What's the concern? They are working with Motorola as a manufacturer. It'll probably be a hard fork eventually but why not make it work in the meantime.
If they hard fork, a lot of apps that are generally "necessary for the average person" (e.g. Uber, banking apps, Gmail, Whatsapp/Wechat/Line) might stop working.
I mean we privacy nerds all love webapps but the reality is the people actually in charge of S&P500 companies hate them. They really, REALLY want to fingerprint your device and use it as a verification and tracking mechanism.
Until that changes, webapps aren't going to sell.
Even Google tried multiple things to "sell" the idea of webapps (e.g. Polymer project) in 2011-2015 and failed.
Funny enough, Wechat kinda succeeded at webapps in China because there's a strong user preference to stay inside one monolithic "everything app".
I find, as a user primarily of free and open source software, it’s really the opposite: native FOSS apps have minimal tracking and analytics that defaults to off or is easily disabled, while most free and open source webapps are behind Cloudflare, blocking access to them until I turn off my VPN and disable the anti‐fingerprinting features in my browser.
I don't want to see more groundwork for web apps. GrapheneOS is meant to be secure, which means running trusted apps on-device. My messages are less secure if they permanently are stored on a server.
Yes, but there is no alternative other than giving up. Starting a new OS from scratch with zero apps is a much worse starting point compared to a platform where 99.9% of apps work (minus those relying on Play Integrity with strong integrity) which may have its rug pulled in the future. The race here is about getting to a big enough market share that GrapheneOS cannot just be ignored as completely niche but has to be treated as a small but not insignificant minority.
It's not ideal, but in the case a hard fork happens, they could implement the same APIs and most apps will probably continue to work. Similar to how microG is a replacement for Play Services and still works for most apps (not as well as sandboxed Google Play of course).
Above that, not much would change for a few years anyway, because apps still target ancient Android versions.
Seriously, I don't see a mediocre android provider like Motorola running and maintaining a hard fork.
Forking is all easy, keeping it up to date year after year as codebases diverge is a whole different story.
I could see Samsung doing it. But they won't, they're too good buddies with Google. But they have the resources. A Motorola no. The grapheneos team won't either, maintaining a disparate fork and introducing new features independently from aosp would just be beyond their scope. You're not just hardening at that point. You're basically doing everything.
Don't forget when Huawei didn't fork. Well they started with that but then replaced every component with their own design. It's easier because if you fork you're still bound by decisions made by the original party. Better to greenfield the whole thing then.
And look at how many people made a soft fork of chrome with some ui changes. There's tons of those. There's no hard fork that no longer follows Google. Even a large company like Microsoft didn't.
They could for a while but what's the point if it's not sustainable? Google is not going to turn around and make it more open again.
With every Android release you will build up more feature base to replicate. Unless you cut all ties and drive a separate ecosystem but good luck getting enough developers to buy into that.
They basically have opposite goals to Google so I don't imagine there will every be good feelings there. There shouldn't be.
Yes Google wants android to be secure, but the problem is that to be truly secure it should be secure from Google too. And they don't want that. They want it to be their personal datamine and walled garden. Just like Apple with ios.
Google staff might follow you but their actions speak otherwise. Closing off AOSP, convincing OEMs to lock their bootloaders. They really want to consolidate control over Android.
Google is the one making bad actions, which it makes sense to complain about. They moved to building in private so forks don't get features as they come and more recently they stopped providing certain source code in a timely manner.
We've collaborated with many Google engineers working on Android. Many of their engineers, security researchers and even people in management positions follow us on social media. One person who describes themselves as an AOSP engineer on Hacker News doesn't reflect what their overall engineering team thinks about GrapheneOS. This person likely also finds the security engineers at Google complaining about the same things and pushing for improvements annoying too.
...printing the most money into it. The circular IOUs amongst the AI and hyperscalars are a form of debt, i.e. money creation. Don't get me wrong, a whole lot of other dollars are going in too, but investing money that doesn't exist is a massive risk always.
Maybe I'm not doing capitalism right, but isn't it supposed to be "The one who profits the most wins"? If you win by just spending, I think you need to adjust the parameters of your capitalistic market.
I don't get it either, but it seems to me a bit similar to how the US, if you look at market value of car companies, has utterly crushed Europe and Japan (with China surging ahead of those and maybe threatening the US soon), which to me sounds crazy (I still think of German cars as the top of the bunch).
According to Google (AI summary, no idea if it's 100% right but from what I've seen elsewhere it seems right):
Top Car Companies by Market Value (May 2026):
- Tesla ($1.3T - $1.56T): Retains market leadership with a valuation often exceeding the next several largest competitors combined.
- Toyota ($259B - $317B): Largest traditional automaker by market cap and unit sales.
- BYD ($122B - $126B): Strong market position as a Chinese electric vehicle leader.
- Xiaomi ($119B - $135B): High valuation following its entry into the smart EV market.
