Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.”

Good luck with that. If the success of the iPhone has taught me anything it is that the average person loves them some incompatible with anything but itself vertical integration.

Anything related to healthcare has no business being any closer to the whims of “the market” than the public roads.

It would be unheard of for a government to stop maintaining a public road because whomever was supplying some ingredient of the asphalt said that particular mix is “to old and the new mix is not compatible with the roads created using the old mix”.

They don’t want to do it anymore, fine, then provide whatever is needed for someone else to maintain it for the cost of the materials to print/email/upload to GitHub the technical documents. It should not be legal to get someone hooked on your life altering medical device then rug pull them like this.

Once ads are allowed into a platform they will ultimately be what destroys it eventually.

Might take a week or a decade. But the lust of that easy ad money will ruin the thing they were put there to fund in the end.

Right along with story points.

Not meant to be a measurement of time, but of effort. But everyone ends up using them as a measure of time because that is what the MBA at the end of the tables wants.

I wonder how much longer it will be before Reddit has to start paying people to moderate the subreddits since no one will want to do it for free anymore.

Who am I kidding, there are so many people that are already taking their payment in the HOA like authority being a mod gives them that will never happen.

I honestly don’t see an issue with the people going back to the office because they want to work from there. I just want others to stop trying to force me to do the same.

This sort of thing seems to have always been a plague with a set of the extroverted sort. They seem to feel the whole world should for whatever reason cater to what makes them happy and us introverted types that do not like the social activities that they do should be made to partake anyway. For our own good. Yet the world is ending when those same extroverted people have to spend a large chunk of time alone or simply being quiet.

The older I get the less patience I have for those sorts of games. Which could become an issue for me professionally I suppose.

There is something society could learn about itself if we spent anytime thinking honestly about how much of a dead end it is politically speaking to increase our use of nuclear power as a means of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Yet, when big corporate interests want it for their own reasons, it is no big thing and almost no politician will speak ill of it. Even though if some kind of disaster comes about because of it they will be left holding the bag of public opinion since that industry is so heavily regulated.

I’m sure the bears would allow you to attend, as the meal.

Sounds like they are just pissed that he found a way to beat them at their own game.

Yet another thing we have entire books and movie series about what will go wrong, and probably how. Yet somehow a way will be found to make it go wrong in exactly those ways.

Someone found something that still depends on the control panel that will not be easily moved or done away with I bet.

That stance will change if they ever get acquired. Might even get the chance to see James Cuda try and walk back this stance in a few years.

This kind of thing getting worse and worse at all levels of tech is increasingly pushing me to the fringes of tech solutions (with all of the handicaps that come with that) as those are getting to be the only places where this kind of thing is not pervasive.

• No apps on phone, if the mobile site doesn’t work it can wait until I am in front of a desktop/laptop
• No NFC payments as that requires the phone to be blessed by lord Google or father Apple
• No set top streaming boxes on the TV, just a small Linux powered PC and a cheap Logitech wireless keyboard/trackpad
• Only Linux OSes on desktop/laptop

My complaint is not that the “appliance” solutions exist for those that want them. But that there is next to no room in the market now for options that are not those “appliance” solutions for those that do want them but also want to take part in the modern tech world with things like NFC payments without having to trick the services with Magisk modules.

The world of mobile phones is a real world example of what we avoided on the PC back in the day when the IBM BIOS got reverse engineered, allowing for someone to put out an IBM compatible PC without having to pay the tithe to big blue first. Not that IBM didn’t do their level best to put those efforts in the ground with their lawyers and the courts as soon as they found out about it. Thankfully the legal system of the time didn’t allow that to happen.

It has been pretty depressing to me that the tech literate have been so easily lulled into accepting such things in the name of “cool toys” and “security” virtually everywhere in modern life besides the PC/laptop/server spaces.

Phones, TV set top boxes, smart TVs, IoT gear. They are all a cesspit of locked down propitiatory and gate kept gardens where nothing happens without the gardens keeper getting a cut and having final say over everything.

This sort of control and gatekeeping from the likes of Google, Apple, and Qualcomm was not something that was hard to see coming a mile away, yet we all collectively let it happen anyway.

I worked somewhere like that back in the 2008-2010 time frame. Thankfully, there was a extension, I believe the name was “IETab”, that would spawn a new tab in Trident (IE’s browser engine). So you could set certain sites to launch in one of those tabs and everything else would use standard Firefox. None of the people I supported were any the wiser. They just thought everything worked in Firefox.

Granted it was only that seamless because Windows already had that rendering engine built in. There are some extensions that do something similar with Chrome, but because of more modern security standards and whatnot you have to install extension helper applications which is gross.

This kind of shit is why Googles (and anyone else that tries it as well) ever increasing push to put a layer of ads into anything is so off putting to me. Sure ads are annoying, but they are also probably second only to social engineering as the method for someones device and accounts getting compromised.

I personally will not go back to the days where just the act of visiting a website and clicking on nothing has a good chance of loading some Javascript and infecting my browser or whole device with the drive by malware of the day because the shit heads that run the site are to lazy to vet what they are letting their site call out too and the third party ad networks are to lazy to vet what sorts of things they are allowing their ad networks to serve.

This is not gonna stop until the consumer puts their money where there mouths are and stops using Windows until Microsoft back peddles. Money is all a company understands so that is where you need to hit them if you want them to listen. But as a group the consumer has a very weak constitution when it comes to having to do something that is good for them in the long term but causes them short term inconvenience. A lot of parallels to the modern corporate world in that.

Tesla will probably be a case study one day in how to get the lead in a market that is hard to break into and somehow squander it.

Sure, I could. But I wanted to leave the original post as it was for transparency. I figured that was the most “open” thing to do.

