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From The Stanford Review editor-in-chief Julia Steinberg’s interview with university president Jonathan Levin:

Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?

President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.

Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.

(Via CJ Ciaramella on Bluesky.)

 ★ 

From The Stanford Review editor-in-chief Julia Steinberg’s interview with university president Jonathan Levin:

Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?

President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.

Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.

(Via CJ Ciaramella on Bluesky.)

Read More 

Alex Heath, writing at The Verge:

“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of
Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times
DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy
around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m going
to help him.”

Trump railed against Bezos and his companies — Amazon, Blue
Origin, and The Washington Post — during his 2016 term. Bezos
defended himself but it did little to help his reputation with
Trump. Now, his companies have a lot at stake in the coming
administration, from the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon to
Blue Origin’s efforts to compete with SpaceX for government
contracts.

Onstage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Bezos called Trump
“calmer this time” and “more settled.” He said he will try to
“talk him out of” the idea that the press, which includes The
Washington Post, is an enemy of the people.

“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he said to
DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “He has, too.”

Next up after Bezos at DealBook Summit was Charlie Brown, who professed optimism regarding his next attempt at kicking a football held by Lucy Van Pelt. What the fuck did they put in the water at this conference?

Or, perhaps, these very smart guys are also craven, and these nonsensical remarks, which are quite obviously contrary to reality, are simply additional exhibits of shameful cowardly compliance.

 ★ 

Alex Heath, writing at The Verge:

“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of
Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times
DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy
around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m going
to help him.”

Trump railed against Bezos and his companies — Amazon, Blue
Origin, and The Washington Post — during his 2016 term. Bezos
defended himself but it did little to help his reputation with
Trump. Now, his companies have a lot at stake in the coming
administration, from the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon to
Blue Origin’s efforts to compete with SpaceX for government
contracts.

Onstage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Bezos called Trump
“calmer this time” and “more settled.” He said he will try to
“talk him out of” the idea that the press, which includes The
Washington Post, is an enemy of the people.

“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he said to
DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “He has, too.”

Next up after Bezos at DealBook Summit was Charlie Brown, who professed optimism regarding his next attempt at kicking a football held by Lucy Van Pelt. What the fuck did they put in the water at this conference?

Or, perhaps, these very smart guys are also craven, and these nonsensical remarks, which are quite obviously contrary to reality, are simply additional exhibits of shameful cowardly compliance.

Read More 

While writing the previous item regarding the FBI encouraging the use of E2EE text and call protocols, I wound up at the Play Store page for Google Messages. It’s shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages’s support for end-to-end encryption. As I wrote in the previous post, Google Messages does support E2EE, but only over RCS and only if all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But the second screenshot in the Play Store listing flatly declares “Conversations are end-to-end encrypted”, full stop. That is some serious bullshit.

I realize that “Some conversations are end-to-end encrypted” will naturally spur curiosity regarding which conversations are encrypted and which aren’t, but that’s the truth. And users of the app should be aware of that. “RCS conversations with other Google Messages users are encrypted” would work.

Then, in the “report card” section of the listing, it states the following:

Data is encrypted in transit
Your data is transferred over a secure connection

Which, again, is only true sometimes. It’s downright fraudulent to describe Google Messages’s transit security this way. Imagine a typical Android user without technical expertise who takes the advice (now coming from the FBI) to use end-to-end encryption for their messaging. A reasonable person who trusts Google would look at Google’s own description of Google Messages and conclude that if you use Google Messages, all your messages will be secure. That’s false. And depending who you communicate with — iPhone users, Android users with old devices, Android users who use other text messaging apps — it’s quite likely most of your messages won’t be secure.

Just be honest! The E2EE between Google Messages users using Android phones that support RCS is completely seamless and automatic (I just tried it myself using my Android burner), but E2EE is never available for SMS, and never available if a participant in the chat is using any RCS client (on Android or Apple Messages) other than Google Messages. That’s an essential distinction that should be made clear, not obfuscated.

While I’m at it, it’s also embarrassing that Google Voice has no support for RCS at all. It’s Google’s own app and service, and Google has been the world’s most vocal proponent of RCS messaging.

