I ran into a similar issue years ago, where the base infrastructure occupied the lion's share of the container size, very similar to the sizes shown in the article:
Ubuntu base ~29 MB compressed
PyTorch + CUDA 7 – 13 GB
NVIDIA NGC 4.5+ GB compressed
The easy solution that worked for us was to bake all of these into a single base container, and force all production containers built within the company to use that base. We then preloaded this base container onto our cloud VM disk images, so that pulling the model container only needed to download comparatively tiny layers for model code/weights/etc. As a benefit, this forced all production containers to be up-to-date, since we regularly updated the base container which caused automatic rebuilding of all derived containers.
That approach works really well when you have a stable shared base image.
Where it starts to get harder is when you have multiple base stacks (different CUDA versions, frameworks, etc.) or when you need to update them frequently. You end up with lots of slightly different multi-GB bases.
Chunked images keep the benefit you mentioned (we still cache heavily on the nodes) but the caching happens at a finer granularity. That makes it much more tolerant to small differences between images and to frequent updates, since unchanged chunks can still be reused.
I'm willing to bet you don't full-on YOLO vibecode like the lead Claude Code developer, running 10 Claude Code sessions in parallel to push 259 pull requests that modify >40k lines of code in a month [0]? There is zero chance any of that code was rigorously reviewed.
I use Claude Code almost every day [1], and when used properly (i.e. with manual oversight), it's an amazing productivity booster. The issue is when it's used to produce far more code than can be rigorously reviewed.
>Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data.
How much of Waymo's training data is based on LIDAR mapping versus satellite/aerial/street view imagery? Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. The fact that this needs to happen suggests Google's geospatial data moat is not as wide as it seems.
If LIDAR becomes cheap, you could imagine other car manufacturers would add it cars, initially and ostensibly to help with L2 driver aids, but with the ulterior motive of making a continuously updated map of the roads. If LIDAR were cheap enough that it could be added to every new Toyota or Ford as an afterthought, it would generate a hell of a lot more continuous mapping data than Waymo will ever have.
> Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city.
Not entirely true. From their recent "road trips" last year, the trend is they just deploy less than 10 cars in a city for a few weeks (3-4 weeks from what I recall) for mapping and validating. Then they come back after a few months to setup infrastructure for ride hailing (depot, charging, maintenance, etc.) and start service.
I am curious how much Claude Code is used to develop Anthropic's backend infrastructure, since that's a true feat of engineering where the real magic happens.
Isn't the main problem with pensions today the dramatic increase in life expectancy post-retirement? They were never intended to support decades of retirement: in the old days, you retired at 65 and there was a good chance you'd be dead by 70, at most 75. (When Social Security was established in the 1930s, life expectancy was only 61.) Nowadays, there's a good chance you'll live beyond 90, with expenses increasing disproportionately towards end-of-life. Combine that with a shrinking birthrate, and no feasible increase in ROI/worker contributions can sustain pension-funded retirements of 25+ years.
Using overall life expectancy here is misleading, as it includes the risk of childhood mortality. You have to look at life expectancy at a given age. According to the SSA's life tables[0], life expectancy for men at 65 in 1930 and 1940 was about 12 years. In 2020, it was about 17. A significant increase, but not nearly as extreme as you're saying.
In 1930, if a person starts paying into the pension at 30, at that point they have a life expectancy of 37 years, ie they will benefit from the pension for 2 years. Life expectancy at age 30 goes up to 48 in 2020, which gives them 13 years after retirement, 6.5 times higher. Assuming linearity, the average life expectancy after retirement during the time you are paying into your pension between 30 and 65 would be 7 years in 1930, and 17 in 2020.
No, the problem was that increased contributions [that would've ensured solvency with lower market returns and/or extended life expectancy] would've cost more sooner, and no one wants to pay more. So, we "extend and pretend" using generous return assumptions and when those assumptions are not borne out in reality, we simply shrug. Similar to $39T in US treasuries someone will need to pay back. Only the top 40% of Americans have enough income to have a federal tax liability, so who is going to pay this debt back? Different sides of the same coin. What is a debt after all besides a promise to pay.
At age 65 life expectancy hasn’t gone up as much, only around 6 years more today vs 1930. So it’s still a factor but not as dramatic as you make it seem.
