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Selling user data, selling ad placement, subscriptions for paid services, enterprise-grade support contracts, and the like.

They could also take an approach similar to Google, branching back out from being just a browser into a suite of related tools that Chrome can then convince users to switch to (similar to how Chrome gets users to not just use Google search, but also services like Gmail too.)

This is an order to sell, not break up.

Currently, it’s still recommended actions to the court. Nothing has actually been finalized in terms of what they’re going to actually end up trying to make Google do.

Google must not remain in control of Chrome.

While divestiture is likely, they could also spin-off, split-off, or carve-out, which carry completely different implications for Google, but are still an option if they are unable to convince the court to make Google do their original preferred choice.

A split-off could prevent Google from retaining shares in the new company without sacrificing shares in Google itself, and a carve-out could still allow them to “sell” it, but via shares sold in an IPO instead of having to get any actual buyout from another corporation.

By “sell,” they could also mean ending up having Chrome just split off from Google, as a new, independent entity that is its own company, without anybody needing to buy it in the first place.

They definitely will, since they don’t even support any of Google’s standard restore features by default.

They use Seedvault instead, which doesn’t have the capability to restore app logins. I have a feeling Seedvault may end up adding that as a feature in the future, though.

I’m excited for the future, but not as excited for the transition period.

I have similar feelings.

I discovered LLMs before the hype ever began (used GPT-2 well before ChatGPT even existed) and the same with image generation models barely before the hype really took off. (I was an early closed beta tester of DALL-E)

And as my initial fascination grew, along with the interest of my peers, the hype began to take off, and suddenly, instead of being an interesting technology with some novel use cases, it became yet another technology for companies to show to investors (after slapping it in a product in a way no user would ever enjoy) to increase stock prices.

Just as you mentioned with the dotcom bubble, I think this will definitely do a lot of good. LLMs have been great for asking specialized questions about things where I need a better explanation, or rewording/reformatting my notes, but I’ve never once felt the need to have my email client generate every email for me, as Google seems to think I’d want.

If we can just get all the over-hyped corporate garbage out, and replace it with more common-sense development, maybe we’ll actually see it being used in a way that’s beneficial for us.

Yet another case of “AI” becoming a meaningless word to describe generalized computing techniques that have been in place for years

It’s like applying DRM law to all media ever. And we know the problems with DRM already, as exemplified 2 decades ago by Cory Doctorow in his talk at Microsoft to convince them not to endorse and use it.

I would like it if it actually did something for me, (like automatically doing x, y, or z to my account on the backend based on my request) but instead it just feels like every one of the “AI-Powered” support bots is designed to try and make it as hard as possible for me to actually get anything done.

I haven’t had any problems myself.

In fact, I regularly use their anonymized LLM Chat tab to help out with restructuring data, summarizing some more complex topics, or finding some info that doesn’t readily appear near the top of search. It’s made my search experience (again, specifically in my circumstance) much better than before.

If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.

I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it’s out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I’ve tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I’ve used in years.

Both jokes can be true 😅

This simply isn’t really possible.

Even if they published open-source code for their backend, it wouldn’t prove that it’s actually what their systems are running.

And when you are storing your data on their servers, and decrypting it by sending over your password, there’s no way you can actually truly prevent them from accessing your data, if they were to modify how their systems function overall. (this is true for every company)

Even if they were using zero-knowledge proofs to verify and prove to you the computation done on the server matched what would be expected from published open-source code, then either their very own systems (and by extension, their administrators), or a different company’s proprietary TPM module, would be the root of trust for those ZK proofs, and would still have the same underlying trust assumptions of at least 1 company having the ability to potentially steal your information.

If you want to rail against Proton for this, you have to be against every single cloud-based instance of code that hosts encrypted data, by any company, for any user.

Saying Proton acts just like Microsoft is a laughable comparison to make in order to justify claiming a lack of privacy or security on Proton’s part.

Why? Is it because they’re both companies that offer online services? Guess what, loads of companies do that. But you know what Proton doesn’t do? Give away the contents of people’s files, like Microsoft states they do in their own transparency reports, that they conveniently stopped publishing in 2022. Microsoft handed over the content (not just IP, email, etc, but actual docs, communications, stored files, etc) of thousands of people’s accounts to law enforcement. Proton hasn’t given out content once.

And this doesn’t even consider the fact that Proton’s business model is privacy. For Microsoft, their users will keep using their services regardless of their privacy, but for Proton, if it comes out that their services are no longer private, nobody will use them anymore, because nobody who got them for privacy would need them at that point.

I haven’t had a single issue with crashes, noise, heat, display, etc.

The positioning/gaps of the spacers are extremely tiny, and barely noticeable, and the only issue I’ve had so far has been my laptop not turning off fully when I shut it down, but that’s fixed by just holding down the power button.

Oh, and I’m running an unsupported linux distro, (NixOS) so it’s not like I’m starting from any advantaged position in terms of software integration.

Performance is great, cooling is great, games run well and it boots up quickly. Nothing much else to say other than it’s a good laptop.

It’s generally not an accurate statement to say that piracy drives down sales, at least when you look at overall measurements. You’re definitely correct in assuming pirates want to support developers (and media creators in general) that they enjoy the works of, because pirates are by far the largest purchasers of content compared to traditional content purchasers

Gotta love this quote from the article: “piracy doesn’t mean a lost sale if the person pirating the game couldn’t afford it in the first place.”

I’ve seen this happen time and time again with people I know who simply couldn’t pay even a single dollar for a game, and had no other options available. They deserve to experience culture and entertainment just as much as the rest of us.