Google is going ‘all in’ on AI. It’s part of a troubling trend in big tech

Use at work is a secondary factor. If end stage customers refuse to use a service because of a certain trait, that trait becomes unprofitable.

As an example, my friends and I will never play Valorant because of the invasive anti-cheat system; most people don't care.

We all have a choice, even if it means giving up some conveniences. It would seem that most people either don't know or don't know better.

Can confirm. The more you deal with people who have climbed to the tops of corporate ladders, the more it becomes clear that it's all vibes. It's all people telling stories to other people who tell stories about those stories.

The peter principle is wrong - in an oversized corporate structure, there is no upper bound for incompetence. You can keep rising for no reason, because after a certain point other people just trust that you know what you're talking about, and the people that know better work around you instead.

The people beneath you can't trust the people above you enough to explain the situation, the people above you don't really listen to the people beneath you anyway, and so plenty of middle managers just muddle through and constantly make shit up to justify their own existence, while everyone above and below is left in the dark about what's really going on.

Decisions are constantly made by people without any real connection to the consequences, and it shows. With the everything.

Nothing I can do to resist?

I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.

Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems "not secure enough" (it's lacking TMP 2.0)

This means you can get a great deal on one of these "inscure pc"... but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. ... and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.

Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

Currently, many banking apps won't run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.

Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).

Gmail? I don't remember when I opened mine the last time...

Today things like "email reputation" make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better "reputation".

My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.

True, in a broad sense. I am speaking moreso to enshittification and the degradation of both experience and control.

If this was just "now everything has Siri, it's private and it works 100x better than before" it would be amazing. That would be like cars vs horses. A change, but a perceived value and advantage.

But it's not. Not right now anyways. Right now it's like replacing a car with a pod that runs on direct wind. If there is any wind over say, 3mph it works, and steers 95% as well as existing cars. But 5% of the time it's uncontrollable and the steering or brakes won't respond. And when there is no wind over 3mph it just doesn't work.

In this hypothetical, the product is a clear innovation, offers potential benefits long term in terms of emissions and fuel, but it doesn't do the core task well, and sometimes it just fucks it up.

The television, cars, social media, all fulfilled a very real niche. But nearly everyone using AI, even those using it as a tool for coding (arguably its best use case) often don't want to use it in search or in many of these other "forced" applications because of how unreliable it is. Hence why companies have tried (and failed at great expense) to replace their customer service teams with LLMs.

This push is much more top down.

Now drink your New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.

I still don't understand how Stadia got out the door the way it did. It was the exact same business model Onlive tried back in the day. And it predictably failed the exact same way.

Rich people at tech companies replace workers with AI, set up a security force that goes after immigrants, surveil the city with a camera network, try to remove the human from the equation, try to upload human consciousness to the cloud, lots of other AI tech dystopian stuff.

It's the same reason why they removed the headphone jacks from phones. They don't want to give you a better product, they want you to force youbto use a product, even if it's worse in all aspects

Google just released a video generator that is a ball hair away from perfection. The hallucination rate from their latest models is <1% and dropping you just see cherry picked screenshots.

I assume it's big tech that has this weird ai they try to sell while the scientists are using different ai for real useful stuff, like the protein something I heard. Or at least that's what I'd like to believe.

We have to find those investors man… its always those investors investors bla, we have to please them…

Need? None. There are certainly areas that "ai" tools excel at but what I saw was a company literally forcing it into every aspect of the system. Every single booth at the conference, regardless of the topic, made a point to talk about agentic AI. It was my first time there and I left feeling like I got screwed, because I missed out on quality content that I could use in lieu of AI that I'll never use.

If I were I prospective customer, I'd be looking at other solutions for sure.

It already has script automation and has had for years so I'm not sure what AI is going to bring to the table.

It actually makes a lot of sense. AI is a good use case for case management. The problem is how much you depend on it without human intervention, but even humans fuck up, especially if they’re following the same rules and processes that the AI tool would. The AI tool just gets through cases faster, so in theory you can sus out root causes sooner.

I'm self-hosting my mails; no need for another third party that will decide whatever whenever. The major difficulty is the decades of things that are reliant on the old one.

And I just said that google works fine for search, despite people claiming it's on the decline, broken, unusable, etc. That's not to move toward qwant, who are no less shady, burn money (sometimes coming from public money…), and despite wonderful claim of an autonomous index, completely stop working when Bing is down. As far as recommendations for search engine goes, google (and Bing for that matter) are far less disingenuous. All usable search engines these days are backed by the big ones anyway. Something like https://openwebsearch.eu/ would be a better alternative, assuming it follows on its promises.

For search I'm really happy with Kagi

DuckDuckGo has made A.I. results optional, which is a good move.

Companies that are making it fixed can go swimming in lava for all I care (looking at you Google).

Yes, THANK YOU!!!!!!!

Facebook started out as invite only for a few years so they might have been looking to emulate its early trajectory. Gmail also started that way.

They certainly didn't help it by weighing it down with more and more ads.