DarthYoshiBoy

My kids have child phones on Google Fi which allows me to shut down their Internet with a couple of button presses. Are they simple devices if I geofence their internet access off while they’re in school? I somehow doubt it, but it does meet the definition as you’ve stated it, which in turn means it is as @originalucifer said, not exactly cut and dry.

I accidentally misclicked this article and reported it as spam while I was trying to report some prescription drug spam. Hopefully it’s not adversely affected. I wish there was an Undo on that action.

You or I might, but companies have a constant flow of new middle management who want to make their KPIs this quarter and will shove their own mother in front of an oncoming train to get there. Corporations don’t learn, doubly true for corporations like Apple who have basically captured an audience within their walled garden, the motivation is always all the money now, not some money consistently forever.

Even when you have a company like Samsung with their exploding battery fiasco. Sure they have protections now in place against designing a new product with bad batteries, but give it some time and they’ll do it again when a middle manager (who wasn’t there the first time) ignores the recommendations of their engineers and the company guidelines so they can save $0.001/phone by using a slightly inferior battery design and net that neat bonus for keeping costs down. It will always happen.

Not for all the money in the world could you convince me to touch him, let alone what you propose.

The best that the SMS protocol can tell you is whether the message was delivered and even that isn’t a requirement. SMS has delivery receipts, it does not have read receipts.

I don’t have a problem with people who are okay with it getting it.

My apologies if I implied that you did, that was not my intent.

But they aren’t really an alternative to, say, YouTube. […] I just would prefer to pay for them with money rather than with data.

Sorry, that was my point though, without the tracking, you’re not getting YouTube, or most of Google’s services as we know them. The Google secret sauce is that they know enough about their users to curate an experience per user. That’s largely why competitors to Google services rarely take off, the competitors lack enough individual user knowledge to make an experience that is better than what Google can offer for most users.

The services more or less are what they are because of the breadth of what and how Google knows to shape the experience for an individual, and that’s why Workspace accounts still track what they do. Google would be providing their paying customers with a lesser experience if they genericized everything you’re interacting with in those content related services due to a lack of learned data and behaviors per user. Which is probably not what the average user wants if I had to guess?

Heck, even paid YouTube Premium still needs your tracking data or it’s just going to show you whatever popular rage bait is trending day to day with the general public? Or maybe just an unfiltered firehose of all the hours of nonsense that is uploaded every minute to the platform? I guess you could treat it as a whitebox video hosting site, but where does the money come from if YouTube can’t make guarantees to advertisers that their ads will be seen by people who might care about the ad, and how do the content creators make money if YouTube can’t get advertisers on board, and who is making interesting content if they have to pay to host it themselves because advertisers aren’t paying that cost for them? I think my point is that if you pull the tracking and user knowledge out of the Jenga tower, the whole thing just crashes down.

I actually consider the tracking of my browsing/watching history to be integral to the search experience. It’s why when I search for Python, I get results about the programming language and not snakes both in Search and YouTube. Or why Commodore gets me the computer and not naval crap. Or any number of other things that steer their search results towards things in my interests and away from junk I don’t care about.

An ad blocker in my browser keeps anything else they’re targeting at me through their scraping out of my hair while also blocking a load of what they might learn about me from third party sites, so I’m not terribly bothered what they think they know about me, they’re not getting access to the bulk of the stuff I’d consider personal, and the junk they do track is kept so that they can get me results that will matter to me instead of generic crap.

I think there’s a general misunderstanding that Google tracks stuff so that they can sell it, when the reality is that they keep it so they know where to target ads (that I never see) and so that they can provide results relevant to my interests so I’ll keep coming back to (not) see ads. They don’t sell the info they collect, they sell people the ability to run ads against that info. If they were selling the info itself, they’d be killing the golden goose. So long as they’re contractually not allowed to look at my mail and files, I’m good with the rest of what they take because it 100% goes into making a better experience for me using their services so long as I’m running Firefox/uBlock.

That said, if you don’t want tracking being used to improve your search experience, a Workspace account indeed won’t get you 100% away from it. I tried using DDG for a while and I just couldn’t hang with it. Its lacking the little dossier that Google has on me made it so that I constantly had to work harder to find what I wanted vs a quick search on Google, and that’s what you’d get without the tracking and info collection. It wasn’t worth the tradeoff for me, maybe it is for you though?

if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.

It’s called Google Workspace and it’s decently nice. You can get a basic business starter account for something like ~$7 per month/per user + whatever you want to pay to register a domain each year. Takes a little bit of know how and you need to do some lifting for yourself that Google would otherwise shoulder for you, but it’s pretty nice and has more benefits beyond just the privacy implications, like 30GB of account storage and Google Meet conferencing for up to 100 people without time limits. On the downside, some stuff that needs to track your usage to function properly (Like YouTube video recommendations) just do not work with a Workspace account because they don’t track your preferences so they don’t have a way to build a recommendation profile for you.

I’ve been doing it for years now and I appreciate it a lot. In the rare instances when I need to go do something on my old Gmail account it’s shocking every time how bad the unpaid versions of Google products have gotten.

