realharo

I still see fake download button ads distributed via Google's own ad infrastructure to this day. I even reported a few that were taken down.

For all the AI prowess Google likes to brag about, why can't they make a simple "does this look like a download button?" detector? The scams are not that clever, most of them follow one of a small number of specific patterns.

You need to look at this from a practical standpoint.

The vast majority of phone apps are not local-only. They are merely the frontend to services provided by some company - e.g. a Reddit app is really about Reddit the service, a food delivery app is about the service, not the locally running code, etc.

Apple controls what users can and cannot install on devices made by them, but the web and things like PWA are an alternative that would be viable for some portion of these.

You can make a web app that can be added as an icon on the homescreen, can access the camera, location, notifications, storage, authentication (e.g. require fingerprint), etc. It still can't do everything native apps can do, but it would be good enough for a good portion of popular apps.

But in China, that is not really possible without the government's approval either, because China requires the same kind of registration and an ICP license for websites, otherwise things will get blocked. Which, even if you could install anything you want on a device, would effectively limit you to purely local-only apps anyway.

I remember this article from last year, when they laid off 80 people, or 17% of their workforce https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/patreon-layoffs-cuts-creator-partnerships-team-1235372211/

My reaction to this is still - how the hell did they need close to 500 people?

This kind of service should be a very thin layer between the creator and the viewers, there is no need for any additional crap that a middleman company tries to provide. Plenty of other services can do the same for much cheaper.

Unless of course the app makes API requests to its backend, which is blocked in China.

Web is the universal open platform, and China just blocks it with a firewall 🤷‍♂️.

I used to play a bit on Geforce Now when I only had my laptop with me. That was the only service with usable latency where I live.

But a free market solution would be the airport increasing its prices until the demand at those prices matches how much capacity they have (and probably a push to add more capacity, or a build a new airport nearby, etc.)

The problem from Australia's point of view is probably that this could cause their own airlines to be out-competed by foreign ones, or it could reduce the number of destinations where flights are viable, etc.

But wouldn't a more free market in this case let them do more direct flights to Melbourne without requiring the extra leg?

The extra leg is only added to get around a specific kind of regulation of the market (limiting how many flights they can do with Melbourne as a destination), it wouldn't exist otherwise.

Now, there was a paper that instantiated a couple dozen LLMs and had them run a virtual software dev company together which got pretty good results

Dude, you need to take a closer look at that paper you linked, if you consider that "pretty good results". They have a github repo with screenshots of some of the "products", which should give you some idea https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev/tree/main/misc .

Not to mention the terrible decision making of the fake company (desktop app you have to download? no web/mobile version? for a virtual board game?)

(Also the paper never even tried to prove its main hypothesis, that all this multi agent song and dance would somehow reduce hallucinations and improve performance. There is a lot of good AI stuff coming out daily, but that particular paper - and the articles reporting on it - was pure garbage.)

So if as a result of this, Google won't be allowed to pay to have their search engine be the default, does that mean the effective end of Mozilla?

True, as of today. On the other hand, future advancements could very easily change that. On the other other hand, people have been saying the same about self driving cars 10 years ago, and while they do basically work, and are coming eventually, progress there has been a lot slower than predicted.

So who knows. Could go either way.

You mean like AirBnbs?