That's ridiculous. You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system. The only solution is forced diversity, and to that end, I congratulate Apple for being the last guardian of the web as a truly open platform.
(I still remember when communities like Hacker News were screaming and howling at Apple for daring to rid the web of Adobe Flash, a corporate-owned proprietary monoculture cluster-f**k of security vulnerabilities. The virtue of Apple's influence on the web is painfully obvious in hindsight.)
> You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system.
You absolutely can, and we absolutely have. You believe this because anti-trust action was derided as anti-growth in the latter quarter of the 20th century, by people who knew exactly what they were doing (see also: banking deregulation).
It's one of the major reasons we're stuck with such horrendous corporate and individual wealth inequality today.
Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick, ship a browser, or ship general-purpose client operating systems.
It wasn't really any better when Apple killed things off. For years afterwards I was running into devices that had embedded Java applets for configuration over the Web that no longer worked. Sometimes I'd run into an academic's personal web page that had examples that used Flash or Java and no longer ran for the same reason. There was a lot of useful legacy code that got broken overnight when Apple led and others followed in killing off these kinds of plugins.
For all the claims about security problems - and there were many and the complaints were valid - people seem a bit too willing to overlook the much greater attack surface of modern browsers that still incorporate similar flexibility and functionality but through other protocols and native Web standards now instead. For better or worse today's "evergreen" browsers roll out new functionality more quickly than before but their most important innovation was introducing frequent automatic security updates to a general non-technical audience at a time when that certainly wasn't the default for most desktop software. Take a look at how many significant security issues get fixed in any of the major browser on each update cycle and you can see that even today this is still far from a solved problem.
I'm not sure that's a great example. Even though Microsoft lost, it had no real consequences - the company was not forced to split, MSIE remained a core component of Windows, and Netscape was still forced out of the market because they couldn't compete with free MSIE. By 2003 or so, MSIE was up to ~95% of the market.
Allowing Google to use their control of the web to kill the most effective method of blocking ads is the solution?
No.
People need to stop using Chrome and Chromium based browsers and use browsers based on implementations of the web standards that are out of Google's control.
Firefox on Android supports the full version of uBlock Origin.
>IMHO, that also should be addressed from the legal perspective very strongly
Then do that FIRST (or at the same time). Don't give us, yet AGAIN, the tired bs song and dance about how you'll make things worse first and then totally someday address the other part properly, and oops what a surprise that turns out to be too hard nevermind.
>But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.
Objectively it is a solution though. Because it's been done, and it's been more effective than nothing, while meanwhile nothing has happened from a legal or political angles. If a better solution can be done down the road great, but a hack dealing with a problem non-optimally can absolutely be better then just having the problem completely unaddressed. And count me skeptical that any government is going to have the will or capability to actually address what a lot of us already hate about not just the Chrome monopoly but that entire approach (I don't in fact want my web browser to be a full lowest common denominator operating system with low level hardware access thanks). I dislike much of what Apple does now but I'm glad their selfish interests have happened not to align that way either. Until monopoly lock-in gets better addressed, one of the main ways to push back is via another monopoly lock-in that has different incentives.
If the one other competitor didn't allow it, then would we be allowed to complain in your mind?
This argument is terrible, we're lucky the one other competitor, for now, allows installing what you want or people like you would argue everything is fine.
I said it was a business opportunity. Not necessarily a business opportunity for you personally. But if a gap in the market did exist, it would be an opportunity for Microsoft, or Meta, or Dell, or... I hear Firefox wanted to build a phone...
> Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Then maybe Apple should invest a fraction of their fortune on making Safari better. Competition is good. Apple doesn't care about competing because they have a monopoly. If they were forced to actually improve WebKit and Safari, maybe people would choose to use it.
And instead they choose to keep the browser diversity alive by taking away your right to choose (your browser in iOS). A sad state of affairs that this is the only thing keeping us from complete Chrome monopoly.
At the time the roles were reversed. The spin was "use Chrome to break the IE browser monopoly." And Chrome was a better browser, and much faster. It worked.
