Interesting! It says Apple investors haven't voted in favor of any proposals not endorsed by Apple management since 2022. Shareholders also rejected 3 separate proposals for Apple to write transparency reports about:
the risks of its work on AI; recent decisions related to child sex abuse material; the company's charitable giving practices.
Isn't it necessary to be on the Twitter platform in order to use Grok? Unlike lots of other people, I still use Twitter, but for those who don't, I would think it is an obstacle to using Grok.
The advantage of using Grok (or any alternative to Google Search!) is that there isn't an entire ecosystem of pervasive prying Alphabet services to go along with it: Gmail, Youtube, Google Play, Google SMS (Verizon terminated its SMS for text and recommended all users use Google instead, in November 2024), Google Meet or whatever they call it, and probably more. It can track you everywhere, and a deliberate effort is required to evade it with alternative providers.
You can sign-up using X / Google / Apple accounts or email so you are not forced to be locked in an ecosystem but you are benefiting from answers coming from and index made up of scapped web pages and an index of X posts (+others)
But this doesn't explain how/why Musk/X/xGrok isn't just more of the same.
Just like Google, Musk is driven by greed. What he really wants is some of Google's money for himself. And the easy way to achieve this is by doing what Google does --- or perhaps even working in cooperation with them.
Hi, Elie! I read the article, then read your case study, then visited you on LinkedIn. I was amused by your custom LinkedIn URL!
A few hours ago, I was replying to a post about "Gradual Disempowerment" from generative AI. My theory (just a guess, not researched like your case study!) is that Google and Apple (and maybe Microsoft and Amazon) are diverting CAPEX away from their core businesses to chase after AI chimeras. And as a result, the quality of their services (e.g. Google Search) is static or degrading. So, in order to improve Gemini, is Alphabet diverting resources from Google Search?
I thought this was a bit much (although I agree with her overall message):
>The social media billionaires want us to believe their putrid platforms are the “new town squares.” That their half-baked social videos and for-you feeds have replaced the agora... Instead of humans talking and interacting with each other in the open air, we’re corralled like cattle by engagement metrics...
Someone has to pay for IRL town squares: Pay for security to keep the square safe at night, encourage entertainers on the periphery, arrange for someone to clean up litter every day, etc. Digital public spaces are a distant second to those in real life. Paying to use the digital ones with our personal data and original "content" isn't as good a deal as it seemed initially...
Wikipedia is definitely not a public square. It is an encyclopedia. What you said, about it being
>like a library with steep rules
is entirely correct. That doesn't make it bad, not at all! You're right: There are very few equivalents of a public square, digitally. I consider HN to be one, even more so than email. Email chains get awkward with multiple people, and email addresses are (of necessity, due to spam, like others already said) non-public.
Agree that it is not a square, but I meant more in the sense that it is public. It has GPL, Creative Commons, 501 c 3.
The thing with social media of that type is that it is often filled with foss devs who are a very narrow point demographics.
The chans and reddit have some public properties. I hear the bluesky and mastodon things (the latter especially) have very public infrastructures, not sure about the people, it feels like it will be left leaning democrats on the first hand and FOSS devs on the latter.
Department of State operates embassies in places where people don't like the American government very much, as well as sometimes hosting foreign officials that some would prefer unalive.
Soooo, starting with GPT-5, they're making it more opaque by no longer letting users choose what model they use?
Also, in the process of eliminating model selection, I wonder what kind of pricing will be associated with the subscription tiers for "intelligence levels".
They are pretty clear about the pricing: $0 for the lowest tier, $20 for Plus, $200 for "Pro". They will probably keep that, maybe add some more tiers above that.
I really dislike the AI slop at the top of Google search results. It is an annoying distraction that forces me to scroll past every single time, multiple times a day. Bing is just as bad with its LLM although it is also a worse search engine.
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