These sorts of things are fun projects, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them. But running my own media server with 4K mkv files I can browse and play on an OLED TV is light years ahead of what I had in the 90s, and I love it.
If the future is AI, then a future where every compute has to pass through one of a handful of multinational corporations with GPU farms...is something to be wary of. Local LLMs is a great idea for smaller tasks.
Sure, that's why local LLMs aren't popular or mass market as of September 2025.
But cloud models will have diminishing returns, local hardware will get drastically faster, and techniques to efficiently inference them will be worked out further. At some point, local LLMs will have its day.
Before AI, people complained that Google was taking world class engineering talent and using it for little more than selling people ads.
But look at that example. With this new frontier of AI, that world class engineering talent can finally be put to use…for product placement. We’ve come so far.
Did you think that Google would just casually allow their business to be disrupted without using the technology to improve the business and also protecting their revenue?
Both Meta and Google have indicated that they see Generative AI as a way to vertically integrate within the ad space, disrupting marketing teams, copyrighters, and other jobs who monitor or improve ad performance.
Also FWIW, I would suspect that the majority of Google engineers don't work on an ad system, and probably don't even work on a profitable product line.
My LG OLED has never been connected to the internet. It never complains about it or asks me to connect. There’s a setting to automatically load the last used HDMI input when it turns in. I haven’t seen the TV’s Home Screen or OS in years. Probably as good as you can get at the consumer level.
I don't think this is that much more different than comments in earlier times saying "this could be a really good application for the blockchain!" except the volume of them. Almost everything can have the soul and humanity crushed out of it by AI if we let it, and almost every idea already has a YC applicant.
It's pretty clear to me that Youtube shoving endless low quality content towards kids is their intended business model. It's what drives the most engagement. It's why they don't let you permanently disable YouTube Shorts. It's why they don't let you block channels easily any more. Or dislike videos. They're AB testing themselves into a low quality slop firehose.
There's some truly great content on the platform, some of it even for kids. But it gets drowned out by mountains of algorithmic slop.
I have stopped giving my kid access to Youtube. instead I set up my own media server, filled it with pirated TV shows and Movies I can curate, and give them access to that on the TV and iPad in their allowed screen times.
If you disable YouTube history, it completely removes shorts. It also breaks functionality in surprising ways (breaks back button behavior - the petty bastards)
If anyone reading this ever gets the chance, go to Tekapo in New Zealand and enjoy the sky. The area is park of a Dark Sky Reserve. I enjoyed a midnight stargazing tour complete with telescopes and hot springs.
What a great future we are building. If AI is supposed to run everything, everywhere....then there will be 2, maybe 3, AI companies. And nobody outside those companies knows how they work.
What makes you think so? So far, many new AI companies are sprouting and many of them seem to be able to roughly match the state-of-the-art very quickly. (But pushing the frontier seems to be harder.)
From the evidence we have so far, it does not look like there's any natural monopoly (or even natural oligopoly) in AI companies. Just the opposite. Especially with open weight models, or oven more so complete open source models.
Something about the human brain just makes it very bad at observing a mocked-up screen layout and understanding how well it works in practice. Apply that to an entire application with multiple functions and the problem increases exponentially.
Experience helps speed things up. But rapid iteration with a fast feedback loop is the best practice. Design is not doing the start of the loop, it’s doing the entire loop. Repeatedly.
Does Meet/Teams even compete with iMessage? They seem to be in competition with FaceTime.
Regardless, Apple still shows green bubbles for WhatsApp users and still offers no way to integrate with the e2ee scheme (and therefore reach blue-bubble status) despite WhatsApp also implementing e2ee. The anti-competitive argument is sound regardless of how shit Google Meet is.
I think Meet replaced Duo which replaced Hangouts; the latter of which was a good competitor to iMessage. I’m not even sure of the history of all their chat apps anymore because they always have multiple alive at the same time competing with each other. All I know is that they have had chat apps that were pretty good but Google could never stick to just one.
