Are we shocked, really? We have evidence from discovery of them actively making search results worse to pad query volume. Of course they’re using enabled-by-default, run-without-asking AI features to pad Gemini usage.
The Valley is tripping over themselves to convince the world fancy autocomplete is worth 800 billion.
The economic tension of these "run by default" AIs is quite hilarious once you see it.
On the one hand, the relevant KPIs of whoever is driving this product needs to be able to show AI usage is increasing, because AI usage is obviously the Platonic embodiment of goodness [1].
On the other hand, these things are expensive, so while it's mandatory that Google searches stuff these things in our faces, they are also horribly underprovisioned. If my only exposure to AI was the various search engine popups or the other free AIs, or even the bullet-point AIs that I'm nominally paying for but not really, like in Office, I would also have a pretty negative view of AI. I use DuckDuckGo more than Google but whatever model they may nominally be using to power their search result summarizer, it is de facto at least two years behind the state of the art in a very fast moving industry. It frequently gets things exactly backwards and is clearly leaning on its internal model a lot more than the links it has supposedly read, and clearly has a thinking budget of "indistinguishable from zero", and I don't know what kind of summarized web page content is being fed to it but it must be getting brutally dismembered in whatever summary is being fed to the AI.
The debate about how useful AI you pay for may rage on, but at least at this point in 2026, I'd say the AI you can get for free is every bad thing anyone says it is.
[1]: I believe there is a lot of useful things current AI can do, but there is no level of quality AI can ever reach in which AI usage for the sake of using AI will ever be a terminal good. Honestly any manager, whether they be a line manager or a CEO of a multinational company, that has ever pushed that in any capacity, should be fired for demonstrating gross incompetence for that position. It's "second or third week of Econ 101" or so that you learn about why it's never a good idea to just open the checkbook and spend an unbounded amount of money on something, and nothing you'll learn further down the line will ever contradict that.
> You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.
Well, firstly, newer cars are now equipped with tons of safety features like various kinds of auto-braking, various warning systems which monitor blind spots in the car, and driving aids like lane assist, lane monitoring, what have you. And then they also have advanced telemetry features that don’t keep them safe, but their insurance company hopes will identify them as bad drivers if and when they get into accidents so they can be denied coverage. These could be analogous depending how you look at it.
Additionally while there’s not much out there for tools, I think that’s less to do with it not being an issue and more to do with it being kind of impossible? That said a few tools have things like sensors that detect the presence of fingers near saw blades and will not only stop operating, they’ll usually destroy the tool in the process to ensure the operators safety, because fundamentally, more saws exist, more fingers do not.
Like despite loving track driving, I wouldn’t think that everyone tearing around in V8 monsters with stripped interiors and roll cages is a good idea.
Huh, I always forget about the newer safety features of cars because I generally see older cars around me and I used to drive cars where ABS, ESC and beeping where as far as it went for safety. And sure you could argue that telemetry used this way could be a path to price bad drivers out, if I understood your point correctly, yet while it would be effective when deployed to this goal I still instinctively regard telemetry as an invasion of privacy (in a space I assume by default to be private) but that's veering towards a different discussion.
Generally I have to admit that society is trending towards making things safe(er) by default but as always with every trend some attempts at following or complying are executed poorly (intentionally or unintentionally). Here's where I agree that while some safeties are universally good and people that disable them suffer from overconfidence I have seen some examples like experienced people removing the shields from brush cutters because they can get in the way and increase the risk of a tangle when cutting overgrowth (though you have to be mindful and careful to not fling small rocks around afterwards).
And yeah, I see your last point and generally agree but for fairness sake I would like to present the other extreme end where a person on a bicycle against a pedestrian is also dangerous albeit less so. That said I'm about to accidentally argue in favor of the "guns don't kill people..." rhetoric and I really don't want that so I will concede that for the time being it's better to (thoughtfully) design safe systems instead of relying solely on operator diligence.
