It's not just English. Some words exist in normal english and law english, and yet have entirely different meanings. You have to study to understand the meanings. You have to study to understand the contexts in which words appear and in which they are even relevant.

Every profession has terms of art in it, including engineering, science, and construction.

Having engineers in HN complain that they need to learn something in order to understand it is a pretty bad look.

Not to mention the heavy salting with latin words and phrases.

You severely underestimate the market capture of the Google Play Store, the related network effects, their control over Android OS, and their power and motivation to use all of that to prevent any competition from ever getting traction.

F-Droid is not doing too bad. And yet, the vast majority of people will never ever use it after Google Play implenents their developer verification scare screens.

None of your examples succeeded in an environment that was even remotely as hostile, neither Windows nor Palm could have done what Google does today, without risking a fatal user backlash.

It's one thing for something to be thinkable and imaginable. Of course you can imagine Google Play getting dethroned. It's just so incredibly unlikely to happen without regulatory antitrust intervention that it is pointless to consider seriously.

Fdroid can never replace the main default because their strict rules rule out too much. I approve BTW, I like that a special place like fdroid exists, but it can only ever be this special niche thing.

But as time goes on and software tools become more powerful, there is just not much moat. I don't even mean AI, I just mean the ordinary power annordinary computer and the gobs of highblevel languages and frameworks and automation that just grows and grows all the time. It's not that hard to port an app to a new platform, or a new distribution mechanism, or a new clone source for an existing platform and distribution mechanism.

Big universal things with 100% capture get replaced overnight all the time. Everyone switched from MySpace to Facebook in like an hour one day. Other things like my Steam example took longer but they became at least an equal player, a real alternative that normal people could and did choose in numbers that Sony and MS couldn't ignore, pretty quickly.

Everyone switched from Palm to Android pretty quickly.

Google has a few extra levers which is agreements with all the phone manufacturers who in turn have to deal with the carriers, and google are doing the bulk of the ongoing os developement and security work so the manufacturers don't have to.

But they could just start doing that same work, or spin up a new 3rd party who's work they all share, easily, any time. They all actually already maintain half-assed backup plans they can switch to and go whole-assed if google gets that 1% too annoying one day.

There are really no easy robust moats any more. Even the biggest are precarious and have to be actively maintained through constant shenanigans. No matter how big the capture, it's never actually very strong.

All of the alternative stores are systematically disadvantaged time and time again due to Google's and Apple's near-absokute control over their respective OS. They are as anti-competitive as they are allowed to be. And the US seems incapable or unwilling to rein them in.

I'm sure Microsoft and Apple could have been able to afford a cheap office given their parents' generous financing.

And, regarding the original topic, we wouldn't have many of these privacy issues if the US had not strategically failed to regulate its obnoxious tech monopolies

I'm sure the employees are (rightfully) worried. However, that does not at all preclude hidden motivations of the CEO behind acquiescing such worries.

Sure. I don't personally trust any of the CEOs, and I have yet to hear a single person (in general, not just on this topic) who trusts Altman.

It should be noted that GrapheneOS had similar criticisms about almost every smartphone vendor, including Motorola before their upcoming cooperation IIRC.

Most of their criticisms are valid, but they seem to be absolutely unwilling to make any compromise at all.

Not sure if they want to protect their brand, if any of those criticised issues would increase the work needed by them significantly, or why they are like that.

But I would prefer to have a slightly less secure GrapheneOS on many phones, that helps many many more users than just Pixel owners, over the current all or nothing situation.

> Most of their criticisms are valid, but they seem to be absolutely unwilling to make any compromise at all.

Making no compromise to security is the entire point of it's existence.

You can achieve the best security without compromises by not using any technology.

GrapheneOS making compromises on their requirements would signal that vendors producing low quality, less secure hardware and software is OK. On something as important as a secure and private smartphone, GrapheneOS not making compromises is actually beneficial to everyone. Maybe it is pushing these vendors to actully care a little more about secure hardware and software. The good thing is that if you actually want a good secure smartphone, you can buy a Pixel and install GrapheneOS.

I am running that on a single 6000 96GB with 4-bit quants for both weights and PLE table. Needs just 32GB RAM and fits snugly into the 96GB VRAM with KV cache equalling ~300k context tokens. Not sure if I quantized the KV

They are certainly trying to

These laws apply to US companies in a more limited way because if we fine them too much they complain to US government that other countries have laws they have to follow. And then the US government intervenes to protect their money and data/intelligence extraction machinery (big tech companies). Usually with at least partial success.

That just sounds like exactly the same as the US companies are doing with their government (trying to get a lot of money out of them)