Vertical would be if MS owned the carrier, the manufacturer, the operating system etc. Horizontal applies here where they own many interconnecting parts of the same layer of the market. Search, browser, email, etc, all being used to promote each other at the expense of competitors

I was actually a fan of Outlook for Android. Followed system dark mode before it was cool, had real multi account inbox, good wearos app, and other useful features. Then they started inserting Bing search into my long press menu system wide. And also recommending Edge when I clicked links. This kind of horizontal integration is just too baked into the company DNA. They can’t help themselves, even when it actually harms them

At least it theoretically has account portability…but yes, I fear people are setting themselves up to be enshittified again, as Cory Doctorow has brought up

Same, also the Readrops app. Less features but faster sync.

I think people need to start being educated about how their climate influences how they can use the electric car. Many people know if they live by the sea or where roads are salted that corrosion is an issue. But people might not be aware that with some EVs, they should leave it plugged in if they’re in an extreme climate, so the car can air condition or heat the battery. I caused some battery degradation to my Volt because I wasn’t able to leave it plugged in living in Tucson.

The idea of holding developers of open source models responsible for the activities of forks is a terrible precedent

Gemini soon to be rebranded Allo Assistant All Access Chat

yes, I find Gemini actually not bad when it comes to my specific use case of showing generic examples for R programming, so I can figure out the syntax for my actual code. I don’t try to have it generate actual code for me because my topic of marine biogeochemistry is far too specific for it to have any idea how to work with it. Unlike ChatGPT, which often makes up nonsense functions or hallucinates whole packages, Gemini seems to do ok. I also found it pretty good for generating images of natural subjects. It did the best job of generating a pic of a giant clam of any image generator I’ve tried. I would never trust factual information from Gemini. So like Google+, it’s a pretty good product that in no way should be shunted into search results, Google Docs and other places where its output is not relevant, yet that is exactly the trap Google is falling into again.

If there were multiple sources of traffic, the pressure to optimize to one source would be lower, and the disruption caused by algorithm changes would be muted. Which would mean more interesting content less driven by a narrow set of metrics

It’s an example of why monopolies are harmful. They create distorted economies that don’t serve consumers. Like ecosystems overcome by a monoculture, monopolies are inherently less resilient, less functional and prone to sudden disruption.

Like them, I had the same lesson after changes to Google Home, Smartthings and have moved entirely to cheap stuff that works with Home Assistant and allows me total control

They aren’t talking about an investment for a financial return. They’re talking about investing their time and energy in a platform that then gets enshittified

I do, from bandcamp (flac, not mp3)

CDs are already showing signs of a comeback! https://www.axios.com/2024/01/06/gen-z-cds-buying-collection

I like to buy older albums that were mastered for vinyl, like Steely Dan, some prog rock like Yes or Pink Floyd. It gets a lot closer to listening to how the artists would have been hearing their product

Apparently CDs are trending up as a nostalgia format in some demographics! https://www.axios.com/2024/01/06/gen-z-cds-buying-collection

I feel conflicted about the whole thing. Technically it’s a model. I don’t feel that people should be able to sue me as a scientist for making a model based on publicly available data. I myself am merely trying to use the model itself to explain stuff about the world. But OpenAI are also selling access to the outputs of the model, that can very closely approximate the intellectual property of people. Also, most of the training data was accessed via scraping and other gray market methods that were often explicitly violating the TOU of the various places they scraped from. So it all is very difficult to sort through ethically.

Yes, privacy and encryption are always the enemy of authoritarians. They enable dissent

Blocked for poor reading comprehension

That’s not what they said at all.