Lastly, I also think it’s a bad idea that Google Messages colors all RCS message bubbles with the exact same colors (dark blue bubbles with white text, natch). SMS messages, at least on my Pixel 4, are pale blue with black text. Google Messages does put a tiny lock in the timeline to indicate when an RCS chat is secure, and they also put a lock badge on the Send button’s paper airplane icon, so there are visual indications whether an RCS chat is encrypted, but because the messages bubble colors are the same for all RCS chats, it’s subtle, not instantly obvious like it is with Apple Messages, where green means “SMS or RCS, never encrypted” and blue means “iMessage, always encrypted”.

 ★ 

While writing the previous item regarding the FBI encouraging the use of E2EE text and call protocols, I wound up at the Play Store page for Google Messages. It’s shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages’s support for end-to-end encryption. As I wrote in the previous post, Google Messages does support E2EE, but only over RCS and only if all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But the second screenshot in the Play Store listing flatly declares “Conversations are end-to-end encrypted”, full stop. That is some serious bullshit.

I realize that “Some conversations are end-to-end encrypted” will naturally spur curiosity regarding which conversations are encrypted and which aren’t, but that’s the truth. And users of the app should be aware of that. “RCS conversations with other Google Messages users are encrypted” would work.

Then, in the “report card” section of the listing, it states the following:

Data is encrypted in transit
Your data is transferred over a secure connection

Which, again, is only true sometimes. It’s downright fraudulent to describe Google Messages’s transit security this way. Imagine a typical Android user without technical expertise who takes the advice (now coming from the FBI) to use end-to-end encryption for their messaging. A reasonable person who trusts Google would look at Google’s own description of Google Messages and conclude that if you use Google Messages, all your messages will be secure. That’s false. And depending who you communicate with — iPhone users, Android users with old devices, Android users who use other text messaging apps — it’s quite likely most of your messages won’t be secure.

Just be honest! The E2EE between Google Messages users using Android phones that support RCS is completely seamless and automatic (I just tried it myself using my Android burner), but E2EE is never available for SMS, and never available if a participant in the chat is using any RCS client (on Android or Apple Messages) other than Google Messages. That’s an essential distinction that should be made clear, not obfuscated.

While I’m at it, it’s also embarrassing that Google Voice has no support for RCS at all. It’s Google’s own app and service, and Google has been the world’s most vocal proponent of RCS messaging.

Lastly, I also think it’s a bad idea that Google Messages colors all RCS message bubbles with the exact same colors (dark blue bubbles with white text, natch). SMS messages, at least on my Pixel 4, are pale blue with black text. Google Messages does put a tiny lock in the timeline to indicate when an RCS chat is secure, and they also put a lock badge on the Send button’s paper airplane icon, so there are visual indications whether an RCS chat is encrypted, but because the messages bubble colors are the same for all RCS chats, it’s subtle, not instantly obvious like it is with Apple Messages, where green means “SMS or RCS, never encrypted” and blue means “iMessage, always encrypted”.

Read More 

Kevin Collier, reporting for NBC News:

Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies
such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that
Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their
communications stay hidden from foreign hackers.

The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one
of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it
has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call
Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s
telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told
NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to
spy on customers.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.

Don’t hold your breath.

In the call Tuesday, two officials — a senior FBI official who
asked not to be named and Jeff Greene, executive assistant
director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency — both recommended using encrypted messaging apps
to Americans who want to minimize the chances of China’s
intercepting their communications.

“Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new
here: Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or
if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication.
Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is
encrypted, it will make it impossible,” Greene said.

It seems kind of new for the FBI to call encryption “our friend”, but now that I think about it, their beef over the years has primarily been about gaining access to locked devices, not eavesdropping on communication protocols. Their advocacy stance on device encryption has not changed — they still want a “back door for good guys” there. Their thinking, I think, is that E2EE communications are a good thing because they protect against remote eavesdropping from foreign adversaries — exactly like this campaign waged by China. The FBI doesn’t need to intercept communications over the wire. When the FBI wants to see someone’s communications, they get a warrant to seize their devices. That’s why the FBI wants device back doors, but are now encouraging the use of protocols that are truly E2EE. But that’s not to say that law enforcement agencies worldwide don’t still fantasize about mandatory “back doors for good guys”.