No. Chrome was so much better than Firefox it wasn't even a contest. Firefox, when it came out, was honestly pretty crap - I tried it and went back to IE in pretty short order because it was noticeably faster. Chrome was a huge leap over either IE or Firefox when it came out, and people switched for that reason.
That is a weird alternative history. Even by Firefox 1.0, it was a dramatically better browser than MSIE in every conceivable metric -- except for support for Microsoft's proprietary extensions like VBScript, ActiveX, and NTLM auth support. (It also failed to replicate some of MSIE's most outrageously terrible bugs.)
When Chrome was released, Firefox was four years old and had already gained 33% market share with momentum on its side, mostly through word of mouth. Chrome was a bit better in some respects, a bit worse in others, but it had the Google marketing juggernaut allowing its market share to skyrocket.
chrome started picking up on firefox when they released 4.0 and started doing some heavy UI updates which made it feel chonky, whereas chrome was this smooth looking browser that paid attention to webview realestate by putting the tabs in the topbar
>But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
And giving Apple a monopoly is a better idea?
>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Forcing users to use the Safari browser engine when they install Firefox or anything else is not the way to protect anyone from anything. It's abusive in its own way. And Apple is not going to save anyone from Google. People are still using Google services through Safari, because they are services Apple either sucks at or doesn't offer.
>Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
So you're fine giving over all control to Apple. Apple already has way too much control. Being on the W3C board, they use their power to block any browser API that could make web browsers more capable, which would cut into their native app mafia racket where they charge 30% of any purchase done through an app. They don't offer any alternatives, or any changes - they just squash anything they see as competitive to native apps. That's how fucked up they are. They are literally holding back progress for no good reason - not security, not for privacy, it's purely for their own greed.
> But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
Easy. Just legislate that the only browser allowed on iPhones is Firefox. That way, Chrome can't monopolize the web, and iPhone users get to have a decent browser.
I'm getting some serious "Microsoft has to protect Internet Explorer from evil competitors like Netscape" vibes from this comment.
Safari simply sucks. If WebKit was any good, then Apple wouldn't have to worry about allowing third-party engines onto iOS. The situation on Mac tells us everything we need to know.
> Part of me would like a little longer in the world where the problem is still open and I am still looking for its solution. But reaching a summit, even by someone else’s route, comes with a view. From here I can see new mountains, and I look forward to climbing them with my students, collaborators and the machines.
It’s not so hard to get root shell on some routers via the admin panel, which usually has the same password as the wifi network or a default password. From there the device can capture dns logs.
setting aside the dynamics question, it is known that LLMs have limits wrt the theorems they can prove without human input, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49756412
LLMs receive new data via input context, not just training data.
Thought experiment: How effective will 2026 LLMs be for humans in 2526?
It's not game over just because 500 years are missing from the training data. The important question is how well can 2526 humans make culture and knowledge navigable to LLMs via tool calls.
Today's LLMs might need for example sub agents to translate to 2526 English, sub agents to read 2526 docs.
It's _really not clear_ whether 2026 LLMs will be useless. To believe that reflects an enormous misunderstanding.
> LLMs receive new data via input context, not just training data.
Be more specific about the "new data". If everyone is using LLMs for work (generating code), especially the juniors who won't get the chance to learn from first principles, LLMs will be training on the data they generated. How will new code enter the system at large enough quantity that it can be used for training?
> It's _really not clear_ whether 2026 LLMs will be useless. To believe that reflects an enormous misunderstanding.
They won't be useless, they will just be frozen knowing only whats in their training data. No new programming languages will emerge, in 2526 they'll still be using Rust and javascript, same exact code from 2022 which dominates the training data.
The "new data" is: person A prompts an LLM to create or modify a tool, person A distributes code person B, person B's LLM uses the tool via docs/help/error. That is a direct path for an LLM to "know more" from a human than what's in its training data.
If we get a new programming language not in the training dataset, we could give an LLM a decent compiler with compile errors, and some sample code and it would be able to write code in the new language without training.
I agree. I believe it could be the best piece about AI ever written. The themes of lost dreams reawakened, sobering up of egos, sci fi technological development, the role of humanity. It’s a weird feeling to see that it’s actually really happening.
Except for Postgres
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