Targeted ads.

Google and Facebook in particular aren’t selling your data, they’re selling the service of showing ads to people who are likely to purchase those things.

The average website that has 800 close friends to share data with is trying to figure out who their target demographic is so they know which demographic to pay Google to advertise to… Or they’re also selling ad space.

So it’s targeted advertisements either way, just different angles

You also don’t need AI for it tbf

Not so much an AI thing as much as an American thing. Americans and Israelis love doing that shit.

That’s exactly what it’s perfect for. If you go further and detail the intent of the project and give a high level overview of the architecture, it’s even better at inferring what needs to be done without a bunch of expensive file reads and asking you repetitive questions

For subscriptions they use a black box metric nobody knows. For usage credits, tokens are very measurable.

The subscriptions are much cheaper than usage credits but have been nerfed in the past and will be nerfed again in the future

They use the captcha page to ddos Wikipedia so for some people it just keeps looping

It’s also cultural. Country roads in my country are 90 km/h and unless it’s dangerous, that’s what you would do on them. Which means speed is lower than posted in tight spots and curves, but not normal roads.

And yet most people install gApps. Because Android without Google Play Services doesn’t do everything you expect of your phone. This is intentional design to sell you on an “open” ecosystem that doesn’t work without Google.

It’s a closed source derivative. BSD license allows it.

They’ve never said their OS is free and open to everyone. It’s never been a community project.

Haven’t kept up with the Android ecosystem after moving to iOS. I hear GrapheneOS is working with Motorola to support an upcoming phone of theirs if you’re privacy minded (GrapheneOS) and don’t want a Pixel (only device it currently runs on)

IT professionals may hate them, but software engineers tend to love them. Something about having a unix system with great performance and less fidgeting to get things working most of the time.

I used to be an Apple hater, but switched ~4 years ago for some of the reasons you’ve given here.

I handed my 2012 fat macbook pro down to my mom. Still kicking with 16 gigs of RAM since I upgraded it when I still had it. I myself got it for like a hundred or two hundred euros. It’s running on a newer MacOS than it officially supports with opencore. Yes, Linux will support devices even longer, but how many laptops have this kind of hardware longevity? Mostly just Thinkpads, but not all generations of those either. And SOME generations of Elitebooks, but not most of them. Bit of a survivorship bias on this one though, some of the 2010-2012 15" models had different forms of graphics chip failure, mine was 13".

Android landscape is changing, but when I switched to iOS, you could get, for the same price, 3 years of Android updates for a flagship phone vs ~5-7 for iOS. But if you have an iPhone 8, you still got security updates in May despite not having had a new major version since 2022. That model is turning 9 this year.

Android runs on non-Google devices too, so Google needs to make money off those by doing something other than selling hardware. iOS only runs on Apple devices, they’ve already made their money off each device. Not saying they’re absolute privacy champions, but they have a lot more to lose in terms of reputation if they were doing extensive spying on you 24/7.

This all without even getting into the Apple Silicon chips. M1 when I had it was ridiculously fast and power efficient already.

Then get iOS and run yt plus. Quite literally iOS users CAN still run adless youtube even though it’s a bit of a hack (refresh every 7 days via SideStore app on your phone unless you have a dev membership)

Or the better solution if you care about privacy and freedom over convenience, get an Android phone with an openable bootloader. Preferably one that’s not a Pixel.

It might as well be if you’re trying to do something it doesn’t like. I created the registry entry in my VM and it still keeps turning itself back on.

They’ve done it in the past, it was investigated, they got fined, look it up. Same people leading the same companies, why would they not do it again? Pay a fine of a few hundred mill again to make billions? No-brainer.

Did you have an index of the entire Internet?

I’m assuming no. The crawl itself is pretty damn costly.

How do you feel about ads in your search?

So I’m paying taxes all my life so old people don’t have to work but I might never be the beneficiary of this system myself

So people who want to kill you for having to take all those zucchinis they didn’t want

Well why would they prioritize memory constraints? It has literally no change to their bottom line.

Say you’re paying an engineer 100k a year. Reasonable cost in a western country, US based would be more like 200k+ when taxes and everything are involved. Tell him to spend 20% of his time optimizing memory usage.

Now how much money are you spending to increase your userbase by maybe 0.01% (there can’t be that many people who’d uninstall software they need just because it uses more RAM than they’d like)? And that’s for every engineer you tell to spend time optimizing.

Memory consumption only becomes important to the authors of the software when it’s on the backend and you’re serving so many users that your annual server costs get into millions, at which point you can save enough money that optimization is starting to be worth it.

It sucks, but it is what it is. For everyone to start building super optimized software again, we’d all first have to move to 512 MB Pentium 4 machines so using more memory would actually mean lost revenue via lost customers.