Oh how I dislike that objectively I recognize the need for safety yet subjectively I disdain the fact that my tools try to nanny me and I can't reconcile these two views :/
> And sure you could argue that telemetry used this way could be a path to price bad drivers out, if I understood your point correctly, yet while it would be effective when deployed to this goal I still instinctively regard telemetry as an invasion of privacy (in a space I assume by default to be private) but that's veering towards a different discussion.
A discussion on which I think we'd absolutely agree. But yeah, it's a thing, whether we agree with it or not.
> Generally I have to admit that society is trending towards making things safe(er) by default but as always with every trend some attempts at following or complying are executed poorly (intentionally or unintentionally). Here's where I agree that while some safeties are universally good and people that disable them suffer from overconfidence I have seen some examples like experienced people removing the shields from brush cutters because they can get in the way and increase the risk of a tangle when cutting overgrowth (though you have to be mindful and careful to not fling small rocks around afterwards).
Oh 100%. I would argue most safety features, even when implemented well, will encumber those who were already skilled, which is why you rub against the ones in MacOS. It just... I don't think there's a way around that, you know? Think it's just an immovable law of the universe.
> Oh how I dislike that objectively I recognize the need for safety yet subjectively I disdain the fact that my tools try to nanny me and I can't reconcile these two views :/
I struggled with this for a long time too, but for me, it kinda resolves with the following reasoning:
On balance, safer... everything... makes for a better society, because it enables more average people to do more things, to go more places, to use more technology, to make their lives better. And the fact is, for more experienced people, we can get around this.
Like the security constraints in MacOS are a great example: they are fucking ANNOYING when you're configuring a new Mac, completely agreed, because every last thing requires so many steps. However how often do you really find yourself needing those options in daily driver use? I can count on a hand the number of times I needed system access the last couple of weeks (and usually it's just an app update where I have to give the app the go ahead by typing in my password). The last time I had to open security options and do that whole procedure... it would have to be weeks at minimum, perhaps even months.
I mean they might well prefer it, and a lot of other things, but the Republicans have done such an incredible job propagandizing everyone into "guvernment bad" thinking that they refuse to pay for it, because (mostly) Republicans have spent decades running on a platform of how the Government sucks and can't do anything, to get elected, and then set about making their Government suck and not be able to do anything. Then they go home and tell their dumbass constituents about how nothing in the Government works, and they're so propagandized against any reasonable sources of information they believe them, and vote for them, and rinse and repeat.
They've been doing this for like 70 years at this point and it's frankly a testament to how strong our institutions were that they're still kind of functioning, in the same way a 1999 Corolla you haven't gotten an oil change on since the Clinton admin is still kind of functioning.
And no I'm not going to do the song and dance for both sides. Yes, plenty of Democrats suck and I would love to see them ousted, but by and large the party consistently in power when the U.S. is in decline of it's own making is the Right. Something something facts don't care about your feelings.
Not only are we not drowning in it, virtually all crime is at historic lows. The world has never been safer, the problem is every bad thing now is reported on every major news feed and shot across every social media algorithm. People have paradoxically never been safer, and never been more terrified.
And none of this is helped at all by greaseball politicians who use fear of the Other to line their pockets and increase their power.
It's wild that the OLED Deck is now the same price as the Ally X I bought to replace my own deck about 18 months ago.
Still incredibly worth it, IMO. The Deck is some of the most fabulous and exciting hardware I've seen out in the last decade, perhaps only trumped by the M-series Apple chips.
My steamdeck broke about 15 years of strict PC Gaming habits for me. Games like Balatro and Megabonk have broken my previous definition of "fun" in a fantastic way.
For people who have a steam library, it's an incredible value for money. When I bought mine, I basically not only had a mobile gaming option, but a nice one, and one that already had access to 70% of my substantial Steam Library, with many developers promising Deck-optimized settings and such.
