HN user
That's an excellent read. It not only recounts the principal allegations from the book, but also mentions in passing that the book 'Careless People' became a #1 bestseller while its author was completely banned from promoting that book. By the way, the book itself is also worth reading! Provides a lot more context on how Facebook evolved their Public Pulicy team into a political manipulation team.
Fortune can't repeat those allegations for fear of being sued by Facebook or worse: loosing access to their ad and user tracking network.
I think Google as a search engine, back when the started with ads, was really superior to others. (To the point where competitors just didn't find what I was searching for and Google had it in the top three or at least on the first page.) As for ChatGPT's advantage... I am currently subscribed there and not for others... but at least for the software engineering models, OpenAI doesn't seem so far ahead... maybe it's true for other models as well. Also it's likely that most income for the LLM provider companies will come from third parties or business that integrate APIs. And as long as all the APIs are so similar (and wrapper libraries make them compatible for many use-cases)... nobody has a moat.
This will become even more interesting once business start using the cheapest for each use-case... which often end up being some open and license free model. I imagine this could be a big part of "enterprise workflow automation". Thinking of many office jobs which don't require actual intelligence besides understanding language...
Absolutely agree that "isolated installations" are the future. Plan9 was way ahead of their time when they used their version of chroot and mounting to achieve basically something like that. And now the Fuchsia team is making this a pillar of their architecture even going so far that all installs are transparent: almost like running an app directly from an URL. And sandboxing it like a webpage, even when it's a native app. Ooops, I digress. But I really see this as a trend and NixOs one of the systems which are used to collect experience on the concept of isolation and refine it.