skuzz

He gained access to a trove of government data that he Starlinked back to his lair. He got more government military contracts and he got the FCC to revisit a bunch of hardline fiber broadband that will now end up going to Starlink or T-Mobile home broadband, as T-Mobile seems to be pretty ingrained in his money camp. Why give America fiber when you can deploy wireless affected by all sorts of extra physics problems? He also likely got a pass to keep poisoning communities with his AI datacenter running on a fleet of unfiltered backup generators.

He wanted money and access, and to feel special, like all of their types do.

Bold of you to assume the Federal government still follows the law.

"Large Language Model incorrectly travels down the wrong statistical path when choosing words from its N-dimensional matrices and ends up guessing the wrong aircraft manufacturer. Possibly because of training bias against foreign manufacturers in a xenophobic American future."

Just doesn't have that ring to it, versus "AI SLAMS AIRBUS IN HOT TAKE!"

That is also the first thing that popped in my head.

Why would they waste their effort? They can just sit in orbit watching our news feeds as we destroy ourselves and grab a free empty planet in a few months.

While this was an inevitable move, it makes me curious if they are hitting a point where Gemini is becoming so integrated in all their software stacks and they're just insanely paranoid about any precious "AI" code leaking that they just decided to close the gates early.

Probably for the best long-term. Having this weird dependency on the generosity of a corporation was always a liability. Whatever comes next can hopefully avoid it.

Hopefully someone like the EU, to combat ewaste, eventually requires all hardware manufacturers to sell their mobile hardware with bootloader/firmware flashing unlocking requirements. The work then will be for the community to write support for all these various makes and models of device, but the endgame being actual device freedom. Although with the world seemingly leaning hard into Authoritarianism and Fascism, it might not end up being the right time and freedom will remain underground.

A pity too, all phone hardware at its core is generic ARM computers with various devices connected to fairly generic interface busses. They just encrypt bits of code so the sauce to make things work is hidden.

KaiOS is one alternative, it was FirefoxOS. It's pretty sluggish though. Maybe on more decent hardware with some optimizations it'd have a possibility. A lot of Nokia feature phones run it.

The complexity of getting the closed binary blobs to run modems and other hardware will make it exceedingly difficult to extract the necessary files and configurations to keep third-party OSes afloat. Then there's the matter of carrier configs, carrier compatibility, expensive carrier certification, and even then, carriers may still just ban the device because they don't like it.

Options will end up being:

• Tearing apart ROMs for blobs and backport/reverse-engineering patches to make them run on alt OSes.
• Find some hardware based on janky Chinese modems that will have little band support, lackluster performance, and likely banned by most carriers.
• Start a new company with the pull to design a new phone OS and hardware with chip and carrier support.

Not impossible, just exceedingly difficult. These systems are heavily integrated and heavily proprietary.

Funny part is, this move will actually make Google lose more money, as Google will lose hardware/software sales, and software dev over this. More people will end up on iOS in the interim, and out of it will come some new mobile OS that will make Google's mobile OS irrelevant in 10 years.

Let's start now, start a company, base a new phone on QNX, have an Android emulation layer for apps until a proper SDK is developed, and just take the wind out of Google sooner than later.

Most of his businesses. Apparently, in America, success is all perception, not reality?

Dug up from a previous post:

Mango Mussolini's failed businesses:

• At least four failed building ventures
• Had a failed “university”
• Failed vodka business (how hard is that, right?)
• Failed steak business
• Failed airline
• Failed board game
• Failed casinos in Atlantic City (how do you fail at running multiple businesses that only exist to hoover up money?)
• Failed magazine
• Failed luxury travel organization
• Failed mortgage company
• Failed presidency that took Pres. Biden’s administration most of their entire term to fix. We’re talking documents that are gone, departments that are deleted, abject chaos that had to be rebuilt from scratch in some cases.

Successes:

• Had mommy’s money to get him going
• Had 5 successful buildings built, mostly in the 1980s
  • At least three of them had fraudulent financial statements, inflated valuations, and inflated tax losses

Don't forget Stephen Miller. He's the puppeteer pulling the senile old man's strings.

Never mind that ICE's creation in 2003 was to stop human trafficking and terrorists. So they're already outside of their original designed purpose. Nothing that they are doing is legal.

I am also annoyed that those exact thoughts about boon/curse had to enter my brain, but storing it in long-term planning just the same.