The problem is people don't buy small phones. ASUS' Zenfone 9 and 10 were, in my opinion, basically perfect; small, someting I can actually hold in my non-athletic hands, but they didn't sell well at all, and ASUS abandoned the small phone market entirely with the Zenfone 11 Ultra.
I've used adblockers, revanced, and whatever else for years, so I don't see many ads, but every time I'm on a computer without this stuff installed I am appalled by how many scams get through. At some point, Google must have realized that nobody is going to come after them for selling ad space to scammers (possibly because of section 230 of the CDA?) and hey, scammers are willing to pay enough for it to be worth it.
There probably will be soon, given the reliability issues associated with vibe software. Whats probably going away is the hand-coded "it technically works" slop we've been cranking out for decades, since companies realized it was cheaper to have bad code.
Because in the age of vibe coding and scrapers, every service on the internet goes down constantly, so it was only a matter of time until they all overlapped. Also, one going down probably causes people to use others, putting more load on them too. Same sorta thing that happens with cascading power grid failures.
The point is to not mislead people. When you write "buy," you are implying that the "buy"er is obtaining a perpetual right to use the software, subject to certain rules (i.e. you can't make copies and redistribute it). "Buy" implies the buyer has an absolute right. When "buy" actually means a temporary revocable license is issued, and the buyer has no rights, that's a problem.
So because Google monopolizes on a big enough scale, suddenly they are too important to break up? I would argue that if any single company is big enough to where if it were to break up it would be "against the national interest," then it is too big and must be broken up.
Remember when the buttons test was circulating a few months ago? Where if you press the red button, you survive, but if you press the blue button, unless more than 50% of people chose the blue button you die? That was a case very similar to this. It is locally optimal for everyone to choose red; your own outcome is always better or equal to what it would have been if you chose blue, however everyone independently making this optimal choice is catastrophic on a global scale. Thats why its "rational".
Theres a gym I work out at, and that I have been going to for nearly a year now, and they have an app you can use to check in, schedule classes, whatever. I don't actually know because I never downloaded the app, I just use my phone number to check in every time I go. I don't want more apps on my phone, not for the gym, not for fast food, maybe my bank and the apps I need to communicate with friends and family, but the majority of it is pointless bloat they push on you for no good reason.
Yeah, its really weird. Maybe its a cognitive bias that says "an AI made this, so it isn't important," but I can remember perfectly the events of a book I read 10 years ago, and a book I read 1 year ago, and another I finished 2 months ago. Meanwhile I can't remember what claude told me yesterday.
I don't know about that. I'm a fairly tanned individual, but where I live, in Texas, if I spend all day in the sun, I'm getting sunburned bad everywhere.
Because the Android Runtime (ART) is very necessary to run APKs, and APKs are the only non-iOS standard for packaging mobile apps that is supported enough to be viable. Without it, you might get some open source apps to run on a linux phone, but you won't have banking apps, clash of clans, or a million other things people really would like to have on their phones.
I had some Michelin Energy Savers on my Chevy Volt for a while. Got 25k miles out of them before they were toast. They were awful, noisy, no grip, and I didn't realize how bad they were until I got some much better tires.
And the push to replace search engines with AIs that don't understand what I'm looking for (meanwhile classic search understands fine) and give confidently wrong answers. Why is it the first result if its wrong 80% of the time?
Sure, I'd love to have more policemen around, but I don't want large automated blanket surveillance network tracking the positions of everyone everywhere. There is a huge difference.
Most servers with port 25565 open get hits from either Minecraft griefer bots, or from a bot that looks for that port and warns anyone on that server about the risks of leaving that port open. It doesn't take a huge scale operation to spam every IPv4 address in the world, there are only 2^32 of them, and even then many of those addresses are reserved.
See this is the big issue I've been seeing. The only vibe coded product I can think of off the top of my head that's succeeding at all is Bun, and maybe I'm behind the times but it feels like Bun's success is mostly being pushed by Anthropic; I've yet to see much other than Claude Code use it.
All of the problems are solvable though, and if they weren't then it would still be better to make a hospital just use a few different numbers rather than allowing a billion dollar scam industry to operate unchecked.
As an American myself, I get multiple spam calls every day. Combine that with the fact that I am part of the generation that doesn't really do phone calls, and easily 95% or more of the phone calls I get are scams. Recently, for the past year or so, its mostly been the personal loan scams, but it changes over time. I clear out my voice mail box about once a week and almost always have 20+ messages using that same script.
As nice as this would be, as an American (notably not a Frenchman), I find that 90% or more of the unsolicited calls I get are scammers, not telemarketing, so I don't know how much something like this would do. The US also has donotcall.gov, which no telemarketer bothers with.
Well I think theres a lot of social pressure to disclaim "yes of course its useful" because if all you do is say "hey AI has this problem," you'll have AI bros replying to you telling you about all the good and saying you're misrepresenting AI.