https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Using_Source_Contro...

I know some government may do this with intent, but i imagine many governments simply never thought about it, or no citizen ever didn't accepted a "popular smartphone OS provider's ToS" and challenged that government requirement. I know some make offline alternatives very inconvenient, but that still technically legal.

That behavior also highlights how people within those services care so much about reach, clout, 'going viral', instead of communicating with other people.

This is the equivalent of a "Do you guys not have phones??"[1] but on a way larger scale.

At least where i live i am able to use the bare minimum of phones, even working with tech. The friction is increasing though, which worries me a lot, and day after day there is a new attempt to shove it down your throat if you want to be considered a member of society. Seeing that a lot of countries (including mine) are pushing for age verification, and the whole thing about Android blocking 'sideload', by the end of 2026 you won't be considered a human being without a government certified smartphone.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly10r6m_-n8

After that i moved to OpenAI, Gemini models just seem unreliable on that regard.

Despite rare reliability issues, my fear about it is that it requires a phone. Being so popular, i fear when places will refuse any other form of payments and accept only PIX, making anybody not using a phone unable to buy their products, with the common assumption that everybody uses it ("don't you guys have phones???"). You can't install banking apps on rooted phones or alternative mobile OSs (or is very very hard), so you are trapped with Android or IOs to use it.

I hope it doesn't come to that, but it seems it's going that way.

Nowadays, after 2 years of the surgery, she manages it with a restrict and healthy diet, and the pill. It takes a big toll on the well being even after the pain is gone, and she is almost always tired because of it, the body is constantly fighting the inflammation.

By tying your service to a smartphone your are basically refusing to provide service if the costumer doesn't agree to Apple's or Google's TOS. If the app doesn't complain about emulation or something different than Android or IOS you are in luck, but that's not the case with most banking apps. And that's only talking about people who don't have it by choice and have money to buy one.

For me, once, it went beyond: I took my first dose of the Covid vaccine, and the second dose's date would still be announced. I asked where it would be available to the nurse, "On the Instagram page of the ". "But i don't have Instagram" i said, and the nurse shrugged. It requires both a phone and a social media account with your real info, but since absolute nobody complains about it they just do because it's easier.

This will continue as long people are complacent with it. In some places the government is required to provide you services, by law, by any means available and not depending on 3rd party service, but they do require apps anyway and people stay quiet. Phones as an alternative is fine, it's a tool, but should not be an obligatory device for you to be considered an human being.

Right now there are many small but decent models available for free, and cheap to use. If it wasn't for the hype, it would never have reached that level of optimization. Now we can make decent home assistants, text parsers and a bunch of other stuff you already mentioned.

But someone paid for that. The companies who believed this would be revolutionary will eventually have a really hard reality check. Not that they won't try and use it for critical stuff, but once they do and it fails spectacularly they will realize a lot of money went down the drain.

-Regex expressions: ChatGPT is the best multi-million regex parser to date.

-Grammar and semantic check: It's a very good revision tool, helped me a lot of times, specially when writing in non-native languages.

-Artwork inspiration: Not only for visual inspiration, in the case of image generators, but descriptive as well. The verbosity of some LLMs can help describe things in more detail than a person would.

-General coding: While your mileage may vary on that one, it has helped me a lot at work building stuff on languages i'm not very familiar with. Just snippets, nothing big.

But there was something it did way better than GPT4. I asked to create 10 phrases where the last word was an animal, excluding equines, and in alphabetical order. GPT3.5 and GPT4 aren't able to follow such instructions, but the 8b model did it with maestry.