Bought by whom? Another monopolist bigcorp that surely won't care to monetize it? That is not how you reason about antitrust issues.

"Nibbling at the edges" is what the competition authorities are proposing.

> US federal and state competition authorities recently asked the court of appeals to overturn the part of Mehta’s ruling that permits these payments.

You get the "competition authorities" you pay for. Decades of government-bashing, bureaucrat-bashing, sidelining and shit pay give you this level of institutional competence.

That was after I asked it to only touch 3 text files in its working directory, after which it sparked macOS permission prompts to access my Desktop, Documents, Downloads, and other apps' data. Thank god for the web platform and web apps.

If you're a parent, one factor matters more than any other: the parents' emotional health determines the children's emotional health. Whether the parents have secure attachment, any intimacy/trust issues, high or low self-esteem, anxious or not, self-aware, how repressed they are, how comfortable with their own and others' emotions...

If a parent is uncomfortable with their thoughts/emotions and compensates with digital distractions, the issue isn't the phone. The media obsesses too much over symptoms and not causes.

These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form.

It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.

I don’t know why the EU allowed Apple to intermediate other browser engines with BrowserEngineKit, which is unacceptable, while blocking it here where it is reasonable.

Recently there was an Anki vulnerability that gave any website access to any local files. On Windows or Linux this would be deadly. On macOS, Anki can't access my desktop or documents or Chrome storage or password manager storage. I think Apple's been smart about which security features it prioritizes.

Since mid-April Chrome showed 302 vulnerabilities patched, 225 of them found by Google. Same period last year was 19 vulnerabilities. They've also become more transparent recently, disclosing vulnerabilities found internally, not just externally (which Apple still doesn't appear to do). From the outside, it's hard to tell if Apple has deployed this tooling as much as Google.

But over the next 5 years I expect a growth in Blender-like open-source projects aiming to take on the big closed-source elephants. Code is cheaper now. The main downside of LLM coding, unmaintainable spaghetti code, can be mitigated effectively with discipline and coordination.

You still need maintainers to uphold contribution standards, but people will throw tokens at you. A small, disciplined team can go a long way, make a decent enough product, and then attract the institutional money (like Blender did) and hit that growth curve where everyone rallies you and you've won.

Lots of companies would have a vested interest in reducing these dependencies to Adobe et al., or have a more customizable product. Competitive professional tools, more like Blender and less like GIMP, but in other areas, like DAWs, CADs, and others.

Staying on hold for you. Google Lens on that coat or bag. Warning you in the middle of a text convo with a stranger, if the conversation veers into typical scam patterns. Better text/email spam detection than Apple. Hanging up spoofed calls posing as your bank. Magic Cue. Magic Eraser. Better transcriptions and translations, in far more languages.

And who could forget, a good touchscreen keyboard. Those are real "AI as a feature". Not a better Siri.

This is true in America in many industries now, but most of the rest of the world (even the rest of the OECD) is still far behind.