@futurebird You just reminded me of what used to be one of the best file managers on Android. It was completely free — not even ad supported. Had they suddenly demanded money, I probably would have given it. That's how good, featureful, and useful it was for me back then.

Then, all of a sudden it changed overnight. It suddenly started getting bloated, adding in ads, and reading data it shouldn't. It turned out it had been bought by some company that of course immediately misused the IP. (As a side note, this is a big problem of all existing apps on app stores — yes, including Apple! They get bought out and users aren't informed that the app suddenly has changed hands.)

I mean, back then a typical Android app was something like $1. I would have shelled that out in an instant for it

@mavu @futurebird Except LLMs will never be able to produce such a thing without countless errors and, besides, those weren't open source to begin with, so you can't actually do that anyway...

You're talking about a multi-year project that would involve basically building it yourself just with a LLM to try to help ease the process (or, conversely, a multi-decade process in having it produce things that don't work over and over and then when something seems to, spending ages figuring out why if you load this particular text file it erases everything on your device because you have no idea how any of the code works.)

We don't live in the times you think we do. We just pretend that we do.

@mavu @futurebird Oh no, I don't underestimate. I've used them. I know how they work. Fundamentally. I know what they are capable of and while some things can improve, they'll always ultimately have the same problem before this bubble pops and everyone moves on to hyping something else. I have access to multiple models I can run right on my own system without providing my private data to corporations and use them for simple things and still have to fight mistakes.

And Google is locking down Android for the same reason they removed the "do no evil" motto and etc: because they're leaning more and more into making a platform that enriches themselves and no one else. They always envied Apple for this, but didn't have the pull back then to do it. Now they do and they know it.