Here’s a clunker of a paragraph from this NBC News story, though:

Privacy advocates have long advocated using end-to-end encrypted
apps. Signal and WhatsApp automatically implement end-to-end
encryption in both calls and messages. Google Messages and
iMessage also can encrypt calls and texts end to end.

It’s true that both voice and text communications over Signal and WhatsApp are always secured with end-to-end encryption. But Google Messages is an Android app that only handles text messaging via SMS and RCS, not voice. There’s a “Call” button in Google Messages but that just dials the contact using the Phone app — just a plain old-fashioned unencrypted phone call. (There’s a Video Call button in Google Messages, but that button tries to launch Google Meet.) Some text chats in Google Messages are encrypted, but only those using RCS in which all participants are using a recent version of Google Messages. Google Messages does provide visual indicators of the encryption status of a chat. The RCS standard has no encryption; E2EE RCS chats in Google Messages use Google’s proprietary extension and are exclusive to the Google Messages app, so RCS chats between Google Messages and other apps, most conspicuously Apple Messages, are not encrypted.

iMessage is not an app. It is Apple’s proprietary protocol, available within its Messages app. The entire iMessage protocol was built upon end-to-end encryption — all iMessage messages have been E2EE from the start. Apple also offers FaceTime for voice and video calls, and FaceTime calls are always secured by E2EE.

 ★ 

Kevin Collier, reporting for NBC News:

Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies
such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that
Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their
communications stay hidden from foreign hackers.

The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one
of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it
has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call
Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s
telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told
NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to
spy on customers.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.

Don’t hold your breath.

In the call Tuesday, two officials — a senior FBI official who
asked not to be named and Jeff Greene, executive assistant
director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency — both recommended using encrypted messaging apps
to Americans who want to minimize the chances of China’s
intercepting their communications.

“Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new
here: Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or
if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication.
Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is
encrypted, it will make it impossible,” Greene said.

It seems kind of new for the FBI to call encryption “our friend”, but now that I think about it, their beef over the years has primarily been about gaining access to locked devices, not eavesdropping on communication protocols. Their advocacy stance on device encryption has not changed — they still want a “back door for good guys” there. Their thinking, I think, is that E2EE communications are a good thing because they protect against remote eavesdropping from foreign adversaries — exactly like this campaign waged by China. The FBI doesn’t need to intercept communications over the wire. When the FBI wants to see someone’s communications, they get a warrant to seize their devices. That’s why the FBI wants device back doors, but are now encouraging the use of protocols that are truly E2EE. But that’s not to say that law enforcement agencies worldwide don’t still fantasize about mandatory “back doors for good guys”.

Here’s a clunker of a paragraph from this NBC News story, though:

Privacy advocates have long advocated using end-to-end encrypted
apps. Signal and WhatsApp automatically implement end-to-end
encryption in both calls and messages. Google Messages and
iMessage also can encrypt calls and texts end to end.

It’s true that both voice and text communications over Signal and WhatsApp are always secured with end-to-end encryption. But Google Messages is an Android app that only handles text messaging via SMS and RCS, not voice. There’s a “Call” button in Google Messages but that just dials the contact using the Phone app — just a plain old-fashioned unencrypted phone call. (There’s a Video Call button in Google Messages, but that button tries to launch Google Meet.) Some text chats in Google Messages are encrypted, but only those using RCS in which all participants are using a recent version of Google Messages. Google Messages does provide visual indicators of the encryption status of a chat. The RCS standard has no encryption; E2EE RCS chats in Google Messages use Google’s proprietary extension and are exclusive to the Google Messages app, so RCS chats between Google Messages and other apps, most conspicuously Apple Messages, are not encrypted.

iMessage is not an app. It is Apple’s proprietary protocol, available within its Messages app. The entire iMessage protocol was built upon end-to-end encryption — all iMessage messages have been E2EE from the start. Apple also offers FaceTime for voice and video calls, and FaceTime calls are always secured by E2EE.

