deliriousdreams

Thanks for the heads-up. Didn’t know this existed.

Sounds like you should just set up your own instance and IP block as you see fit.

I’m sure this will make people who use it feel better, but as a form of protest it does nothing. Unless you’re gonna install this extension on a bunch of public computers.

There’s a lot of people claiming “no one wants this”.

Thing is, people loved this when they introduced it with Google Now back in 2012. They literally used to trawl your inbox and tell you when to expect packages, when you had appointments, when your flight and hotel were booked for/when to leave for the airport.

All of that was useful information and it was free. Later their assistant could call to book you a table at a restaurant or add things to your shopping list or whatever. Some of this functionality started off very clunky, but it could absolutely be useful. But slowly but surely people started realizing that they were the product and that in order for Google Now and assistant to do this stuff it had to be reading emails and processing information in the cloud. We didn’t have devices that could do that kind of processing on phone.

After backlash (and likely because it wasn’t making them any money because they hadn’t figured out how to monetize the product yet), Google got rid of Google Now and Google Assistant took over.

it did some of the same things but distracted users from what was missing with flashy new hardware and smart home things. Lots of people loved that stuff too.

Then Sonos sued and forced them to kneecap their products. Suddenly the honeymoon was over in a big way. Some of the most basic smart home features were broken and in such a way that people who used them were irate.

Some of those integrations and functionality returned eventually. But right in the middle of that Google launched Gemini and it sucked at most all of it. It keeps getting “better” supposedly. But for a lot of smart home users the magic has been lost. They want what they had and lost and Gemini isn’t even a reasonable facsimile of that.

So it’s more that people are frustrated with Gemini and angry at Google for killing another service they found useful.

People still want technology to make their lives easier and more efficient. But they also want privacy and for things to just work. Google hasn’t made a product that just worked in a long time and AI isn’t going to be it.

I’m sure that app developers who want to sell user data because it is big business will find a way to do so, yes.

Phones for the vast majority of people are a black box. Most of the users have no idea how their apps work or what data is going where and they don’t know how to check. People who work in cyber security, or the tech field (engineers, coders, developers etc) who’s jobs revolve around this type of thing know how to check and generally take steps to avoid apps and services that siphon up this kind of user data.

I know little to nothing about the Linux phone. I haven’t tried it. I haven’t delved into what it can do and why it’s “not ready for prime time”.

So all I can do is extrapolate from what we already know which is, these apps request permissions that a lot of people give them without thinking about it. People do this on windows and Mac too. Humans and their lack of understanding/preference for convenience are the main problem. That and there’s no regulations that hold these app devs accountable.

These apps aren’t breaking the TOS of the Apps stores they’re on.

My hope is that a lot of the Linux phone apps will be FOSS. That way the code can be independently audited. That would be better than the alternative.

Not with that attitude we don’t.

Yeah. Typo. Seems to happen a lot when I’m typing fast on a phone screen. Sorry.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ukgd0gIWd9gpV6bOx2pcSHsVO6yIUqbjnlM4ewjO6Cs/edit?usp=sharing&ref=404media.co

This is the link to the full list provided in that article but it may also be paywalled by 404 Media which I am a subscriber to. It’s also got more than 1K 10K entries on it.

A lot of these seem to be mobile games, fitness apps, photo editing apps, and prayer apps though.

I’d say the haptics thing is pretty true. And Bluetooth connectivity seems to be a hit or miss thing with their controllers. Some people seem to have had a lot of problems with it, just looking at comments on this and other threads, but I never have and I’ve had 3 of their controllers.

I think you should try the 8bitdopro3. I have the 8bitdopro2 and the only reason I haven’t bought the 3 is because I’ve spent so much money over the years buying these things and the thing the pro 3 does that I would want is have working back paddles that are mappable. I don’t have problems with connection or anything like that when I play docked from 5-8’ away and my controller is solid on steam OS. About the only problem I do have is that I sometimes forget to charge it, and the mapping software for different control schema doesn’t work on Linux (which is fine mostly because I set it up once and forgot about it).

Who could possibly have seen that coming. It’ll be Trump supporters who donate next.

Yeah. I wasn’t sure it would work for your use case necessarily, but I did remember seeing that a version of the Walmart onn box was available in Europe, so I didn’t want to discount it altogether.

Either way I do hope you find what you’re looking for and if I come across suggestions that might work I’ll try to post them here.

Possibly? I don’t know for sure because I can’t find a store front selling it, but it does appear that these devices are region locked and that there are people in Asian countries sharing ways to end around the region lock.

No. It looks like it has a different name.

https://tv.mythomson.com/en/Thomson-Streaming-Box-Plus/270

To be fair, I believe that’s the “Walmart” one op talks about in the post. I believe they do sell a version of this same set top box in the UK and possibly other parts of Europe. So it may be a viable option still.

This is a threat. They know that they’re using the stock market to fund their greed and that anyone with savings tied up there (Retirement funds that are invested in the market) will be on the hook. Plus the tax payer money they’re going to ask for because they’re “too big to fail”.

Sigh. This article is all over the place.

The headline suggests that payment processors/AI companies/retailers are fighting about the collection of shopper data.

AI obviously doesn’t collect the kind of data that would be useful to the retailers or even the payment processors. So it does stand to reason that the retailers would be a little miffed about “agentic AI” insinuating itself as the middle man between them and shoppers, effectively cutting them off from that data flow.

But that’s not actually what’s happening. It seems like (potentially), the AI companies want to sell “agentic AI shopping” to the retailers and possibly payment processors? But these entities want information about the shoppers that the AI doesn’t collect and the quibble is over whether the AI can be made to collect that data?