It would sound like an Alexa on wheels; but it doesn't actually have any wheels. It's basically a webcam with mic, speaker, and the ability to wiggle its 'head' for effect.

This is the 'disruption' that is supposed to be shaking a billion-dollar industry? 'taking on Tesla and Boston Dynamics with radical transparency(except on the order page, because why would you want to know about the camera resolution or battery capacity?)'; and apparently not much else; but hey, only $300 for the hardwired version.

Truly, actually being able to traverse or manipulate your environment is for legacy losers. Wiggling your head is the transcendent future of robotics!

>"In theory, Google paid most of the Mozilla money, so in a way Google owns them all? :o)"

Yes but no. Mozilla was/is over-dependent on Google's money. There is no question there. However, as far as I know, there were/are no strings attached when it came to design decisions, standards, development decisions, user-choice, etc. Had Google done that, in any way, they would have really set themselves up for a MAJOR antitrust situation.

Mozilla, unfortunately, wasted way too much of that money. Had they invested much of it and spent wisely what was needed, they would be set for decades of continued development even if Google completely disappeared. Alas, here we are. Firefox is the only multiplatform competition left. I prefer not to lament over what happened in the past on this, but lament over where we are right now. And that is enough lamenting for anyone.

>"At least browser based on the open source Chromium code base can be 'un-googled'

That is mostly fiction. Chromium is a moving and changing target in which these other "browser creators" can't possibly keep up with. Sure, they can tweak some significant things here and there, but they will not have the resources to undo/change some of the fundamental control Google exerts at this point. So they will mostly plop all of Google's code right into their "browser".

Chromium is open source, but it is NOT an open or community project. Google controls what goes in it 100%. At this point, it is a hugely dangerous monoculture for security, privacy, standards, and freedom. Especially since it destroyed virtually all competition, except Firefox. Very few entities could truly fork Chromium and then actually maintain it. Which is why nobody does.

>"Or is yet another Chromium wrapper?"

Yes

Like all multiplatform non-Firefox/based browsers, it is yet another Chrom* in which Google controls the entire engine and what defines most of web browsing and design now.

>"Sounds like doubling up on tracking to me"

And it is also just yet another Chrom* in which Google controls the entire engine, just like all multiplatform browsers, except Firefox (and it's few offshoots).

>"I sincerely don't know what Chrome specifically did to ruin the web."

Let's take a stab at that:

1) Wiping out ALL competing multiplatform browsers except Firefox. And mostly through their free and constant "advertising" about it on all their platforms for years.
2) Spurring "alternative" browsers, other than Firefox, that are all based on code that Google controls.
3) Creating a near browser monopoly that threatens the security of the web.
4) Creating a monoculture that is starting to make sites incompatible with the few browsers that follow standards but not Google's "standards" or implementation. Further eroding competition and choice.
5) Giving Google the power to ram through or force "standards" that benefit themselves more than the community at large.
6) Systematically removing user privacy and control.

I am sure I missed a lot more that others can contribute.

I am glad that Chrome/Chromium exists (even though I refuse to use either or anything based on them). And it kicked Mozilla's complacency the first few years until Firefox caught up with performance (and it has been on-par ever since). But not at the point it started destroying the "market", standards, security, privacy, and freedom at large. We desperately need more totally open, multiplatform, non-Chromium and non-Mozilla based browsers because right now it is more like there are only two browsers: Chrom* and Firefox*. And if Firefox fails or is eroded to nothing, we are SCREWED.

Luckily the new standard's fretting about "authenticating agents" and "ensuring that only authorized agents can participate in workflows" should allow doing cryptographically what historically was handled by mere obfuscation; so that you can call it a security feature rather than having it recognized as hostile UI design.

I assume that, sooner or later, someone will propose 'agent attestation', if only as an excuse to stop working on the "our agent is dangerously unreliable" problem because that's hard, potentially intractable; while "it's dangerously unreliable; but we can cryptographically demonstrate that it's running on our hardware root of trust" is fairly pedestrian 'trusted computing' stuff at this point.

Then we can talk up 'interoperable', 'standardized', 'glorious collaboration across disparate platforms!' without the risk that our bot infrastructure might enable downright vulgar use cases like scrapers obtaining transparent price signals.

"Once they gather more insight into what factors make games and decision-making scenarios more challenging for people, Zhu and his colleagues hope to start devising new behavioral science interventions aimed at prompting people to make more rational decisions."

The guys who do mobile game monetization are laughing into ~$125 billion/year at the idea of someone attempting to study how games make people act irrationally in order to do something other than encourage them. And that's not counting the overt gambling and day trader facilitating operations.

I'm glad to hear that one of AI's "most pressing challenges" is concluding that you should use TLS on the wire and having a standardized JSON object in which to declare your proprietary extensions; rather than the ongoing inability to make LLMs distinguish between commands and data even vaguely reliably; or the persistent weakness to adversarial inputs.

It's not wrong that you'd want to use the sensible obvious choices and avoid pointless vendor quirks; but talking about 'A2A' as a contribution to solving agentic AI's most pressing challenges seems about as hyperbolic as describing ELF or PE32+ as being notable contributions to software security and quality. Yeah, it would be worse if we were also squabbling over how to format our executables; but oh boy is that the unbelievably trivial bit by comparison.

I'd be curious how often a support session would be sensitive enough to make having it move a problem.

It's easy to see how(especially if people are willing to pay for onshore or onshore-adjacent support anyway) it would be vastly easier to just have the data stay there rather than try to red team every random log upload to see if there's a snippet of GDPR or somethin in it; but my impression was that people already shied away from doing things like uploading live auth tokens when they could avoid it; so I'd be curious how often the support session is truly of urgent interest. Doesn't necessarily need to be; if somebody wants to be sure and the additional cost is marginal; but I envy the security problems of someone locked down tight enough that compromising their vendor and scraping their support logs is the way in.

Then the AI umpire would agree. And when the opponent appealed for the original ruling, the umpire would agree again.

Yeah - modern cars last a long time compared to those of old. I get some motivation to replace old cars for environmental reasons, but nothing is free. A more efficient vehicle required a lot of energy output to produce it in the first place and will still require some form of potentially non green energy to keep it going in the future.

Even if it pollutes more, keeping an older vehicle on the road may be more environmentally friendly than replacing it due to having to effectively make up the production energy cost.

Never underestimate the environmental benefits of just keeping things longer and not constantly churning production lines.

LLMs seem like a fairly appropriate pick if hallucinations are the point of the exercise.

>"That stopped being correct when half the shit under the hood began to be replaced with plastic."

There are many types and qualities of plastic. If selected and used appropriately, plastic can last a very long time without failure. Of course, the inverse can be true as well.

>"The plan would have seen "end of life vehicles" -- petrol cars over 15 years old "

15 years?? That is a RIDICULOUS policy! I just traded in a perfect condition, higher-end, 16 year old car, with 42,000 miles on it. "Age" of a vehicle doesn't say much about its condition. And there haven't been many breakthroughs in 16 years for pollution controls or safety (if that was the motive).

To do such a policy correctly would require some mileage component and probably also actual screening of the vehicle with objective metrics applied.