> You could take the exact same documents, prompts, and whatever other bullshit, run it on the exact same agent backed by the exact same model, and get different results every single time
This is more of an implementation detail/done this way to get better results. A neural network with fixed weights (and deterministic floating point operations) returning a probability distribution, where you use a pseudorandom generator with a fixed seed called recursively will always return the same output for the same input.
In the 90s, you would have said the exact same thing about linux on the PC.
Free software ultimately has time on its side. As long as a project has enough mindshare to keep its momentum, it really is unstoppable in the long run.
Where Linux shines is the absolute for-profit cloud/server world.
Open source has places where it works really nice, bazaar is better at "wider" stuff (having an active community, etc), while cathedral is more deeper/better at vertical integration, etc.
I still can't comprehend why they implemented FIDO/WebAuthn support in Play Services. Passkeys are extremely difficult to support in apps that don't depend on Play Services client libraries.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I was talking about the whole permissions system where the user is a third class citizen. Device manufacturers are second class citizens (restricted by Google via CDD/CTS) and the only true winner on that system is Google.
Regarding some concrete examples - Google can deeply integrate Gemini, but a competitor can't do this and users get no final say here either. Competitors are restricted by the permission system, Google is not restricted at all.
While rooting can alleviate this to some extent, Play Integrity is there to make sure the user regrets that decision to break free..
There are several topics where Android is significantly ahead to the point that iOS is just a toy, and there are areas where the reverse is true.
And I say that as a recent convert, so it's not like I have a decade out of date view of any of the OSs. In my experience I had more visual bugs in case of iOS than android (volume slider not displaying correctly in certain cases when the content was rotated as a very annoying example).
It's not, though. Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices.
It's going to remain at the same level of polish (i.e. mediocre), except now without the major selling point of being able to run your own apps and have alternative app stores, etc. Back around Ice Cream Sandwich or thereabouts they got rid of "phone calls only mode" and forced us to rely on their half-baked "priority mode" that's an opaque shitshow.
When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".
Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
> Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices
Pixel Fold disagrees.
> When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".
You can do that with do not disturb.
> Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
You can definitely make a "phone calls only" mode: create a mode, allow certain apps to interrupt, and add only phone calls to the list.
I do think they should offer more pre-configured notification modes by default, if only to show people what they can do with the feature. Perhaps "phone calls only" should be one of those.
People buy high-end Android phones like crazy, I don't know what bubble you live in. Samsung Folds and Flips are the luxury phones, not the iPhone Pro Max S eXtreme Edition 32 GB that looks exactly like the base model but has a slightly better camera. People show off their S Pen and perfectly stabilised 100x zoom lens, not their liquid ass. Multi-window and DeX are features for professionals who need to Get Shit Done^TM, iPhones are the toys kids use to send memojis to each other.
And yes, I can also click one button and go into phone calls only mode. I can even set it on a schedule or based on my calendar. I don't know where you're getting your half-baked Android, mine Just Works.
You might not agree with every one of those points, but you can't seriously think everyone thinks like you. Go outside your bubble some time.
Putting "Samsung" and "luxury" in the same sentence is lunacy. Their proprietary Android is even worse than Google's.
Where do you live? I've literally never seen anyone using a Fold or Flip device, ever. My kids are at the age where some of their peers are starting to get phones. All those kids have iPhones.
If your plan is to keep saying unsubstantiated bullshit, take that to Reddit. Go to a store and try modern OneUI - it's just AOSP with a slightly different layout and more features. The apps are worse than Google's, but the OS is better. Both are miles above iOS in features, especially for power users. Split screen, windows, chat bubbles, DeX, notification categories and history, vendor-neutral PC integration and TV casting, ...
And I don't quite see your point about your kids' friends using iPhones. I sure as hell wouldn't give a kid a "luxury" phone. I'd take the cheapest thing that does the job and lasts a long time. An iPhone has a very long software support window so the cheaper models actually end up cost-competitive with budget Androids.
As for folds and flips, I've mostly seen people in suits using them, along with a few techy power users and some kids with rich parents. That's a luxury phone in my book.
As opposed to what hardware, then? Because this is pretty much how most other drivers became a thing in the first place. Linux has come a long way and due to it "winning the cloud" many hardware vendors started properly supporting it, but this was absolutely not the case for the longest times.
You don't need an arm processor, many modern x86 chips match or outcompete m series on power efficiency and performance. Mainly lunar lake gen 1 and the new gen 3 (arrow lake not really).
The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.
There are reasons beyond pure power efficiency to use ARM processors. It is a nice architecture to work with, especially if you plan to write low-level code. Also, you might want to deploy on ARM servers.
Also, there is the question who in general makes Laptops as nice as a MB Air? Who makes a fan less laptop of roughly comparable power?
If you're writing true low-level code then you're most likely doing it for performance reasons, like ffmpeg. But ARM doesn't have the instruction set to make the best use of that, x86 does with its extensions. Otherwise, the compiler handles translation, so there's just no reason for you to care about the assembly unless you're writing assembly.
