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Samsung recently deprecated their built in SMS/texting app and put an advertisement to tell us to switch for Google Messages in their app. They threw in the towel and not only will not maintain an android fork, they don't even want to maintain their own apps anymore.

I say this as someone who has tried to switch away from google many times because I dislike google as a company : there is no better search engine out there. There hasn't been for as long as google has existed. Every time I make something like bing or yandex my default search engine I end up getting frustrated with a niche search and type google.com and after typing google.com too many times I get fed up and bring it back as default.

And the two competing search engines I mentioned are pretty much all there is. Other names like duckduckgo aren't real search engines, they are just a frontend for another search engine (DDG uses bing). There just isn't many out there willing to front the bill for crawling and indexing the whole web.

People trying to explain away google's success solely from a marketing standpoint are arguing from bad faith.

> No Email or TOTP? (No, I am not suggesting sms)

Nope. And accessing the website/online banking portal is not allowed without going through the smartphone app 2fa too.

Many banking apps will outright refuse to run on rooted devices, much less google-free forks. There are ways around that but those ways are unreliable and could break at any given time -- I am not risking losing the ability to pay for things online just for the sake of running an android fork. (in my country, all the banks switched to requiring 2FA from their app if you make online purchases with your visa or mastercard)

> But there are models trained on legal content (like Wikipedia or StackOverflow)

Literally all of them are trained on wikipedia and SO. But /none/ of them are /only/ trained on wikipedia and SO. They need much more than that.

> Also, no human needs to read millions of pirated books to become intelligent.

Obviously, LLM architectures that were inspired by GPT 2/3 are not learning like humans.

There has never been anything remotely good in the world of LLM that could have been said to have been trained on a moderate, more human scoped amount of data. They're all trained on trillions of tokens.

Models trained on less than 1T are experimental jokes that have no real use to provide.

You'll notice even so called "open data" LLMs like Olmo are, in fact, also trained on copyrighted data, datasets like Common Crawl claim fair use over anything that can be accessed from a web browser.

And then there's the whole notion of laundered data by training on synthetic data generated by another LLM. All the so-called "open" LLMs include a very significant amount of LLM-generated data. If you agree to the notion that LLMs trained on copyrighted work are a form of IP infringement and not fair use, then training on their output is just data laundering and doesn't fix the issue.

> website that can influence elections in major countries,

I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over.

The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't actually make), videos of random nonsense like dogs taking care of toddlers and behaving like humans etc.

FB has become AI slop no man's land.

I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.

>because that inevitably implies dismantling that trust to get there.

There is nothing to dismantle because it's already gone.

The society that elected Donald Trump on his current program is an exceedingly low trust society. The whole point backed by DOGE is that you can't trust government and must reduce it to the most basic, barebones function. A lot of the current silicon valley elite fell prey to the nonsense preached by people like Curtis Yarvin who preach forms of anarcho-capitalism and despise democracy.

The United States of America are no more.

Inventory commingling ruined any respect I had for them. They've done that for a long time but I still am beyond pissed by the trend they started of being a front for third party sellers, all French retailers copied them (darty, fnac, cdiscount etc) and searching for products sold by trustworthy entities on the internet is now a nightmare.

Everyone imitates the market leader so it really feels as if competition doesn't exist as an alternative to amazon here. They're all as bad, and sometimes worse.

> I really hope you’re not thinking about spending less time on-screen.

Your sarcastic tone reminds me of a Steve Jobs interview.

> In 2010, a New York Times reporter had a conversation that revealed a lot about the life of the founder of Apple. Nick Bilton commented, “Your kids must love the iPad, right?” After the launch of the device. Jobs replied, “They haven't used it. We limit the amount of technology our children use at home. "

Yeah, they know what it is that they are doing to the world. And they do not care, profits > humanity.

It isn't even a specifically nerd thing for terminal tools to be more efficient as a whole. Pharmacies here until very recently used MS DOS based software (probably running on an emulator) to type your data, ordered drugs etc and the efficiency was much greater than your average mouse bumbler. I cringe every time I see a point of sale device with a touchscreen. Absolute abominations.

Are you seriously asking why Microsoft, the company that has experienced what it means to have power over others (anti competitive practices of the 90s on Windows that led to the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case), should not let Google have total control over what the web should be? should not let Google and Apple be the sole deciders of what should be in the appstore of the most used computing device of the planet?

> Apple Music exists as an ecosystem play

And so? Are you implying MS doesn't need an ecosystem of their own?

MS has. stopped. competing. That's it. That's all. Azure is not a moat, it's highly profitable but it also highly prone for disruption. Office is all they have left.

Man, they don't even need to have as much marketshare as Apple for their presence to be meaningful in the mobile market. They just need enough to be sustainable on their own and keep the competitors "honest".

The more MS transitions to cloud stuff and browser based apps the more they become Google's sharecroppers. It is NOT a good thing for markets to consolidate as much as they have over the past decades.