Read More 

A few nuggets of wisdom from Andy Grove, in an interview with Esquire after he retired as Intel’s CEO, but still served as chairman:

Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell
you different.

You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them.
You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake
again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and
the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar
mistake.

Status is a very dangerous thing. I’ve met too many people who
make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash
machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address,
because that’s for everybody else but not them. It’s hard to fight
the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.

Grove, still serving as CEO during Intel’s zenith in 1997, didn’t even have an office. He worked out of an 8×9-foot cubicle.

What you’re seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an
industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew
up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that
many of us have spent in business before this time are of only
limited relevance.

This industry is not like any other. Computers don’t get incrementally more powerful; they get exponentially more powerful.

 ★ 

A few nuggets of wisdom from Andy Grove, in an interview with Esquire after he retired as Intel’s CEO, but still served as chairman:

Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell
you different.

You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them.
You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake
again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and
the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar
mistake.

Status is a very dangerous thing. I’ve met too many people who
make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash
machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address,
because that’s for everybody else but not them. It’s hard to fight
the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.

Grove, still serving as CEO during Intel’s zenith in 1997, didn’t even have an office. He worked out of an 8×9-foot cubicle.

What you’re seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an
industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew
up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that
many of us have spent in business before this time are of only
limited relevance.

This industry is not like any other. Computers don’t get incrementally more powerful; they get exponentially more powerful.

Read More 

Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem for what happed to Intel over the last 20 years.

The Verge’s Sean Hollister penned an excellent high-level summary of Pat Gelsinger’s ignominious ouster from Intel, under the headline “What Happened to Intel?” A wee bit of pussyfooting here, though, caught my eye:

Just how bad was it before Gelsinger took the top job?

Not great! There were bad bets, multiple generations of delayed
chips, quality assurance issues, and then Apple decided to abandon
Intel in favor of its homegrown Arm-based chips — which turned
out to be good, seriously showing up Intel in the laptop
performance and battery life realms. We wrote all about it in
“The summer Intel fell behind.”

Intel had earlier misses, too: the company long regretted its
decision not to put Intel inside the iPhone, and it failed
to execute on phone chips for Android handsets as well. It
arguably missed the boat on the entire mobile revolution.

There’s no argument about it. Intel completely missed mobile. iPhones never used Intel chips and Apple Silicon chips are all fabbed by TSMC. Apple’s chips are the best in the industry, also without argument, and the only mobile chips that can be seen as reasonable competition are from Qualcomm (and maybe Samsung). Intel has never been a player in that game, and it’s a game Intel needed not only to be a player in, but to dominate.

It’s not just that smartphones are now a bigger industry than the PC industry ever was, and that Intel has missed out on becoming a dominant supplier to phone makers. That’s bad, but it’s not the worst of it. It’s that those ARM-based mobile chips — Apple Silicon and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon lineup — got so good that they’re now taking over large swaths of the high end of the PC market. Partly from an obsessive focus on performance-per-watt efficiency, partly from the inherent advantages of ARM’s architecture, partly from engineering talent and strategy, and partly from the profound benefits of economies of scale as the mobile market exploded. Apple, as we all know, moved the entire Mac platform from Intel chips to Apple Silicon starting in 2020. The Mac “only” has 15 percent of the worldwide PC market, but the entirety of the Mac’s market share is at the premium end of the market. Losing the Mac was a huge loss for Intel. And now Qualcomm and Microsoft are pushing Windows laptops to ARM chips too, for the same reasons: not just performance-per-watt, but sheer performance. x86 CPUs are still dominant on gaming PCs, but even there, AMD is considered the cream of the crop.

Of all companies, Intel should have seen the potential for this to happen. Intel did not take “phone chips” seriously, but within a decade, those ostensibly toy “phone chips” were the best CPUs in the world for premium PC laptops, and their efficiency advantages make them advantageous in data centers too. And Apple has shown that they’re even superior for workstation-class desktops. That’s exactly how Intel became Intel back at the outset of the personal computing revolution. PCs were seen as mere toys by the “real” computer makers of the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM was caught so flatfooted that when they saw the need to enter the PC market, they went to Intel for the chips and Microsoft for DOS — decisions that both Intel and Microsoft capitalized upon, resulting in a tag-team hardware/software dominance of the entire computing industry that lasted a full quarter century, while IBM was left sidelined as just another maker of PCs. From Intel’s perspective, the x86 platform went from being a “toy” to being the dominant architecture for everything from cheap laptops all the way up to data-center-class servers.