As for nice laptops, I think Asus and Lenovo makes some nice ones. I don't believe any are fanless, but most are quiet - Lunar Lake gen 3 is an SOC with a base TDP of 25 watts, and it can even go down to 15 watts. These CPUs are slightly faster in multi-core performance than M4, and they use similar wattage. I believe the Asus zenbook duo gets better battery life by a wide margin because of the 99 watt-hour battery. They still fall a little short of M5 in performance, but it's very close.
As for servers, it's a good point. But I think currently most servers are still using x86 CPUs, so it might not be relevant for a while.
ARM servers definitely seem to get more popular. Seems that for a lot of tasks they are the more economic option. Consequently, you want more and more development for ARM. That would be one reason. The other is, that developing for ARM is more fun, whenever you touch parts which are architecture-dependent.
For the computer: the Air is a great laptop. I am very happy it doesn't have a fan, so it can never get a clogged fan and it works great. Currently, I am running Linux on it via VMWare, so I get the best of two worlds. And Linux really flies on it. Once it is no longer supported by macOS, I am certainly going to go native Linux. As it is an M2, that probably would work already today.
If you want an ARM CPU, there are now a few single-board computers with a quadruple Cortex-A78 CPU in the "Qualcomm Dragonwing QCM6490" SoC (similar to a Snapdragon from the flagships of 2021), which run circles around Raspberry Pi and the like.
There are also older NVIDIA Orin SBCs with Cortex-A78, but those are severely overpriced, so they are not worthwhile, unless you really want to use them in an automotive project.
For software development, the Arm-designed cores have the advantage of excellent documentation, unlike the proprietary cores designed by Apple and Qualcomm, which are almost undocumented. Good documentation simplifies software debugging and tuning.
Unfortunately there are no cheap solutions for developing on the latest ARM ISA variants (except for a Chinese Armv9.2-A CPU, which has some quirks and is available in mini-ITX and smaller formats). For the latest ISA, you should develop software on a smartphone, e.g. on one of the Motorola smartphones that have DisplayPort for connecting an external monitor and a desktop mode for Android.
The Qualcomm laptops have various problems with Linux that have not been solved yet.
You have much better Linux support for an older Snapdragon from 2021 (with quadruple Cortex-A78 cores) which has been rebranded as "Dragonwing QCM6490" and which is sold by Qualcomm for use in embedded computers. Thus Qualcomm promises at least 10 years of support for it.
There are a few cheap single-board computers with it, e.g. Particle Tachyon 5G and Radxa Dragon Q6A.
Unfortunately, "cheap" means something very different today than last summer, due to the huge increase in the price of DRAM. Nevertheless, the SBCs with soldered LPDDR memory have been affected less by the price increase than the computers for which you have to buy SODIMM or DIMM memory modules, which may cost now more than a mini-PC in which you would want to install them.
Nothing seems to be close to the MB Air. I would definitely be interested in buying a comparable hardware, if Linux is better supported than on the Air.
Maybe I was lucky, but I never had any serious problems in Linux with any of the many Dell, HP and Lenovo laptops that I have used during the last 2 decades.
The most serious problem that I had was about 10 years ago in a Lenovo laptop with NVIDIA Optimus (i.e. where the NVIDIA GPU does not have direct video outputs, but it must pass through the Intel GPU). At that time, I spent a couple of days until succeeding to make NVIDIA Optimus work OK in Linux. With the Intel GPU, Linux worked fine since the beginning. This happened because at that time the Linux NVIDIA driver did not support Optimus, so you had to install a separate program to be able to select which GPU shall be used by an application. I do not know if any laptops with Optimus still exist today.
Except for that case, I never encountered any hardware compatibility problem that could not be solved in minutes or a few hours of most. For contrast, with Windows I have seen many problems that could not be solved in weeks, even with the assistance of IT support personnel from multiple continents, because nobody, not even the "professionals", had any idea about what Windows is really doing and what may be wrong.
It is true that some of the laptops that I have used had a few features that I have never used, so I do not know if they worked in Linux. For instance I have never used a fingerprint reader or a NFC reader.
> but obviously Google still gets to see everything you do in their apps
Well, the actually scary part of google services is that they have this quasi-elevated access in your phone where it can do a lot of stuff ordinary android services just can't do. E.g. google maps' location sharing works this way (but don't quote me on that).
GrapheneOS managed to "put it back into the bottle", and it runs as a regular android service anyone could write, with the same rules applying. So you have much more control on what you allow it, and this will also limit what data apps relying on google services can leak about you.
They recommend you install google play services if you need it. Privacy is in no small part a user-decision - no matter how secure your device is if you just scroll Facebook all day.
And what is preventing Lyft/Uber whatever's algorithm to have a bug and just falsely flag your account after registration? Like there is no guarantee it works on a stock android/apple device either and I'm fairly sure they have a long list of false flaggings that support has to unlock day-to-day.
This is more of an implementation detail/done this way to get better results. A neural network with fixed weights (and deterministic floating point operations) returning a probability distribution, where you use a pseudorandom generator with a fixed seed called recursively will always return the same output for the same input.
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