Google does not have a monopoly on search. Bing / DuckDuckGo works just fine.
Around 82% of search engine requests are issued through Google. Bing around 10%. I don’t know if we just have differing definitions of “monopoly,” but Google is the default on all Android devices, almost every non-Microsoft browser, and probably on Apple products as well. And most users don’t know enough or care enough to ever change from that.
Let’s not pretend like google does not have a monopoly on search engines, maps, and shortform video content. Also, their cloud ecosystem might be second behind AWS, but it’s still fucking enormous and makes them truckloads of money.
Not sure why you were enabling HTTPS for a project that was not hosting an internet-accessible service, really. By which I assume you mean the service doesn’t have a publicly accessible web based UI or API component. What were you trying to access and how? The only scenario I could think of for this would be that your custom software relies on HTTPS for secure communication within its own internal network (such as on a VPN) to send sensitive data back and forth between services. In which case that feels like overkill for a college course, since you shouldn’t have any genuinely sensitive data that you need to secure if it’s just for testing and demonstration.
I had a problem and then I tried to solve it by installing a snap package. Now I have two problems.
Huh. Kinda looks like the front page of twitter. I hate it. I mean, I don’t go to reddit anymore unless I’m forced to Google something and even then I gotta turn off my VPN first, but still. Yuck.
Full self-driving without driver monitoring.
Which is just fantastically dangerous and poorly advised. Very appropriate for it to be called “Elon mode,” if nothing else.
Wizards/Hasbro hires contractors to produce art for their game. They make virtually none of it in house. It’s most likely they neither know nor care who or what produces art for MTG. Besides, they produce so much content in a year, some of it has to be AI/ML generated, so this is incredibly unsurprising. At this point, MTG is starting to enshittify by dumping out product as quickly as possible. Their quality control and playtesting has gone out the window. Most of their recent sets are pretty poorly received in the limited magic space. I don’t personally care about the use of AI art, but I can say that for money making enterprises, they’ll eventually have more and more art produced via ML over time, and eventually they’ll use ML to design sets in some capacity, as well. Right now, people are upset over it or annoyed by it on some quasi-ethical grounds of “stealing from artists by not compensating them for the work they produced being used to train the models.” But it’s going to eventually become the norm, purely on the basis that they aren’t going to lose any money from using ML to produce art and they’re going to save money by doing it.
The foundational premise of this argument is purely that there’s something “special” about human thought and that the way humans do pattern recognition is somehow “better” than a machine’s.
God I hate tech this decade.
I feel this sentiment in my bones. I know it gets overused, but the word of the decade so far really does seem to be enshittification. The only thing that seems to be getting better is self-hosting, which is still a massive pain in the ass for a lot of things.
Given that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google together only account for 64% of global cloud hosting, I’m going to say those numbers don’t add up. But you are right that Google is third behind the other two.