It's genuinely great hardware and a great experience. So much so (and because Windows is such a shitpile) I actually moved my Ally to SteamOS too. No regrets.
I have to disagree. The low resolution of the screen is my biggest issue. Many UI elements and such are just genuinely difficult to read. Modern games are designed for 1080p or more. Rendering them at 800p gives quite poor results. I mostly use my Deck hooked up to the TV now.
Everybody's going to have their own experience, but I haven't found this to be true at all. I've played a lot of games on my Deck and only really had UI visibility issues with a handful of them. For the rest, it didn't even cross my mind.
I think a big part of this is that many (most?) modern games are designed to be played on big screens at a distance (e.g. TV <-> couch). The apparent size of the display in that scenario isn't much different from a Steam Deck held naturally.
I just wish the Deck had VRR. That and the general lack of power are my only real issues with it, and the power isn't that big a deal given the massive back catalog it supports.
The comment i see the most on reddit is the refresh rate and the battery life are the deal breaker with the price. Very interested to see the pricing on the steam machine. i was looking forward to it, but looks like it could be over $1000 if they adjust pricing up 40%. but again, id imagine it sells out fast.
It has quirks but IMO, worth it for the more performant hardware. With SteamOS/proton I can run incredibly taxing games like RoadCraft and Fallout 4 VERY well, including at the full 120hz. The battery is also quite a bit chunkier which means I can get more in a session. Only drawback: the Ally definitely has more heft.
> Almost every company is run in a basic dictatorial way. We almost never discuss it, when there is a wide corpus of political Science analysing the pros and cons of governance models that certainly puts it at the bottom.
Is it not wild that in the Freedom Loving West, we all spend the vast majority of our time as adults living inside tiny totalitarian states?
I think this persists largely because the people atop those tiny states are also the ones behind most of our media apparatus, so they can make it look and feel pretty normal. But that may be a little tinfoil hat of me.
FWIW I don't think it's tinfoil hat at all but when you say things like that on here you get a lot of late-stage-McCarthyists screaming about you being a Communist.
I accomplish the same thing by saying "fuck" a lot. :D
Edit: Who downed this!? Good god some of y'all need to touch some grass and live a little, none of us are getting out of here alive, relax for goodness sakes lol
Weirdly, and MAYBE tangentially related to AI, me too.
I've been driving my friends nuts cuz we're all neurodivergent little goblin people and now I just call them. And they aren't actually mad they're just like "what's wrong with you" and it's just like, look, sometimes I just need a fuckin answer to a fuckin question, and faster is better. And phone calls are instant.
I think they're coming around now cuz two of em do it to me.
I put spam robocallers / scammers on the phone with voice AI all the time, after navigating their IVR and intentionally requesting to speak to a human scam-agent. This in no way deters them calling.
if you receive an AI call, grab a pen and click it just before every word, be sure to delay cadence between words, to give the impression a mouse is being moved toward the next word to "click" on.
The anti-Apple crowd on here loves to crow about how Apple only wins on marketing. Look I find the ads cringe as fuck too, but let's not pretend that the hardware isn't much, much better than average.
Better than all? No certainly not, Apple's build quality loses out to plenty of much more premium products. But it generally sits head and shoulders above the average build quality of any given product category, which seems to be the niche they most aim for: "the upmarket version of the common offering." That ones that immediately come to mind are Macbooks and iPads.
A simply WILD statement given the rates of children raised in poverty with all the trauma and issues that gives, who then oftentimes grow up to be their parents doing the exact same thing.
> People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.
Previous generations didn't have to, ours does. So if people don't want to make that compromise, they won't.
Maybe if we made it systemically a bit less awful to be parents more people would do it.
we are talking about germany here. no child in germany needs to grow up in poverty even if both parents are unemployed and are living on social welfare.