ARM-based “phone chips” did the same thing to x86 that Intel’s x86 “PC chips” had done, decades earlier, to mainframes. Likewise, Nvidia turned “graphics cards for video game enthusiasts” — also once considered mere toys — into what is now, depending on stock market fluctuations, the most valuable company in the world. They’re neck and neck with the other company that pantsed Intel for silicon design leadership: Apple. Creating “the world’s best chips” remains an incredible, almost unfathomably profitable place to be as a business. Apple and Nvidia can both say that about the very different segments of the market in which their chips dominate. Intel can’t say that today about any of the segments for which it produces chips. TSMC, the company that fabs all chips for Apple Silicon and most of Nvidia’s leading chips, is 9th on the list of companies ranked by market cap, with a spot in the top 10 that Intel used to occupy. Today, Intel is 180th — and on a trajectory to fall out of the top 200.

Intel never should have been blithe to the threat. The company’s longtime CEO and chairman (and employee #3) Andy Grove titled his autobiography Only the Paranoid Survive. The full passage from which he drew the title:

Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the
paranoid survive.

Grove retired as CEO in 1998 and as chairman in 2005. It’s as though no one at Intel after him listened to a word he said. Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem synopsis for Intel’s own precipitous decline over the last 20 years.

Read More 

Nilay Patel:

So many of you like The Verge that we’ve actually gotten a
shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to
support our work. It’s no secret that lots of great websites and
publications have gone under over the past few years as the open
web falls apart, and it’s clear that directly supporting the
creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay
working on the modern internet.

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind
paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also
think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in.
So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage,
core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts,
Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free. We know so many of
you depend on us to curate the news every day, and we’re going to
stay focused on making a great homepage that’s worth checking out
regularly, whether you pay us or not.

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a
dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall,
but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.

This sounds like an extremely well-considered balance between keeping much of the site open to all, allowing metered access to a limited number of premium articles free of charge, and creating a new sustainable revenue stream from subscribers. Bravo.

Count me in as a day one subscriber.

 ★ 

Nilay Patel:

So many of you like The Verge that we’ve actually gotten a
shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to
support our work. It’s no secret that lots of great websites and
publications have gone under over the past few years as the open
web falls apart, and it’s clear that directly supporting the
creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay
working on the modern internet.

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind
paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also
think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in.
So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage,
core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts,
Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free. We know so many of
you depend on us to curate the news every day, and we’re going to
stay focused on making a great homepage that’s worth checking out
regularly, whether you pay us or not.

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a
dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall,
but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.

This sounds like an extremely well-considered balance between keeping much of the site open to all, allowing metered access to a limited number of premium articles free of charge, and creating a new sustainable revenue stream from subscribers. Bravo.

Count me in as a day one subscriber.

Read More 

Christopher Mims, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

The company’s core business is under siege. People are
increasingly getting answers from artificial
intelligence. Younger generations are using other
platforms to gather information. And the quality of the
results delivered by its search engine is deteriorating as the web
is flooded with AI-generated content. Taken together,
these forces could lead to long-term decline in Google search
traffic, and the outsize profits generated from it, which prop up
its parent company Alphabet’s money-losing bets on things like its
Waymo self-driving unit.

The first danger facing Google is clear and present: When people
want to search for information or go shopping on the internet,
they are shifting to Google’s competitors, and advertising dollars
are following them. In 2025, eMarketer projects, Google’s share of
the U.S. search-advertising market will fall below 50% for the
first time since the company began tracking it.

The accompanying chart (“Estimated share of U.S. search advertising revenue”) suggests Google’s decline has been Amazon’s gain. Basically, Google may still dominate the market for general web search, but people more and more are searching using apps and services that aren’t (or aren’t only) general web search engines. And the reason why is that Google web search has gotten worse.