What is the value in 1930 though? Only 6 years could in fact mean over 100% increase in life expectancy at age 65. There's a reason full Social Security now starts at 67 rather than 65, and you are incentivized to take Social Security at age 70 if possible.
>I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI.
I agree. It will be an interesting debate to watch play out, because a) lots of end-users love using AI and will be loath to give it up, and b) advances in compute will almost certainly allow us to run current frontier models (or better) locally on our laptops and phones, which means that profits no longer accrue to a few massive AI labs. It would also would make regulating it a lot tricker, since kneecapping the AI labs would no longer effectively regulate the technology.
>Life and business is not about profit. It’s about bettering the lives of people.
This mentality results in the grass at the Taj Mahal being cut with hand tools [0], or Japan having a whole category of "useless jobs" like elevator operators [1, 2] that simply exist to provide employment. Taken to an extreme, this is the broken windows makework fallacy. If I smash a lot of windows, the local glazier gets paid handsomely, at the expense of everyone who had to pay for window replacements.
Anything taken to an extreme is extreme, that includes capitalism.
We know that turning everyone and everything into a product has it's own set of negative outcomes. Trying to play this off as a binary situation is a form of extremism in itself.
There is already the term Bullshit Jobs [1] for service economies like the US where huge numbers of people are employed as part of company bureaucracy rather than representing the most efficient outcome.
Simply put trying to run a society like a business is going to ensure that you get such a large number of people unhappy that you start a revolution that tries to burn everything down and leads to a lot of death.
Are those people cutting the grass/operating the elevators happier/unhappier than they would be otherwise? (I don't know, but perhaps you do). You seem to be strongly implying that this is in some way "wrong" rather than a subjectively different view of the purpose of human existence - for what reason? (I'll ignore the glazier example as it seems quite extreme, and also comes with more obvious/specific "victims").
>Are those people cutting the grass/operating the elevators happier/unhappier than they would be otherwise?
There are numerous studies that show menial labor leads to poor mental health. Perhaps these people employed as makework automatons are happier than they would be if they had no employment whatsoever and were destitute on the street, but these are not the only two alternatives.
>I'll ignore the glazier example as it seems quite extreme, and also comes with more obvious/specific "victims"
The "victims" at the Taj Mahal/department store are the visitors/customers who have to pay slightly higher prices as a result. While not as extreme as the glazier in the broken window fallacy, the grass cutters/elevator operators exist on the exact same spectrum.
I think what leads to poor mental health is varied - poverty is definitely one cause, presumably one which is lessened in this case. I completely agree with you that there are more than two alternatives, but society seems unwilling/unable to consider any of the more radical.
You could frame those visitors to the Taj Mahal as victims, but that takes quite a narrow and short-term view of value to them. Would the Taj Mahal be as pleasant a place to visit if it were in an even more unequal and precarious society than it is? We all pay for things that don't directly benefit us through taxation (usually). The childless pay for schools, the car-less pay for roads, but we benefit from the society that having them creates. It seems hard to say that those visitors to the Taj Mahal would not benefit from being in a more prosperous and sustainable society.
>>Brynjolfsson found a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since late 2022. For young software developers specifically, employment fell almost 20% from its 2022 peak
>This is confounding AI-exposed white collar occupations with occupations that were overrepresented with extended remote work.
Yup. If you look at Brynjolfsson's actual publication [0], you'll see that precipitous decline in hiring juniors in "AI-exposed occupations" starts in late 2022. This is when ChatGPT first came out, and far too early to see any effects of AI on the job market.
You know what else happened in late 2022? The end of ZIRP and Section 174, which immediately put a stop to the frantic post-COVID overhiring of bootcamp juniors just to pad headcount and signal growth. The problem with Brynjolfsson's paper is that it doesn't effectively deconvolve "AI-exposed occupations" from "ZIRP/Section 174-exposed occupations," which overlap significantly.
Addendum to counterpoint: why haven't those SotA gen-AI companies become the most productive software companies on earth, and release better and cheaper competitors to all currently popular software?
People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It would be both a huge cash cow and the best possible advertising that AI-facilitated software development is truly the real deal 10x force multiplier they claim.
If someone invents a special shovel that can magically identify ore deposits 100% of the time, they aren't going to sell it with the rest of the shovelmongers. They're going to keep it to themselves and actually mine gold.
