They want fingerprinting to work for everyone because the more effective it is, the higher the value of the ad inventory they sell.

Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it.

The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.

Many are saying the US just did.

Trading practice of primary skills for indirect skills like AI is like a writer deciding they should stop writing directly and get really good at Microsoft Word.

That's why I write my own assembly language. Compilers just atrophy your skills!

Personally I just accept that all technologies are great and must be embraced! This way I do not have to think about ethics and potential implications for society.

If McDonald's food was featured in sci fi movies about being able to end humanity through war, that's when this would apply and they'd cultivate fear of that nonsense to distract from their food being shitty and overpriced and unhealthy.

There is still a point to making a choice. Inconvenient sideloading is still better than no sideloading.

In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this.

And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.

From what I can tell, Graphene OS will be unaffected. Some of the app stores like Aurora and F-Droid may run into problems during the verification process. Best I can tell (and read from other sources) is an inconvenient 24 hour wait period and many have said the Graphene team will overcome that in short order.

I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.

You have been able to sideload on iOS for years; I first did it in 2021 but I think it was earlier than that. You just needed to create a server on a Mac and you could easily load apps on, all without any kind of special jailbreak. When Delta got released on the App Store, that was cool and all, but I wasn't as impressed as others because I had already been playing emulators on my iPhone for years.

Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps.

To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pounding a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that.

With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.

We complain when good sites are acquired and shut down, but maybe it's even worse when they're acquired and kept running in a shitty state like IMDB or Twitter. Big enough to stave off competition and prevent progress.

Until recently IMDB worked without javascript even. It's the onslaught from AI crawlers that is driving the current enshittification of the web. It's really accelerated in the last six months.

Their absence supports that it's not an omnipresent American pattern after all.

It's still crucial to keep your hands on the wheel and be able to take over from a self driving car within seconds. But we know this isn't happening and won't happen. The nature of the invention nurtures the behavior to use it unsafely.