 ★ 

Christopher Mims, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

The company’s core business is under siege. People are
increasingly getting answers from artificial
intelligence. Younger generations are using other
platforms to gather information. And the quality of the
results delivered by its search engine is deteriorating as the web
is flooded with AI-generated content. Taken together,
these forces could lead to long-term decline in Google search
traffic, and the outsize profits generated from it, which prop up
its parent company Alphabet’s money-losing bets on things like its
Waymo self-driving unit.

The first danger facing Google is clear and present: When people
want to search for information or go shopping on the internet,
they are shifting to Google’s competitors, and advertising dollars
are following them. In 2025, eMarketer projects, Google’s share of
the U.S. search-advertising market will fall below 50% for the
first time since the company began tracking it.

The accompanying chart (“Estimated share of U.S. search advertising revenue”) suggests Google’s decline has been Amazon’s gain. Basically, Google may still dominate the market for general web search, but people more and more are searching using apps and services that aren’t (or aren’t only) general web search engines. And the reason why is that Google web search has gotten worse.

Read More 

Special guest Allen Pike joins the show to talk about the state of generative AI and how Apple Intelligence measures up (so far). Also: some speculation on Apple’s pending acquisition of the ever-difficult-to-pronounce Pixelmator.

Sponsored by:

WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users.

 ★ 

Special guest Allen Pike joins the show to talk about the state of generative AI and how Apple Intelligence measures up (so far). Also: some speculation on Apple’s pending acquisition of the ever-difficult-to-pronounce Pixelmator.

Sponsored by:

WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users.

Read More 

Amazon is running a holiday discount on M3 MacBook Airs, but it’s tricky — you need to click around through various color choices and watch the prices and ship dates. My main link on this post goes to the config that looks like their best deal for price-conscious gift buyers: the 13-inch M3 MacBook Air in space gray, with 24 GB RAM and 512 GB of storage for $1,299, a $200 discount from the list price, with delivery in a few days. They’ve also got the same configuration, at the same price, with the same delivery window in silver. Starlight only has “5 remaining in stock” (and that was at 8 just a few minutes ago, so they’ll likely be gone by the time you read this), and midnight is already out of stock.

The 13-inch configuration with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage is just $1,099, but delivery dates are in early January. They’ve got the configuration with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB storage for just $899, but only in midnight and starlight, and with delivery windows of “1 to 2 months”.

The best option for 15-inch M3 MacBook Airs is the configuration with 24 GB RAM and 512 GB storage for $1,424 — a $275 discount from the regular price of $1,699. That’s available at that price, with next-week delivery, in all four colors. They’ve also got $200 discounts on various configurations with 16 GB RAM, but delivery on those models is out in January.

Needless to say, all of these links are using my make-me-rich affiliate code. And Amazon still has USB-C AirPods Pro 2 for just $154, almost $100 off the regular price.

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Amazon is running a holiday discount on M3 MacBook Airs, but it’s tricky — you need to click around through various color choices and watch the prices and ship dates. My main link on this post goes to the config that looks like their best deal for price-conscious gift buyers: the 13-inch M3 MacBook Air in space gray, with 24 GB RAM and 512 GB of storage for $1,299, a $200 discount from the list price, with delivery in a few days. They’ve also got the same configuration, at the same price, with the same delivery window in silver. Starlight only has “5 remaining in stock” (and that was at 8 just a few minutes ago, so they’ll likely be gone by the time you read this), and midnight is already out of stock.

The 13-inch configuration with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage is just $1,099, but delivery dates are in early January. They’ve got the configuration with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB storage for just $899, but only in midnight and starlight, and with delivery windows of “1 to 2 months”.

The best option for 15-inch M3 MacBook Airs is the configuration with 24 GB RAM and 512 GB storage for $1,424 — a $275 discount from the regular price of $1,699. That’s available at that price, with next-week delivery, in all four colors. They’ve also got $200 discounts on various configurations with 16 GB RAM, but delivery on those models is out in January.

Needless to say, all of these links are using my make-me-rich affiliate code. And Amazon still has USB-C AirPods Pro 2 for just $154, almost $100 off the regular price.

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