By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story. (and another user here kindly did that for us below: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223... ) It seems such a simple step (they must have been using the rul…
Never link outside your domain has been rule #1 of the ad-driven business for years now. Once users leave your page, they become exponentially less likely to load more ad-ridden pages from your website. Ironically this is also why there is so much existential fear about AI in the media. LLMs will do to them what they do to primary sources (and more likely just cut them out of the loop). This Google story will get a l…
Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
441–450 of 663 posts
Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it’s a legitimate concern. Google is bleeding so hard right now from Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha deciding to use ChatGPT first and foremost when asking questions that Google would’ve answered previously. Whether or not that means they should keep Chrome as a product is up for debate.
>Google is bleeding so hard right now from Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha deciding to use ChatGPT Is this an evidence based claim? From the Q2 2025 numbers Google saw double digit revenue growth YoY for search. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/23/google-expec...
Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#443Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#444By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story. (and another user here kindly did that for us below: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223... ) It seems such a simple step (they must have been using the rul…
Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels like judge was looking for any excuse not to apply harsh penalty and since Google brought up AI as competitor, the judge accepted it as acceptable excuse for very minor penalty.
AI is a competitor. You know how StackOverflow is dead because AI provided an alternative? That's happening in search too. You might think "but ChatGPT isn't a search engine", and that's true. It can't handle all queries you might use a search engine for, e.g. if you want to find a particular website. But there are many many queries that it can handle. Here's just a few from my recent history: * How do I load a share…
Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback and then doubled down by going after respected, unpaid contributors like Monica.
Would they have survived AI? Hard to say. But the truth is, they were already busy burning down their own community long before AI showed up.
When AI arrived I'd already been waiting for years for an alternative that didn’t aggressively shut down real-world questions (sometimes with hundreds of upvotes) just because they didn’t fit some rigid format.
Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#446This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me. An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The b…
This is perhaps a tad ahistorical. Google forked Blink off from WebKit around 2013 - it owes a lot of it's early success to the same technical foundations as Safari (which in turns owes the same debt to Konqueror...)
Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI is a competitor. You know how StackOverflow is dead because AI provided an alternative? That's happening in search too. You might think "but ChatGPT isn't a search engine", and that's true. It can't handle all queries you might use a search engine for, e.g. if you want to find a particular website. But there are many many queries that it can handle. Here's just a few from my recent history: * How do I load a share…
I don't agree that ChatGPT gives an overall better experience than Google, let alone an actual good search engine like Kagi. It's very rare that I need to ask something in plain English because I just don't know what the keywords are, so the one edge the LLM might have is moot. Meanwhile, because it bullshits a lot (not just sometimes, a lot), I can't trust anything it tells me. At least with a search engine I can fi…
Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#448This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me. An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The b…
> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a di…
Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is StackOverflow dead now? And because of AI? It still usually has the standard quality of answers for most questions I google. I google fewer questions because modern languages have better documentation cultures.
All my stackoverflow-style queries are now going to whatever AI chatbot is most accessible when I need my answer. They tend to provide answers that are at least as correct as StackOverflow (i.e. not perfect but good enough to be useful in most cases), generally more specific (the first/only answer is the one I want, I don't have to find the right one first), and the examples are tailored to my use case to the point w…
Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But it is easy to see a near future where an AI agent just retrieves and summarizes the case for you. And does a much better job too. I am significantly less confident that an LLM is going to be any good at putting a raw source like a court ruling PDF into context and adequately explain to readers why - and what details - of the decision matter, and what impact they will have. They can probably do an OK job summari…
Llms are already incredibly able to be great at contextualizing and explaining things. HNs is so allergic to AI, it's incredible. And leaving you behind
* Strayed from reality
* Strayed from the document and is freely admixing with other information from its training data without saying so. Done properly, this is a powerful tool for synthesis, and LLMs theoretically are great at it, but done improperly it just muddles things
* Has some kind of bias baked in-ironic mdash-"in summary, this ruling is an example of judicial overreach by activist judges against a tech company which should morally be allowed to do what they want". Not such a problem now, but I think we may see more of this once AI is firmly embedded into every information flow. Currently the AI company game is training people to trust the machine. Once they do, what a resource those people become!
Now, none of those points are unique to LLMs: inaccuracy, misunderstanding, wrong or confused synthesis and especially bias are all common in human journalism. Gell-Mann amnesia and institutional bias and all that.
Perhaps the problem is that I'm not sufficiently mistrustful of the status quo, even though I am already quite suspicious of journalistic analysis. Or maybe it's because AI, though my brain screams "don't trust it, check everything, find the source", remains in the toolbox even when I find problems, whereas for a journalist I'd roll my eyes, call them a hack and leave the website.
Not that it's directly relevant to the immediate utility of AI today, but once AI is everything, or almost everything, then my next worry is what happens when you functionally only have published primary material and AI output to train on. Even without model collapse, what happens when AI journobots inherently don't "pick up the phone", so to speak, to dig up details? For the first year, the media runs almost for free. For the second year, there's no higher level synthesis for the past year to lean on and it all regresses to summarising press releases. Again, there are already many human publications that just repackage PRs, but when that's all there is? This problem isn't limited to journalism, but it's a good example.