Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1555
Starting to read the Google ruling, Machine is a person, listening to the Sabrina album. Parenting shit. Hot tip for a fellow Lightning owner.
Good morning good morning good morning. How are you? What is it, Wednesday? I’m sleepy. But I will be fine. Jane was much more pleasant this morning, we had a lovely time. Got our Wordle in two, and then she drew the Wordle. I would show you the artwork but, I don’t know, I don’t know your morning order-of-operations. Maybe you read GMHHAY before you do your Wordle. Can’t go spoiling it for you.
Stopped by the grocery store for strawberries after dropping her off, and there was another Lightning there, this one black. Fifth one in the area now. Anyway, I grabbed one of my little iPhone screen joystick hoohickies and walked over and told him about my amazing invention of sticking these little buttons on the screen so you can find the buttons for the camera and HVAC controls easily. I am now an acolyte of these things. I should probably buy some extras so I can just hand them out to people. He seemed suspicious at first but grew appreciative.
I have an important bit of information for you this morning. The Machine, as in Florence and the Machine? The Machine is a person. A woman. Her name is Isabella. Did you know this? Florence and the Machine is a duo. Or was. Or something. Seems to have evolved through the years. But anyway Isabella wrote “Dog Days are Here Again” and my favorite track on Ceremonials, “No Light No Light.” She won a Grammy for her soundtrack to Little Fires Everywhere. She does not seem to have written anything on Dance Fever or High Hopes, though, so I don’t know if she is Florece’s Machine anymore. Also did you see that new super witchy Florence and the Machine video? It is very witchy. It does not, as far as I can tell, have The Machine in it:
Apparently she wrote the song with Mitski. One of the dudes from Idles is on the album.
But where is Isabella!
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
We are listening to the new Sabrina Carpenter this morning, Manchild. It is okay. It is very dirty! The song “Manchild” is pretty catchy though. The track “Tears” is a pretty hot jam but my god it is naughty. I am old and a prude I guess. Or maybe I am secretly skeptical that Sabrina is not in fact that horny and it’s all an act to sell records. She wouldn’t do that would she?
Pretty into this weird-ass song about a dude she likes having agoraphobia, though. That one feels kinda real.
So the judge delivered his ruling on the Google Antitruast case. No, not the advertising one, the one about search. There are two. In this one, Google has been found to be a monopolist, and they spent a bunch of time thinking about what the “remedies” would be for this monopoly. The plaintiffs — the feds and a bunch of states — wanted to force Google to break off Chrome. Google was very nervous.
Well, that did not happen. Google does not have to sell off Chrome. That is probably a relief for Google. As an anti-monopolist I am a bit bummed, but I also have to grudgingly admit it is not really the right solution.
The ruling says that Google can do deals for search traffic, like the ones they do with Apple and Firefox, but those deals can’t be exclusive.
It also says they can’t do deals where you want one Google product, like the app store, and they force you to take a bunch of other Google products.
And then there is a ton of new rules about data sharing. But I don’t really understand those yet.
The devil’s in the details in all of these, and though I am nearly 80 pages into reading the ruling so far, I’ve not actually gotten to those details, because…
This case took five years to find its way through the courts. And even since they talked about what possible remedies might be appropriate a year(ish) ago, GPTs and LLMs have gotten way more popular, and the judge rightfully acknowledged the new lay of the land: that Google is more vulnerable than ever, that people are using ChatGPT as a replacement to search. That it is early days in this trend, but that everyone can see the potential for it to disrupt search. So he seems much more focused on ensuring Google cannot use its current search dominance to give itself an unfair advantage in the current and impending AI wars. Or I mean, erm, AI competition battles. The actual Terminator-like AI wars will come a little later we probably still have a few years for that.
The judge seems very focused on the part of LLMs where they get asked a question and they go ask a search engine for some more up-to-the-minute answers to combine with their LLM training. They call it “grounding.” Very focused on grounding. OpenAI asked Google if they could use Google for grounding, Google said no, OpenAI had to build a whole search engine. Stuff like that.
So, you know, I am not very far along in this ruling, but it seems like the judge is focused on all this data sharing as a means of forcing Google to let other AIs use Google for Grounding. But I don’t really fully understand how.
We shall see, we shall see, tune in tomorrow.
It is very interesting how utterly riddled with AI this ruling is, though. And you can still feel Google’s dishonestly rippling through it: oh yeah we have tons of competitors, search is under threat, AI will change everything. Also by the way our AI, Gemini? Doesn’t impact search at all nope nope nope. Cant have our stockholders thinking the golden goose is under threat, but we need the judge to believe the golden goose is under threat.
Another interesting thing is the judge, while not specifically naming Firefox, basically says he didn’t kill the search deals with Apple and Firefox because it would put Firefox out of business and that wouldn’t do any good for anyone.
And he name-checks the Taylor and Travis engagement so, you know. That happened.
Jane was a little bit better yesterday. Absolutely no screens of any type, just drove her to a playground after dinner without consulting her. It mostly worked. Was chatting a bit with an old friend of mine Erin about screens and videos and the moral panics of our childhood and… it’s interesting. My parents parked me in front of a screen for hours on end. But “we turned out all right.” Was I holy terror? Yes, yes I was. Did anyone ever connect the two? That maybe I was a holy terror because I was sitting in front of a screen too much? No, not really. They had their whole “rot your brain” thing and that hilarious thing where everyone was obsessed with your eyes going bad, but no one really talked about the screens making kids assholes. And I was telling Erin, this seems different from the moral panic of the 80’s. It’s not really what Jane watches, it can be completely wholesome content, but she still acts like a very unkind person afterward.
It does not seem so bad with Minecraft and games though. Which is interesting.
Anyway we went to the playground instead and she immediately made some friends and started doing the zipline a bunch and somehow concocting some sort of zipline-based version of Settlers of Catan where she kept bringing us, and other kids, “resources.” It was very cute.
She didn’t brush her teeth this morning, though. Grr.
I mean, yes, look. One track on today’s Moody and Quiet playlist is 20 minutes long. Is this really a playlist? I know, I know. But it’s a really good song, played a major part in my life in like 1997 or so and I am very excited its on Spotify these days and it is a vibe, as the kids say.
Still very into these new late-period Cranes albums I knew nothing about, and still going through all the strong tracks on Springsteen’s Tracks II.
Have a lovely wednesday.
—
Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.