Because it’s not their business to sell a chat app? "Our company is the frontier lab for AI models, oh and btw we also offer SlackClone, sign up for enterprise please". Their job is selling shovels, really good, increasingly more expensive shovels that keep getting better, let others waste their time looking for gold.
But Google sells the productivity apps and also does the exact same things OpenAI does.
If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better?
Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because Apple doesn’t have access to the same quality of shovels?
What about Microsoft Windows 11? Isn’t Microsoft a major OpenAI investor with full access to their latest and greatest?
Why aren’t we seeing release schedules accelerate or feature lists growing at a faster rate?
Supposedly we are selling a lot of shovels here but I don’t see a lot of holes being dug.
Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. It's not comparable to iOS at all.
Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.
Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making.
My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.
In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.
To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.
Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of <5% and maybe even see code quality drop, then they’ll decide that the experiment was a bust.
But they are marketing their AI as replacing all software engineers. Their CEO can’t stop saying it. According to them the cost of producing software is now just the cost of tokens to generate it.
They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.
It would also prove the power of their LLM product as truly disruptive. It would be amazing marketing!
They care about money, they are making tons of investor money doing what they are doing, there's no incentive to pivot if it would just turn investor money into consumer money.
Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business".
Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?
Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?
Isnt that point kind of the counterpoint to the AI-first narrative.
With standard, human driven operations its true about opportunity costs. What we are told is that AI will replace human, essentially saying that opportunity cost becomes cash only. Then the question of why doesnt AI lab start SaaS fully managed by AI becomes ever more interesting. Maybe because it's not that simple. Hence, it's not that easy in other companies as well to just replace devs, engineers and so on with AI
Waste ? They can become both an AI race winner AND a disruptive Jira vendor. Yet they don't. Why ?
To be a successful Jira vendor will prove their point that software engineers are obsolete now. Why don't they do that already ?
Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat?
My guess is two-fold. One, they are specialized in AI. Two, building another anthropic is a big moat and they like to keep it big vs what you could build with it.
Why aren't we in the year of the Linux desktop? It's free and arguably close enough, better, or as good as Windows.
I think in the modern world people would absolutely sell the special shovel, because even if you have a better product that doesn't mean people are going to be using it. You need to have a much better product for a long time for that to happen. And being much better than the competition is hard.
Anthropic appears to have realized before OpenAI that code gen was an important enough market to specialize in.
For now though, building smarter models / general integration tooling is a better us of model companies' capital.
Once/if performance gains plateau, expect you'll see them pivot right quick to in-house software factories for easily cloneable, large TAM product spaces, then spin off those products if they're successful.
100% agreed. When/if that pivot happens will be the sign that gen-AI is truly disrupting the software market in a profound way. "You're using the model wrong/you're not using the latest model" is an oft-repeated argument against AI skeptics. Nobody knows how to use the latest models better than their developers.
>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products.
I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow.
"Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
I know it is probably not the American way but the only way to address this problem is to make laws that prevent a duopoly, penalize anti-competitive behavior and push open-source standards for software/hardware.
Unfortunately, the status quo also means the US (and its tech giants) has real power and control over other countries' technology sector. So, no party in America will make or enforce laws that will change the status quo within the country or overseas.
Even in the EU we can't use a lot of "society important" smartphone apps without Google Play or the Apple Store. I can get a physical key thing for my national digital ID, but I can't get anything for my bank, my healthcare (which is a public service in Denmark) or any of our national digital post services. You can apply to get exempt from the digital post services, and they do have a website sollution, but still.
Don't get me wrong. I appreachiate all the work being done to get Europe out of the claws of US tech companies, but I think having an official EU app store alternative would be a good start.
This doesn't help. Your contact number is shared by 50 parents' phone..are you sure of their security measures.
Even if I keep everything safe many govts are using Microsoft cloudfor day2day operations. Recently my employer lost tons of data. Every CV you send to a company or recruitment is kept often unencrypted. Every other country is fingerprinting/face ID upon arrival. Are you sure about their security?
Things that I have dumped into my email are far less consequential compared to those.
The game is lost. Very few people can have privacy.
You still have to get Google Play to get the apps. It's better but it's not like it makes us less reliant on Google in the current way these apps are distributed.
