jjani

The right thing in hindsight absolutely would've been for Microsoft to not relent, because of the power balance. Even back then when Intel was still a behemoth, Intel needed Microsoft more than the other way around. Hence why they were the ones begging MS, not the other way around.

What would Intel have done, only supply chips to.. what? Linux machines? Macs? A funny fantasy, obviously unthinkable. Or go wage a marketing campaign against MS? That too in effect would cause lower sales of new machines if anything, directly hurting Intel.

MS would've seen large benefits especially in the long term.

Now this is all very easy to say in 2025, but I think MS should've known this, yet greatly underestimated the negative effects that this would have. The people making the decision probably thought "it'll be okay, and worth staying super chummy with Intel". Probably plenty of golf trips and steak dinners were exchanged.

Yeah okay, so none of them come with Google Play but in general it's possible to install it, but on Huawei it's not, right? I could see that being the case.

>Simply put: can the EU do without US tech? No.

Wrong. The answer is yes, they very much can. Do they want to? No.

> On the one hand, our social media regulations are terrible, are being approved without due process, and will certainly be used for (political) censorship

Luckily this isn't happening in the US and if it is definitely isn't getting rapidly worse.

Called this a while ago[0].

> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.

I'll call another one: The US is only going to do this to the EU and maybe a few other countries whose populace has zero spine and will just submit. A great example of a country that in effect has regulated US big tech far, far more strongly than the EU, and to far more effect, is South Korea. But ironically, this is really never brought up in international spaces, it's always about EU regulation, when they're pretty mild.

I'm willing to bet money the US won't threaten Korea much at all, because its public would rightly tell them to fuck off and it would cost the ruling party significant votes. The politicians would have to be super discreet about somehow deregulating without the public noticing.

I say this spending my time between both Europe and Korea and being ingrained in both culturally.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44432419.

It's always so rich to see comment sections on here when there's an article about a place like Palantir when the likes of Google and Meta play an even so much bigger role in enabling mass surveillance. I'm sure they'll tell themselves "well but I for one am working on something good like Waymo, or as innocuous as Google Sheets! And we don't kill people!! (please don't look at who provides the underlying services that defense runs on)". While the exact same is said by most employees at those companies they criticize so hard.

Sure, no one's perfect, and you have to draw a line somewhere. But if you're at somewhere like Google or Meta, or have been in the last decade and left for other reasons than these, you really don't have a leg to stand on in these discussions.

> I'm actually not so sure. Even if 100% of the signups to the new version came from users trying for the first time, the previous version being essentially free could have got the app a lot of publicity in tutorials, recommendations or even just showing more highly rated or higher in the download charts.

You've just described enshittification 101.

Thank you, all HNers at Google, for continuing to work there.

And yes, before you ask, I have personally quit a job that paid 3x what I was able to get elsewhere over ethics. And no, I'm not rich, probably bottom 5% in terms of assets among my colleagues, coming from a lower-class background.

Most Android phones sold in China include Google Play by default? That's news to me.

If you're in a product-adjacent role at Google there's a 100 other companies that would hire you. Yes, even in this market.

Sounds like you haven't used an Android. What Windows does is the exact same as what Android currently does, showing lots of warning screens. Which is very different from banning them altogether.

> Hmm what sorts of advice in the last year are you referring to?

They're almost certainly referring to first creating a fleshed out spec and then having it implement that, rather than just 100 words.

> Everything related to cookie consent should have been standardized and delegated to browser settings.

Rather ironic to say this when the entire reason this stuff has been needed is that Google, which has monopolized the browser market, is an advertising company whose core business is tracking people in the first place and does everything in its power to obstruct anything that weakens it.

Hilariously, right below your comment is this one:

> You could hold this up in a room full of American business owners and watch them all cringe like a pack of vampires witnessing a cross.

Not surprising that you'd find plenty of American business owners on.. an American startup platform!

> metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing

Boohoo. Don't use a straw then. Out of the billions of beverages consumed during the last 24 hours, it's a given that >95% were consumed without one.

It's also of course an entirely arbitrary line to draw. Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?

> So you want examples of developed countries going after parents, taking children away, because of what someone else did?

No. I want examples where the driver doesn't get charged and faces zero consequences (not even getting fired from their job, fwiw) while the parents both get charged with involuntary manslaughter when their child got killed directly by a different adult.

