Well in the same vain that we discuss "points" and talk about the merits, its useful to discuss and understand their counter points. I for one did not know about this and thought it was insightful when building a product that hasn't fully been scoped out and is more greenfield
I mean it wouldn't make sense for it to be more profitable for google if there were no search deals, since otherwise they would just cancel the deal themselves. Clearly they see long term value in blocking out competition even at that high of a price
Google can't cancel it right now because then otherwise Bing would bid for it. Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this.
A historical parallel is when tobacco advertising was banned, and cigarette companies because more profitable. Advertising greatly affected which cigarettes people smoked but had a smaller (though still real) impact on whether they smoked. So the companies kept most of the revenue with none of the advertising cost.
> Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this.
why would anti-trust rules prevent _anyone_ from bidding? Apple can sell their browser search, just like mozilla can sell firefox search. And anyone with a browser could do the same. Unless the anti-trust rules somehow become so overarching that the selling of space for advertising becomes illegal?
You highlight some genuine points of difficulty for antitrust enforcers.
If the rules were targeted at Google only then Google's lawyers would argue this is unequal application of the law. Even if the courts rejected Google's argument there'd be a real risk end up with exactly the same situation but with Bing in a couple of years time as they become the default search on every device / browser.
If "pay for default" deals were banned altogether then Firefox might be seriously hurt, which isn't exactly good for the competitive tech ecosystem.
I think it would be a good move to prevent browser deals. There is no reality in which the winner is Firefox, Kagi or DDG - it will always be Google or Bing. That's clearly anticompetitive - it locks the other browsers out of a major share of the market.
That's belied by the fact that Chromium exists, and I speculate they spun up Chromium in case they were ordered to break up.
The engine is also used in several other web browsers, many of which do not have the clout to survive solely on ads. Yet another reason Google claiming this is absurd.
Sure, but I'm arguing Apple shouldn't be allowed to sell "default browser" status on iOS. Show the customer a randomized list and let them choose. Google will probably still dominate, but it won't be because they paid to.
The real reason that tobacco advertising ended on television is the fairness doctrine.
After the FCC agreed that the fairness doctrine applied here every station was required to run one PSA for every 10 tobacco ads. The industry, realizing that nobody would stop advertising without being forced to, actually lobbied Congress for the passage of the law banning it. One reason total revenue went up was that stations were no longer required to run anti-smoking PSAs.
It depends on the what the browsers end up doing. If they just surface a select your search engine dialog during set up, most people will just select google and nothing will have changed besides the cost. If they set a non-google search engine by default, they will lose ad revenue because of people not bothering to change the default.
Depends on the default search engine. Many people went of their way to download a web browser that wasn't Internet Explorer for many years even though IE was the default.
If the default search were randomly assigned and Google investors were nefarious the investors (not Alphabet) could simply help launch 30 different subpar search engines. Then if a user landed on one of those as a default search engine: the user would switch to Google.
I don't have exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if 80-90% of google ad revenue comes from the ad prices they can charge for US users. I would be shocked if the percentage was less than 50-60% of revenue from US alone, which would put the value extraction per user for google at ~10$/month/user
Sorry, I mean that the revenue seems to not just be search ad revenue but ad revenue. Google's ad revenue comes from a lot of places, such as in your Android app. I assume it also includes adsense and other things.
Funny that I am seeing this now, because last Fall I had Daniel Genkin as my Intro to Cyber Security Professor (co-author of this result). Interesting class, but I remember him mentioning that they were working on a speculative attack for Apple CPUs after seeing the results of spectre and meltdown on Intel CPUs. I remember how he seemed almost paranoid about security, and I suppose I see why now (security is almost never guaranteed).
I am a little concerned with letting an AI agent that routinely hallucinates control my browser. I can't not watch it do the task, in case it messes up. So I am not sure what the value is versus me doing it myself.
See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2 months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so common
I think there's something wrong with a hiring process where it takes 1-2 months to decide whether to proceed to next step (screening call, or interview, or offer) with a candidate, not to mention the fact that a well qualified candidate isn't going to be waiting around that long - they'll be applying to other jobs at the same time, and if good will be snapped up.
The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.
I think part of it may be they're not saying no until someone else is actually hired just in case they need a fallback, so everyone else gets to wait however long it takes for the role to be filled, most likely...
See this is tricky in my mind, because it doesn't seem like this was just a move to stop AWS/GCP cloud hosting Scylla. That was already solved with the AGPL license. This seems like they are just trying to stop any usage of ScyllaDB that isn't paid (outside of a relatively small free tier). I suppose its not a big deal, since you can always migrate to cassandra for open source forever, but definitely unfortunate for any individuals/organizations that can't afford this upgrade.
I am not well versed with mathematics publishing, but has this proof been already been peer reviewed by other mathematicians, or is it still awaiting confirmation/proof replication?
This is just a preprint, so no peer review or anything yet. Putting out a preprint on the Arxiv like this is generally the first step of the author sharing their work for other mathematicians to take a look at, before it gets submitted for peer review and publication
Just a quick well, actually. It's common at least in my corner of mathematics to put something on arxiv simultaneously with submission to a journal or conference. If I wanted feedback on a paper before submitting I would definitely do that privately. But everyone is different.
You'd think most people who put stuff on arXiv would already be reasonably confident it is correct, at least through correspondence with their peers. However...
That said, I've no reason to doubt this proof (it is not within my wheelhouse).
I got this formula as well. I viewed it as an expanding binary tree where you end up cutting branches early, similar to a alpha beta pruning search tree
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