- General Motors ($69B - $75B): Leading traditional U.S. manufacturer, competing with Hyundai and BMW for top 10 spots.
- Ferrari (\(\approx\$60B-\$68B\)): Maintains high value due to luxury branding.
- BMW / Mercedes-Benz / Volkswagen (\(\approx\$58B-\$64B\) each): German luxury and traditional automakers facing high competition.
- Ford (\(\approx\$47B-\$54B\)): Remains a major player with significant US market share.
So, essentially, Tesla alone is somehow worth more than all European companies combined??!
Except that by sales volumes, the top companies are exactly the ones you'd expect: Volkswagen ($350B) and Toyota ($315B) at the top, far ahead of anyone else... Tesla is around the 7th place with just $95B. Does the financial markets still expect them to far out-earn Volkswagen and Toyota any time soon, we've been waiting for like a decade already??
Gemini says that by country, the car companies revenues are:
The stock market is over 60% passive investment, it's starting to get unmoored from the financial realities of the underlying companies. What that means for the future is [shrug emoji].
>Does the financial markets still expect them to far out-earn Volkswagen and Toyota any time soon, we've been waiting for like a decade already??
These capital heavy industries operate on 30+ year timelines, a decade isn't sufficient time.
Revenues are not the end all, be all. Profit and profit margin, along with revenue trends provide a more complete picture. And the most significant factor is that the market does not expect Volkswagen or Toyota to do anything new, to do anything with the potential to earn more. They are what they are, and they will continue with their lower margin businesses until they fade away.
Investors are betting that Tesla, however, might have a few tricks up its sleeve, that will allow it to expand markets and profits.
Look at profit rather than revenue - "it's easy to make a lot of revenue when you're selling a dollar for 80 cents" applies just as much to big legacy automakers as it does to startups.
The traditional car makers have had a hundred years to learn how to make profit by selling cars. What evidence is there that Tesla knows something they don't and has profit margins higher than they have??
Stock market is about expected future returns. Tesla probably won't ever be very good, but it has the chance to regulatory capture the entire US market in a way that Volkswagen doesn't. Tesla gets to market overpriced junkboxes to rich people in a way that Volkswagen doesn't. Tesla has a likelihood of acquiring lottery-ticket companies like xAI in a way that Volkswagen doesn't. This stuff doesn't happen when your company just focuses on making cars.
There is a reason in capitalism we have anti-monopoly law or preventing dumping prices because those often leads to monopoly. So yes for sure you can kill your competition by just dumping money and loosing profits.
That also assumes the monopolized market is profitable enough to pay for the dumping, but right now we are still questioning if LLMs have such high value on the market. Yeah its great for programming, but is the majority of the population benefitted enough to all start paying for access lke many investors expect? Someone might have looked at the low cost and massive lifting capacity of hydrogen balloons in the past and seen a lot of potential profit but if investors had dumped money to monopolize the hydrogen balloon market they would have lost their ass.
I ran into the same issue with my play group. I told them that I will only learn 3 new games a year.
Since I added the rule about a decade ago, we've never once hit the 3 game limit. Just having the rule made them rethink if it was worth learning a new game or playing one we had a lot fun with already.
I suspect we'll address this by just going back to older ranking algorithms for search. We'll go back to the primary signal of good content being links from trusted sources.
People gaming the content based algorithms will eventually cause their own downfall.
rel=nofollow is used to signal that links should not be used by search crawlers for authority calculations on most sites with user-submitted content, including Hacker News.
You basically have to use nofollow for comments otherwise your site becomes a big target for SEO link spam.
Crawlers would need to use backlinks but also rank vector similarity to ensure the linked content matches the linked intent. Some kind of rainbow shades of how relevent the link is to the linkee and reverse.
> Who is "we"? Definitely not Google or any other major tech company, they're all actively encouraging this.
Google has been fighting aggressively to replace its search results with snippets, now generated by LLMs, to avoid sending traffic to other websites. If they continue, they will basically lead Google Search to a tipping point where a good competitor can take this market by storm. Microsoft also believed Windows is indestructible and now they have a rude awakening.
The fact is what people really want from a search engine is a single perfect result that answers their query exactly. An LLM does the 'single result' bit, but it's dubious whether or not it's a perfect answer. Most of the time that's probably not very important so long as the answer satisfies the search enough that the user is happy.
Google is trying to turn Search into that product e.g. the single answer to a given search. They could do that now with Gemini, but the ads in the results are what makes them money, and the backlash to embedding adverts into the output of Gemini would drive millions of people to OpenAI overnight. They have to do it slowly. Give it 5 years though, and search engine results pages will be a thing of the past.
What I meant was that it'd a good answer but maybe not perfect. For example, if you ask for a coffee recommendation you might get something that's in your top 5, but not number 1. That's better than getting a page of links where the top 3 have paid to be there, the next 5 are SEO-farms, and then maybe there's a site about coffee that will answer your question.
I don't have a ton of hope just yet because I think it's still an incentives problem rather than a technical one.