And I'm happy to consider cases where the child was killed by an adult through other means than a car. Suicide has always been treated entirely differently by pretty much every justice system in existence, the analogy doesn't work.

It's very strange that we'd have to dive into their privacy policy to get a clear definition of it, but good spot.

The rest stands though - no models, no averages. User tovej below put it better than I did:

> The median does not move if the upper tail shifts, it only moves if the median moves.

> The fact that they do not report the mean is concerning. The mean captures the entire distribution and could actually be used to calculate the expected value of energy used.

> The median only tells you which point separates the upper half from the lower half, if you don't know anything else about the distribution you cannot use it for any kind of analysis

49% of queries could be costing 1000x that median. Stats 101 combined with a sliver of critical reading reveals this report isn't worth the bytes it's taking up.

That's a complete cop out. They didn't give the data to back this up.

> Here's the catch. Because of these constraints Korean conglomerates don't create as many jobs.Korean software or services industry is almost non existent or heavily constrained to Korea.

What? Korea's software jobs per capita is one of the highest of all wealthy (let's say top 30 HDI) countries. Please stop claiming this sort of stuff without being familiar with the country.

It seems like these kind of maps suffers enormously from the Mercator projection. Something better should really become the default for such usecases.

The public at large has no idea what IPTV was or how to set it up. Now Barry down the street is watching his footy through it all weekend cause his mate knows someone selling a box for 20 quid, and Barry does know how to plug in a USB cable.

The public doesn't need to know how it works behind the scenes to use it. It just needs to be packaged in a way so that they don't need to know. Which it will.

Watching sports for cheap using a "dodgy firestick" or similar hardware is incredibly popular in the UK to watch sports for cheap even among those not tech-inclined, despite obviously being illegal. I'd predict the same to happen here, quickly you'll see plug-and-play boxes that will route their home wi-fi traffic through a VPN, and most people will have a mate of a mate who sells them for a few tenners.

> So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?

The option here is to stop trying to solve everything with tech when a lot of the time it's not viable and actively makes things worse. Start putting that time into the non-tech options. Not as fun though, is it?

- The report doesn't name any Gemini models at all, only competitors'. Wonder why that is? If the models got so much more efficient, they'd be eager to show this.

- The report doesn't name any averages (means), only medians. Why oh why would they be doing this, when all other marketing pieces always use the average because outside of HN 99% of Joes on the street have no idea what a median is/how it differs from the mean? The average is much more relevant here when "measuring the environmental impact of AI inference".

- The report doesn't define what any of the terms "Gemini Apps", "the Gemini AI assistant" or "Gemini Apps text prompt" concretely mean

Then as part of the bail out break them up so that they're no longer too big to fail.

""The driver faced no charges.

Legend’s parents, Jessica and Sameule Jenkins, did.

Two days after the crash, the district attorney charged both with involuntary manslaughter, set bail at $1.5 million each, and took their remaining children into protective custody. Facing the prospect of months in jail and the loss of their children, the Jenkinses took felony plea deals.""

This part.

Do bad things not happen in developed countries related to children? No. But this part would not happen.

Here's what happened:

1. Google rolled our AI summaries on all of their search queries, through some very tiny model 2. Given worldwide search volume, that model now represents more than 50% of all queries if you throw it on a big heap with "intentional" LLM usage 3. Google gets to claim "the median is now 33x lower!", as the median is now that tiny model giving summaries nobody asked for

It's very concerning that this marketing puff piece is being eaten up by HN of all places as evidenced by the other thread.

Google is basing this all of "median" because there's orders of magnitudes difference betwen strong models (what most people think of when you talk AI) and tiny models, which Google uses "most" by virtue of running them for every single google search to produce the summaries. So the "median" will be whatever tiny model they use for those models. Never mind that Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is what everyone here would actually be using, may well consume >100x much.

It's absurdly misleading and rather obvious, but it feels like most are very eager to latch on to this so they can tell themselves their usage and work (for the many here in AI or at Google) is all peachy. I've been reading this place for years and have never before seen such uncritical adoption of an obvious PR piece detached from reality.

Sure I do, but not as part of any tools, just for one-off conversations where I know it's going to be the best out there. For tasks where reasoning helps little to none, it's often still number one.

In the developed world this is absolutely unthinkable.

Don't worry, the same party being the "judge, jury and executioner" is now rapidly becoming the norm across everything, no longer just limited to agency fiefdoms. Have fun!