experience.

Blocking the likes of YouTube and Reddit is easy enough.

It's much harder to deal with all the spam consisting of pseudo-guide websites, each with very specific names, seemingly a lot of them using LLMs to generate them, which I guess make money from either ads and/or referrals ?

And anyone can scrap the web and train LLMs, so even limiting the size of infocoms by law (and banning foreign ones) wouldn't solve this issue.

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