Poverty exists everywhere and Germany is no exception. Looking into it, the average welfare recipient is going to get ballpark 80% of what someone earning minimum wage does. Granted their lives are more stable, at least from an outside view given that the government programs directly cover rent and utilities. That said those numbers only really work for people in practice by way of budget conscious spending, i.e. grocery store brand foods and really no luxuries to speak of. By any definition, that's still poverty and is still subject to the stressors that implies. Making it so people don't end up homeless is certainly a good thing, and I'll definitely give them props for it, but like, if you were a poor kid growing up, you still knew that. Your clothes were never new for the school year, you don't get nearly as many fun foods or treats, your toys aren't as nice, all the rest. All the little psychological dings that add up to adults with issues around money management and delayed gratification. And that's assuming the parent is devoted and caring, if that's not the case, you can have ALL KINDS OF BAD in this system too.
Like, again, still beats the shit out of America's system, but it's far from perfect too.
if you were a poor kid growing up, you still knew that
i have been there, and i disagree. it's of course about attitude. and yes, sure we didn't get expensive clothes, but that wasn't an issue not in the school i went to. things might have changed, but i am sorry, it's not the problem of a welfare system to account for materialism. i was a boy scout and i got all my clothes from army surplus stores because that's what we were into. not the army style, but the sturdy hiking stuff. i was able to save up for an expensive leather school bag, not the cheap stuff everyone else in school had. i could do that because we were thrifty and didn't waste money on other unneeded luxuries. fun foods, treats? why? i am a lot healthier now because we didn't get that, and, most importantly, there was never any desire for that either. so no stress at all. as a child i never once felt that we didn't have enough money. i was proud of the way we lived.
i raise my kids the same way now. money is not the issue here. our toys were almost exclusively lego. lego is expensive, but only if it is new and if you insist on expensive presents every year. it also lasts a lifetime. you don't need to spend a lot every year to have enough to play with. and nowadays there are alternative brands that are a lot cheaper and just as good. oh, we also had comic books. lots of them. we bought and traded them on flea markets. why would they have to be new, when you could get them used at a fraction of the cost?
that's assuming the parent is devoted and caring
in your scenario the parents already failed. again, it is not the job of the welfare system to account for bad spending habits. but i get it. that argument is not new. i heard it already when i was young. and i just didn't get it. i was able to afford everything that i wanted, and i never felt i was missing anything just because our money was limited. i didn't feel that the money was limited. i didn't know that i was poor. my classmates in school didn't know that i was poor. i didn't notice that some other kids in my class were rich either. even those who actually were. at worst i saw some kids spending money on things that i would never waste my money on, but i didn't envy them. i was able to participate in every scout camp and trip that our group was doing. i was a member of a sailing club and made my sailing license. i was able to travel to various countries in europe and even to america. by the time i finished school i had done more traveling than any of my peers.
sure, i had financial support for that airplane flight, but that's the point. these things are available to everyone, regardless of income. anyone who doesn't take advantage of what is offered is either blind, ignorant or stupid.
to summarize: money is not the issue. what matters is a society where people care for each other and make efforts to ensure that everyone is included, regardless of their income. the problem is, that people don't see that. they argue that the money is not enough, when in reality the problem is lack of education (how to spend your money wisely), the wrong values, false pride that prevents people from accepting help, envy, selfishness, i don't know...
People still think these things are smart. That if their word generator eats enough of the Internet, it will somehow give them the real information that's otherwise hidden. Or perhaps a better word; filter the bullshit.
To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it.
This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle.
For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once.
I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting.
I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident.
And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text.
Something I’ve also seen multiple times is an LLM giving wrong information, I tell it it’s not right, then it tells me I’m “absolutely right” and it provides the exact same answer and tells me that one will work.
I was just reading another post yesterday and your comment reminds me of this one [0], same sort of format and experience of the submitted article of the HN post that comment is on.
The Valley is tripping over themselves to convince the world fancy autocomplete is worth 800 billion.
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