Parent mentioned not using the Play Store or the Apple Store. The hardware Graphene runs on is kind of irrelevant for that. I don't see a problem with paying Google for hardware that I am free to use as I like; unlike other manufacturers the bootloader is unlockable, which means the stock OS can be replaced.
Requiring a device from the same manufacturer as the OS as the only way to be free: there is really nothing you see contradictive in that? I mean, power to you!
You most likely can.[0] Of course, banks don't tend to advertise these kinds of authentication devices, probably because people tend to find apps easier, but you absolutely should be able to get one from your bank. It's very much not a Danske Bank specific technology, and it's explicitly there to allow for accessibility for those people without "suitable" phones, e.g. old people.
It's certainly not as convenient to use the online bank with a fob like this vis-à-vis a banking app, and we should absolutely push for banks to not be reliant on Google and Apple for their apps, but it is possible to use the services without being reliant on Google or Apple.
> my healthcare (which is a public service in Denmark) or any of our national digital post services. You can apply to get exempt from the digital post services, and they do have a website solution, but still.
Now admittedly I don't know how this stuff is over there in Denmark, but here in Finland we have access to the digital healthcare services via a website, both for the national patient database and the healthcare region access. Again, not as convenient as the respective apps -- although the app for the national patient database, OmaKanta, is very much in beta stages still, and it's way more convenient to use the website even on the phone -- but it's possible. I would be very surprised if that wasn't also possible over in Denmark.
And authentication can happen via couple means that aren't reliant on the smartphone duopoly, with authentication doable with online banking -- which as established, doesn't even need a phone -- and via a "phone authentication" which IIRC only needs support insofar as it's supported by the SIM card, and then of course authentication can be done with the national ID card and a smartcard reader.
And again, the point isn't that this kind of de-Googling or de-Appleing isn't difficult or inconvenient, or that we shouldn't improve the situation, but that it's absolutely possible to get away without using these vendors. And that we should make sure that these kinds of alternatives remain possible to use.
> Don't get me wrong. I appreachiate all the work being done to get Europe out of the claws of US tech companies, but I think having an official EU app store alternative would be a good start.
In my opinion there is a too strong connection now between these private corporations and "politicians". Everyone can be bribed.
The only way I see a change possibility is for people to think about how to change this collectively. Pushing for open source everywhere would be one partial strategy that could work in certain areas.
I have little hope, since the EU is lobbyist-infested like the US, but there is a chance the EU will fund FOSS platforms over centralized solutions. There are already several EU wide or national funds for that and it would help immensly when that money would go to burning out solo devs and maybe even to orgs like mozilla.
> it is probably not the American way but the only way to address this problem is to make laws
Regulation and liberty mongering are very American. We do it constantly at multiple levels of government.
What kills privacy regulation is this weird strain of political nihilism that seems to strongly intersect with those who care about the issue. I've personally worked on a few bills in my time. The worst, by far, were anything to do with privacy. If you assume you're defeated by forces that be, you're never going to probe that hypothesis.
You are incorrect. There is another way to address this problem and I suspect it will come to this: average people will begin attempting to destroy data centers and their interconnection points.
Your trillion dollar investment to control the populace ain't worth shit when its on fire and the monkeys are hurling flaming shit at you.
> make laws that prevent a duopoly, penalize anti-competitive behavior and push open-source standards for software/hardware.
None of this is legally easy to implement or enforce, and any attempt of doing it is virtually guaranteed to create an unbelievable amount of unintended consequences as people figure out ways to game this new set of rules.
We need something similar to FIPS for interoperable software and standards. Organizations will fall in line when money is at stake.
Say for example your local/state/federal agency publishes (or accepts) documents exclusively in ods/odf instead of proprietary formats, that will automatically drive adoption of software and prevent lock-in.
Agressive interoperability at the protpcol and exchange format - its why email mostly works even forcing Google to back off when they tried to change email to be rendered by their cdn (i forget the name of the offering - but was similar to what news pages were being pushed for speedup).
Bad actors will always abound - like Microsoft spiking the documnt standards by pushing through ooxml when odt/odf was gaining traction.
Or basically just coercing the decision makers like in Berlin(?) where they moved their offices into hte city to get them to drop Linux/Openoffice.