Doesn’t appear you can do anything of that via the Drive mobile app. Maybe one day they will make that possible.

If they can ever get a spreadsheet application I could fully get away from Google for that kind of thing without losing out on anything I care about.

If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.

Whats crazy is Hangouts is still going (in the form of Chat and Meet). I’ve had the same group chat going with a few buddies on it for years and years now. And it is still better than anything outside of Signal in my opinion for messaging.

Dunno how it is Apples fault that he didn’t take the time to understand how the tools that he uses work.

If I plow my car into a crowd of people because I mistake the gas for the brake that is not GM’s fault.

I mean Android, and Samsung in particular, borrow from Apple all the time as well. Hell Samsung frequently bad mouths Apples for the anti-consumer choices one year then follows suit and does the same thing in a year or 2 themselves.

These kinds of takes are not the flex some seem to think they are in my opinion.

I wonder how long it will be before they start giving discounts on tickets for interacting with the ads a certain number of times during the flight.

Because they are more concerned with the fact that devs aren’t making the games for Linux natively in most cases than they are with if you can play most games on Linux.

The most damning thing to call it is “inaccurate”. Nothing will drive the average person away from a companies information gathering products faster than associating it with being inaccurate more times than not. That is why they are inventing different things to call it. It sounds less bad to say “my LLM hallucinates sometimes” than it does to say “my LLM is inaccurate sometimes“.

Then it sounds like the “web” tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.

If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.

Disclaimer: The below rant does not include things like healthcare where choice in the market is either not a thing or not possible. Lest someone think I am being absolutist. It is purely railing against the average consumer widget, not grandmas oxygen tank refills.

That depends on how many people want them.

Companies will make, or stop making/doing, nearly anything if the money for doing it goes away. But not enough people want “dumbphones” bad enough to stop buying “smartphones”.

Just like not enough people want small phones to stop buying the big ones. Or not enough people want the price of Netflix to go down to stop paying for Netflix, etc. Consumers in general need to learn the power of and build up the mental discipline to do without when the available options aren’t what they want. Apple, Google, etc can’t force you to buy it from them after all.

Companies prey on the inability of the consumer to go without when they find the terms of the deal distasteful to great success. Large chunks of every companies marketing department think about nothing else.

The real “sin” in all of this is there not being enough smaller players around to fill those smaller segments, because we kept buying from the company that bought up all of the competition years ago despite finding those practices distasteful.

Companies, and politicians, have figured out that the average majority is all bark and no bite. And the average majority would be wise to start to figure that out.

Good thing seeing that a game is published or developed by EA, or one of its subsidiaries, is 9 times out of 10 enough for me to not bother with the game to begin with. They don’t make a thing that is worth dealing with them to get to play.

That company burned all of its good will and trust with me years ago. So sure go ahead and put as many ads as you want EA. I know for sure I won’t be seeing them.

As much as some of us may dislike it when a company does these kinds of things. You can’t really blame them for following the laws of the country that they are headquartered in.

You can blame them for operating there to begin with in cases like Apple in China, but you could hardly blame them for following the laws of the US where they are headquartered for example.

If the law of the land where the headquarters is requires them to give up the data they do have to partner nations then they don’t really have much choice in the long run if they want to continue to exist.

I think Rossmann tends to be a drama king about things sometimes, but the general overarching message he is trying to get across, sometimes poorly, is something I usually agree with. This included.

The whole thing reads like just some lawyer on retainer was sent a memo telling them to send a threatening sounding letter and no further thought or research went into it on Googles or the lawyers part.

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately when it comes to Googles products, especially the Chromecast since they started shoving it so full of ads with their Google TV launcher.

Most of the flexibility I like about Android TV over say tvOS is that it allows me to customize things like the launcher or use SmartTube over the official YouTube app. The thing is the only time I care to do such things is to get away from the mess Google made of the product or service, usually with ads, to begin with.

So it becomes this circle of I prefer it only because it lets me undo things that it pushed upon me that its competition doesn’t in the first place.

Long winded way of saying I’m not real sure what Google could do with the new model that would make it compelling to me beyond a bottom of the barrel product for a guest room or something, and even then the Onn 4k is cheaper and more or less the same experience, over just replacing it with an Apple TV when the time comes.

Never worked for one of the big tech firms, but I have been in the working world for ~16 years and one of the few things anyone that has been around for awhile can and will agree on is you don’t talk about salary within earshot of the boss, you don’t badmouth company decisions within earshot of the boss, you don’t talk about politically charged topics, and you certainly don’t combine 2 of those 3 and protest company decisions on politically charged issues literally in the office.

You also don’t do those things on company provided equipment, software, or services. If you want to bitch about something the company is doing, you go out to lunch or do it after hours, preferably without written or video evidence.

While I think it is gross that Google fired them for this, given the history of the company almost encouraging such things, I can say these people just got a hard lesson that most of us learn about the corporate world long before we make it to working for the likes of Google.

Rightly or wrongly freedom of speech, assembly, etc protects you from the Government, not your boss. And your boss is a petty little ego maniac that controls your livelihood, so best to stay out of his gaze on matters you know he/she would view negatively where at all possible.

As much as I like Linux, and use it almost exclusively on desktop/laptop, every time I see something like this I am reminded how much I hate the fact that Apple of all companies is about the last bastion of commercial and consumer operating systems who isn’t trying to derive the bulk of their revenue from advertising.

Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Because that gives the user as much or more control over the device as Apple themselves have. One of the fairly consistent things about Apple over the years has been a desire to maintain tight control for themselves over the products they make.

Shhh, don’t tell the out of touch politicians that teenagers are not exactly known for their care about if something is against the rules or not.

It is more fun to watch them be shocked on TV when they can’t explain why their ideas don’t work.