wolvesechoes

I doubt it. Software is, well, software. Most people have their aesthetic preferences in regard to clothing or furniture, and aesthetics of these are obvious to anyone. Code that runs on a device and implements some functionality is not like it. It is more like infrastructure - nobody cares about handcrafted sewage pipes. Plumbers possibly can have strong preferences regarding plumbing, but other people don't.

Free market was a tool, yet for you it is a venerated idol.

I guess US and European societies.

But Meta can share with NSA what kind of porn are you into or that you've said few bad words about US president, whilst CCP doesn't care, so who is a real adversary?! By the way I am an INDIVIDUAL, my personal FREEDOM and FEELINGS are all that matter. China didn't hurt my feelings, domestic companies or politicians did, so, again, who's a real adversary now, huh?!

> What's short-sighted and naive is believing that globalism can be reversed, that economic efficiency can be overcome by political will, and that knowledge can be contained to one country

Peak ideology.

> Economic nationalism and high tech are incompatible

Except in China?

> How readable and accessible is this book?

As with most works of cultural theory you need to read it few times, and also check other works of his. Otherwise you may end up reducing concepts from this book to social media or AI slop.

Moreover, books like this usually are just phrases in a long dialectical process. For example, it is useful to read Debord first, and then move to Baudrillard.

Well, maybe they lie, who knows. But "hearing people talking" is rather poor counterevidence.

My god, do people really lost the ability to read such short article?

No, built-in Android and Chrome are not blowing these numbers.

AI Overviews are not accounted for in that number.

Read the article?

"These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that’s not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort"

AI Overviews are not accounted for.

Somewhat tangential, but when Google doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money and make heavy investment in infrastructure that they rent to those participating in the churn, while still they are "losing the AI race".

But when Apple doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money, and needs to rely on Google for AI services, then this is "the Apple way", "do nothing and still win" uber-pragmatic 5D chess game.

The same inflation caused to a large extent by constant increase in revenue to satisfy your insatiable shareholders?

> If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup.

Sweetie, it is called cooperative, not startup.

> Why would a developer use Windows in 2026?

To have somewhat working desktop OS with access to one of the most powerful dev environments in a form of Visual Studio?

To a casual reader of this thread - look at comments, this is what ideology is.

> You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too

At least the human's brain requires about 20 Watts to operate.

Cheap garbage is better than garbage requiring whole power plants nad billions of capital investment.

> Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system.

God, tech people should have stayed in basements.

Who?

But in all seriousness - you can even bring up Pope himself. Don't care. Show me data, show me the leaps our software made with all this 100x productivity boost. Show me a myriad of better LLVM projects, new usable kernels, and so on. Show me sharp decline in bugs and defects in existing projects.

Keep blog posts and HN comments.

Uncle Bob was a dev celeb before there were dev celebs.

> Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI?

Key thing was not that they were X% slower, but that they were slower while being convinced they are faster. Of course, any analogies with the current hype cycle are completely unfounded.

> How about DHH, Max, Nolan, Steve, Mitchell

Oh yes, dev celebs that rely on constant validation through social media. Very reliable source of data.

> You should stop using social media as your yardstick.

Yes, don't believe people posting on HN.

> Random allocation of citizens to seats might actually make for a better government.

Not only that, but that would be actually democratic concept. Greeks long ago found that elective systems are in the end oligarchies.

> Combined with the ability to compile to a single native binary, having a solid package management solution, a fairly advanced type system, and a solid selection of nice language features

Good to see a praise for C#.

But the moment you step into social realm it becomes political, as Mr. Aristotle said.

Good, based. We need some pesticide.

> There’s millions of apps to choose from on your phone

And choosing one of them obviously makes life more complicated than not doing that.

> getting your ass profiled

Gmail knows nothing of my ass.

> let me know if the ads in your mailbox are helpfully tailored to your needs and preferences!

I couldn't, for I don't check them. I have enough life to live without degoogling crusade.

Yup, it is often mind-boggling how people here are detached from reality. Millions of people around the world rely on Google services, Gemini in all probability is the most used model consumer-wise, Google receives unimaginable stream of data on even smallest habits common people have etc.

But hey, Gemini makes shittier job than Fable at producing my shitty "app" no one cares about. It is so over for Google!

> But why people choose to bring the mediocrity of Google into their lives is beyond me.

Because life gets simpler and better if you are just using what is available on your phone and in your browser instead of constantly chasing current HN darling.

> google being their usual terrible selves at anything consumer-product related

And yet millions of people around the world are using their stuff, very often using only their stuff.