I got tired of the increasing AI slop in my YouTube Music feed and switched to Deezer a few months ago. Since then, not a single AI artist I've been able to spot. If a relatively marginal player like that can manage it, why can't Spotify or YTM? My suspicion is simply that Deezer actually actually tries.
It's the same problem with Google and search. Kagi and others have demonstrated that you can produce better results with an infinitesimal fraction of the budget, and Google is still plenty competent where they care to be. This won't start to get fixed until they see a financial incentive to do so.
Spotify 100% rather buy/produce AI music than pay artists. Also they demonetized most of their artists so if they can pump AI songs that sound enough like what you listen to and then stop promoting them they don’t have to pay anyone.
That's likely a factor but Deezer reports that's it's 28% of their ingest as of last September. Being a smaller target doesn't account for all of it, or that openly AI "artists" are not being delisted from the larger platforms, nor are they providing ways to filter them out.
> As pointed out by another commenter the NBER has never failed to declare a recession after two consecutive quarters of GDP reduction.
That isn't 100% accurate. There is 1 example from 1947 where we had two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, but positive jobs, positive industrial production and positive consumer spending and NBER doesn't consider it a recession.
2001 was the opposite. It was called a recession without consecutive 2 quarters of negative GDP growth. [1]
In the USA, "officially" a group of 8 economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research decides when a recession starts. I suspect other countries have their own definitions.
"The NBER's definition emphasizes that a recession involves a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months. In our interpretation of this definition, we treat the three criteria—depth, diffusion, and duration—as somewhat interchangeable. That is, while each criterion needs to be met individually to some degree, extreme conditions revealed by one criterion may partially offset weaker indications from another. For example, in the case of the February 2020 peak in economic activity, the committee concluded that the subsequent drop in activity had been so great and so widely diffused throughout the economy that, even if it proved to be quite brief, the downturn should be classified as a recession." [1]
Planet Money (podcast on NPR) did an episode [2] a little while ago about it that I recommend listening to. They talk with one of the 8 economists. It was honestly refreshing hearing the economist talk about it, I got the impression that it was a more neutral take on the circumstances rather than pushing a narrative.
In other words, if it looks like a recession and quacks like a recession then it might be a recession.
And yes it much more complicated - especially it also depends on how much outside pressure NEBR has. I think there is a large pressure not to declare recession since we still have a high inflation and feds needs to continue raising rates.
the reason for the weirdness is that it doesn’t look like a recession in the labor market. Layoffs have been almost exclusively limited to tech, and within tech pre-profit or highly speculative (cryptoshovels) companies. This is important because in the US economic system labor power drives income drives inflation. (This isn’t true in all countries.)
When the employment outlook changes, and I expect it will, we will be in a traditional recession.
I was under impression that unemployment is a lagging indicator. The last thing employers want to do is let people go - they will try to cut here, cut there, stop hiring etc.
All I gather from their description is that they basically just get a "feel" for it. That's why so many people choose to follow the two negative quarter thing - it's objective and clearly defined, but maybe less accurate (particularly in cases like now where unemployment is still really low).
You're approaching it from the standpoint that it's an exact science, but it's more of a social science and you can't really pin down exact specifics, but only best guesses. Unfortunately (and I fell into this camp for a long time) many people see economics and see the mathematical models and assume that it must be scientific or precise, but the marketing campaign to legitimize economics unfortunately confused many of us into that misconception.
It's helpful to think of economics as a field under the branch of political science, which itself isn't very scientific.
I like to think of it as not really one or the other, but as both. It’s like a venn-diagram intersection of finance and sociology. Some elements of economics are purely quantifiable, and some elements are purely human.
Both of those are up to the consensus of the group of economists. They regularly talk about it with each other and compare with historical data mostly. Keep in mind economics is a social science, not exact science.
It would strike me more as "feeling it out", but they are not in a rush to announce it is or is not a recession until they have a better feel. Everyone seems to be rushing to call it a recession as early as possible. The economist I heard talking had a "wait and see" attitude on the podcast which was refreshing to hear.
I'd say listen to the economists that are actually apart of the group and form your own opinion. I didn't get that impression personally. Although I'm sure there is some impact.
Economics is a social science. It is probably the most data-driven of the set, but it is inescapably human, and therefore ultimately comes down to judgment.
"And it’s rare for there to be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP without a recession. In fact, George Washington University professor Tara Sinclair said the only time on record appears to have been 1947."
Great question! Not that I'm aware of (EDIT:
sseagull provided a good example in 1947). To be fair, I can't think of any time where we've seen 2 quarters of negative GDP growth while maintaining "full" employment and wage growth. This is an unusual recession if it is a recession.
This is a recession. During a recession, the economy tends to lose 10% of its employment or more. Usually this is from loss of jobs. This time, inflation has cut everyone's pay by between 10 and 30% depending on who you ask. The CPI says 10%, but a lot of necessities, like energy and food, are up a lot more.
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