As i rmeber it ooxml backers made it intentionally harder to parse the specs than was necessary ,if it was fully open i believe the open source implementation would have been on par. As it is its subtly broken in annoying ways , and with Word being the default - its version wins out and gets to be the only acceptable submission format.
If you notice most doc submissions when its not a pdf being requested will specifify MS's version.And by sheer momentum the alts get less traction.
While that may be true, people need to start somewhere. Otherwise the future will just be even more sniffing done by private entities. Do we want a sneaky Skynet that looks more like 1984?
Everything counts, this attitude is very defeatist. Stop using it the easy ways at first, and then make conscious steps to get off these services going forward.
It's probably at the same scale as gas/oil companies and recycling at this point. I'd like to believe my individual efforts will make a dent in the surveillance state, but at this volume legislation is truly the only meaningful effort to defang these multi-billion dollar companies.
Yea I noticed many of these sevices won't allow an email address not hosted with a provider that wasn't Google,Microsoft, or apple where they can collect other details. I think i tried to sign up for VanceAI, it would only accept gmail or discord connected account as a sign in.
A lot of schools use apps like 'ParentSquare' to interact and manage the student/teacher/parent relationship, and do not offer the same level of communication through traditional channels anymore.
I wonder if there would be standing to sue, since public schools are an agent of the government and sending your kids to school is mandatory. Lawsuits are the usual way these types of shenanigans get sorted. Can the government really force you into contracts with private parties?
This is because social media has trained today's young parents to be completely entitled assholes and teachers can only take so much of their abuse. What teacher is going to want to sit down for a conference with a parent who whips out a phone to record the meeting and then posts selectively edited excerpts online in order to get a few upvotes on a social platform.
Nonsense. My kid just started kindergarten this past year - I've never been required to log into ParentSquare through a GMail address and I have only ever accessed it through a browser on a laptop.
The web is no better than phone apps when it comes to data gathering. Maybe the data is a little fuzzier, but you can be assured it's being gathered all the same as it is in phone apps.
and how are you going to prove your ID? you might as well be the one abducting them, and especially if you refuse to use an app to identify yourself... (playing devils advocate here)
I am a parent and the school employees in primary would ask the kid to point finger at their parents and would remember our faces after just a few weeks. If someone had to pick them up because we had an issue we would just call the school.
I however never understood why I couldn't sign a paper so my kids could walk home on their own, especially since they would walk to school on their own already.
most immediate, would be my children would identify me, next one is under the assumption this suddenly crops up as a policy change, such a policy from the start would be a non starter, however familiarity of face would overide the need for what would be plutobeaurocratic requirement.
the really tight one is how to proceed when there is a change of lawful custody or guardianship, because, unfortunately, divorce, and domestic violence happens, and the lag between court order and, notification of custodial reassignment should be close to zero.
Oh well, I guess there is nothing to be done. Pack it up everyone. It is over. You can't do anything. No one can learn anything. No. You heard the guy above. It is over. Go home. Do nothing.
it is not complicated at all if you have resolve and understand what the ramifications of not doing anything are. I quit all social media 6 years ago, thought it would be hard, took about a week total to not even think about it. had same “trouble” in school with whatsapp groups and whatnot, threatened to sue, everything got moved to the SMS within a week………
Yeah, Tim Apple handing over a 24-karat gold plaque to the sitting president is completely normal behavior for CEOs to engage in, and not at all about just making as much money as possible. He had to do that, otherwise Apple as a company would disappear tomorrow. They're just trying to survive.
Unless you're going to demonstrate that handing over a golden plaque implies handing over privacy data to government agencies, I'm going to prefer the former over the latter.
Apple has already been outed as one of the participating companies in PRISM. [1] So that privacy boat has long since sailed. The public legal wrangling is likely just a mutually beneficial facade. PRISM is almost certainly illegal, but nobody can legally challenge it because the data provided from it is never directly used. Law enforcement engage in parallel construction [2] where they obtain the same evidence in a different way. So nobody can prove they were harmed by PRISM, and thus all challenges against it get tossed for lack of standing. It's very dumb.
But in any case the legal battles work as nice PR for Apple (see how much we care about privacy) and also as a great scenario for the government because any battles they win are domains where they can now legally use information directly to the courts and sidestep the parallel construction. That also takes the burden off of Apple PR in giving that information up because it can be framed as the courts and government forcing them, rather than them collaborating in mass data collection.
