Some people just see it as a cost, one "tech" startup I worked at I got this lengthy pitch from a sales exec that they shouldn't have a software team at all, that we'd never be able to build anything useful without spending millions and that money would be better-spent on the sales team, although they'd have nothing to sell lmfao. And the real laugh was the dev team was heavily subsidized by R&D grants anyway.
According to the latest data I found online [0], they are earning ~25k/minute, at the moment. With 1 hour of revenue they can pay 3 people to fix the technical debt that caused this and prevent more failures in the future.
Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI? The reason this is important is their DOJ antitrust case, about to start trial, has made this kind of conduct a cornerstone of their allegations that Apple is a monopoly.
It also lends credence to the DOJ's allegation that Apple is insulated from competition - the result of failing to produce their own winning AI service is an exclusive deal to use Google while all competing services are disadvantaged, which is probably not the outcome a healthy and competitive playing field would produce.
So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model? And the reason that this is an issue is because both companies are large?
This feels a little squishy... At what size of each company does this stop being an antitrust issue? It always just feels like a vibe check, people cite market cap or marketshare numbers but there's no hard criteria (at least that I've seen) that actually defines it (legally, not just someones opinion).
The result of that is that it's sort of just up to whoever happens to be in charge of the governing body overseeing the case, and that's just a bad system for anyone (or any company) to be subjected to. It's bad when actual monopolistic abuse is happening and the governing body decides to let it slide, and it's bad when the governing body has a vendetta or directive to just hinder certain companies/industries regardless of actual monopolistic abuse.
> So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model? And the reason that this is an issue is because both companies are large?
No they were already being sued for antitrust violations, it just mirrors what they are accused of doing to exploit their platform.
So if it mirrors something they were already accused of (like you're saying), my questioning should be pretty easy to map onto that issue as well?
It's the line of thinking that I'm trying to dig into more, not the specifics of this case. Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
If that case was prosecuted and Apple was found guilty, I suppose you can point to it as precedent. But again, does it only serve as precedent when it's a deal between Apple and Google? Is it only a precedent when there's a case between two "large" companies?
Again this is all really squishy, if companies aren't allowed to outsource development of another feature once they pass some sense of "large", when does it apply? What about the $1T pharmaceutical company that wants to use AI modeling? They're a large technically component company, if Eli Lily partnered with Gemini would you be sitting here saying that they also are abusing a monopolistic position that prevents competition in the AI model space?
> Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
No it's antitrust because they have a failed product, but purely by virtue of shutting out competitors from their platform they have been able to turn three years of flailing around into a win-by-outsourcing. What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked default voice assistants? Would they be able to recover from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology? How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly? This is why it's an antitrust issue.
No other thoughts on my actual questions? You're just addressing one-off sentences from my responses.
"it's antitrust because they have a failed product" is objectively hilarious
> What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked default voice assistants?
Probably pretty much the same. What would Gemini's position be like today if they hadn't blocked out default voice assistants? You only get Gemini when you use Gemini, just like you only got Siri when you use Siri (up until this deal takes effect). Also Siri has used ChatGPT already, so I'm not even convinced this is a valid criticism. They already didn't block OpenAI from being part of Siri.
> Would they be able to recover from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology?
This is relevant how?
> How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly?
How would what measure against other ai models? How would their ability to recover from a lack of investing in a better "homemade" AI model differ if they used OpenAI instead of Gemini? How does that have anything to do with antitrust? That's a business case study type of question. Also, shouldn't they be allowed to recover from their own lack of developing a model by using the best tool available to them?
> it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model
The problem isn't that they used another company's model. It's that they are using a model made by the only company competing with them in the market of mobile OS.
> Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI?
Sorry if I'm missing the point but if Apple had picked OpenAI, couldn't you have made the same comment? "nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg Gemini/Claude?".
Enemies? Google contributes about 20% of Apple's profits annually through their default search engine deal, that's more profitable than just about everything they do or make except selling iPhones.
> The U.S. government said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met in 2018 to discuss the deal. After that, an unidentified senior Apple employee wrote to a Google counterpart that “our vision is that we work as if we are one company.”
> "Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer."
14 years ago I wrote a node module that did this in 100 lines of code, to improve the throughput on another node module, both of which were just performing lookups on MaxMind's GeoIP data.
It will be interesting to see how they approach this, producing open source software "at scale" come with all the costs, difficulties and high mortality rates of any other startup or business trying to successfully and sustainably build something people want to use. They need to paint such a broad stroke to find the winners it would be perfect for an "open source UBI".
A contrived error-ridden, disastrous SaaS with barely functional registration, broken features, requiring invasive permissions and with no customer testimonials.
But good news - their SaaS, which they neglect to link to in their article - can help you detect these discrete retention issues if you're making these classic mistakes.
Second this, I enjoy using it coming from a Flash then HaXe background. It's very robust and mature and great with Electron and Capacitor packaging it up for various platforms. I really like being able to stick with the "web stack" after decades of learning all kinds of stuff that is absolutely pointless to know today! I also like being able to reuse tools like Playwright, Jest and Vite.
You can already use TypeScript with Phaser and they extract all the jsdoc notation to TS bindings so in terms of making a game there wouldn't be much to gain from the framework itself transitioning, but it it would be nice to see them do that + start reinforcing it all with tests.
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