I know you're being sarcastic, but yes, that's exactly what's happening. And it's really hard to fight this kind of corruption when your allies get sarcastic and angry at you instead of listening and discussing. Please consider reading the HN guidelines and thinking about how your comment might not be aligned with them.
I don’t like that we’ve gotten to a place where presumably serious people think that giving a token prize to a narcissist is the same thing as engaging in massive surveillance of the entire population.
If you or I had complete knowledge of all of apple's activities, this would be a more relevant point.
Instead we have to make judgements based on what limited information we possess and sucking up to trump is a real bad sign for things like caring about privacy/liberty/safety
> presumably serious people think that giving a token prize to a narcissist
Unfortunately, I think reality is much worse than you seem to be under the impression of. Voter suppression and military violence against your own population isn't "narcissism", it's the introduction of authoritarianism. The flagrant narcissism is a symptom of that, not the actual issue.
>They share just as much with the NSA as Microsoft and Google.
For something like icloud vs gmail/gdrive, they're approximately the same, but that doesn't mean "they share just as much [...] as Microsoft and Google. If they never collected data in the first place, they don't have to share with NSA. The most obvious would be for location data, which apple keeps on-device and google did not (although they did switch to on device a few years ago).
It doesn't have to be a binary choice between "don't use it ever" and "continue using it as much as you are now". If people stopped using these services 50% of the time, it would have a huge impact.
In concept what you say is correct but reality is complex. There are very few providers that implement friction free login/password and importantly security. A large number of email providers didn't implement 2FA until very recently. Even those that have terrible apps, ad infested, no app password or oAuth etc. so many governments use MS hosted services.
It is akin to Visa/MasterCard duopoly. It is hard to escape but even if one does it then it resulted only inconvenience. I still don't have my cards in phone - neither will google change path nor will govts force a change.
I don't see any contradiction here with what I said. If you feel that using Google for email is unavoidable, that can be the part that you keep using. You can still easily ditch a lot of other things. E.g. Pixel phone, Google Docs, Google Drive, AWS. Each of those has plenty of, arguably better, alternatives.
I've largely disconnected from big tech for years, perhaps 80%, and encouraged others to do likewise. When does the seismic shift happen?
I don't care for these 'bottom up' strategies because they don't have clearly defined success conditions and are more wishing than anything else. It also puts the responsibilities on consumers for 'not advocating (or voting) hard enough,' which imho is just another kind of diffusion of responsibility. Everyone ends up feeling bad for not doing enough to solve the problem when the reality is that coordinating social swarms or other sorts of collective action against tech giants with highly integrated command and lobbying structures is almost impossible.
I don't understand your point. We're talking about ways to reduce dependence on big corp products. Some people object on the basis that it's not always feasible. I've responded that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You've identified some products that you think you can't move away from. I've identified some that I think you probably can, and acknowledged that you might still by stuck with those others. I don't see how your latest comment fits in.
In the context of the present debate, Pixel phone is inherently bad because it's a Google product. You're putting money in Google's bank account when you buy one, and you're running your phone the way Google wants you to. The point of the debate is whether it's feasible to move away from such things. In the case of a Pixel phone, it is possible (to some extent, anyway).
The comments are fair. My post was quick and lacked details as I was frustrated in the ever increasing enshitification of the web.
What I meant to convey, from my personal experience, is that it seemed hard to get off of platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Ring, Google Photos, etc. but then I did it and didn’t miss them. These small moves by a lot of people, I believe, can still make a difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. Do I still use some services? Of course, I have Gmail and WhatsApp, and use a lot of Apple products. When I can, I choose intentionally what I use since there’s no perfect companies out there, but there are “better” ones (whatever that may be in one’s opinion). I chose cloudflare for hosting and Anthropic for vibe coding. Allowing people to use existing login info versus exposing them to more risk with self managed auth was a choice I made. There are tons of choices we make every day so trying to be more intentional is a good start.
Nobody is perfect, but we can try to improve each day in these choices we make.
Talking about anti-tech-monopolies and using Stripe-paypal is extra ironic.
I can understand aws, youtube, being on google index, and other things as they sometimes are the most cost efficient or vendors don't offer alternatives... but stripe-paypal is more expensive and worse than the less-bad alternatives. jeez.
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