I am so glad, that there is no chance of ever meeting one in my country

Lucky 😆

Very true. Perhaps my statement which continued on beyond what you quoted didn’t make it clear, but I did point out what you said: “You’ve got brakes, but you’re without any of the assistance that the car normally provides” as well as stating later that you’ve got “naught but your unaided foot on the brake peddle” both of which were intended to say that it’s pretty hard to brake in most cars these days without power brakes.

I don’t know how the Cybertruck breaks down on the easy <-> difficult manual braking spectrum, but I imagine that given the high gross vehicle weight and large wheels, it probably steers more towards the difficult end of the spectrum than the easy. Such a dumpster fire of a vehicle.

It is a ridiculously proven and safe technology.

In Planes, where there are 3 or more levels of redundant power and hydraulic systems with an ability to fail down to a limited mechanical operation mode if all the other backup systems fail. It’s proven because they designed it with a stupid level of failsafes.

There’s no redundant power in the Tesla Drive By Wire system, if the power is cut, you lose the ability to steer. You’ve got brakes, but you’re without any of the assistance that the car normally provides. It’s so fucking stupid I can’t believe it’s allowed on the road. If anything goes wrong that cuts power while you’re in motion, you’re suddenly captive in 3.3 tons of stainless steel without crumple zones, without the ability to steer, with naught but your unaided foot on the brake peddle to determine your outcome. It’s nothing like the multiple layers of failures you’d have to endure to find yourself in trouble in a plane both for the power and the hydraulics.

At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.

Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors. What are the left supposed to do? Pull a Trump and pretend that the laws and systems that make our country don’t exist and just say that what they want is law and ignore that half the country is electing morons who will fight them at every turn? That’s not how it works and frankly I wouldn’t want it to work that way because it’s just incredibly dangerous. They’re trying to work within a system where the right has learned they can con half the country into believing they’re doing their job while they sit back and do their damnedest to ensure that the government doesn’t function at all because that’s the only way that conservatives can stop progress at this point with their platforms being as unpopular as they are.

The left is definitely more open to considering regulation. It’s not even close. The right thinks that regulation is a four letter word and they’re generally not a fan of those either. It’s disingenuous to both sides everything. Much of the time where the left allows a carveout for vampirism, it’s because it’s the best compromise they can mange to a given end given that the right is out there swabbing their throats and getting all hot and bothered waiting for daddy Drac to come and give it to them, not because it’s their preference that we allow unfettered late-stage capitalism to destroy lives. Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors (and I am well aware that there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides of the isle, so 🤷‍♂️)

…and lest anyone think that this problem isn’t solved with government regulation, I invite you to look at the medication situation in nearly any other country in the world where by and large they are not afraid of regulation for the same drug companies that are fucking us sideways in the US and see how much cheaper and better their access to medications is solely because they’re willing to support that maybe there is a greater public good than shareholder profits.

This is of course their MO. They were making Insulin for pennies per vial for years and selling it for hundreds of dollars per. It’s funny how they’re allowed to keep doing this to us and they probably always will because the US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it. Obesity and Diabetes are a couple of the largest killers around, to say nothing of the losses in Quality of Life they cause. It’s just insane that we refuse to regulate prices for drugs that would relieve immeasurable suffering and death because CEOs gotta have a nicer Yacht or how is life any fair?

It depends. In the early days of the Android ROM scene, Twitter was the best place for news. Cyanogen and all the crews basically announced their new releases exclusively on Twitter. There has been a similar vibe for other scenes over the years as well. Discord is largely taking over that space these days, but I miss the simplicity of following one or two people whose updates I cared about a bunch over the new reality where I’m in 30 Discords and they’re all chock full of notifications for endless nonsense I care nothing about.

My 2016 Nissan Leaf is 4400lbs, which is more than my larger (but still not that big) 2016 Mazda CX-5 at ~3500lbs. Both manage to fit my family of 5, but the Leaf is far less accommodating and it weighs a good deal more. Small EVs are still pretty substantial. A Kia EV6 which is roughly the same size as my CX-5 weighs 5500lbs. You add a lot to a vehicle when you add an EV battery.

The 90/90 rule strikes again!

I’ll be honest, I could sometimes find a helpful answer there, but for about the last 2 years it has taken 3 reloads of a page at least before it actually loads any content, otherwise it just sits there at a plain white page showing their logo and I usually give up rather than try to get lucky with a page actually loading.

How the fuck this headset weighs over 600 grams?

Because plastic isn’t a premium material. Apple users expect fancy alloys with glass everywhere, Apple can’t very well show up with a plastic headset and ask $3500 for it, they need all that extra weight to convince people that they’re getting a premium VR AR SPACIAL COMPUTING device that is unlike anything ever done before. It’s all part of the grift.

I’m a reformed VR enthusiast and I have got to say that it’s all a hell of a gimmick, but it’s just a really neat gimmick. Without any hard-light tech or something to make stuff that you can actually interact with it’s all just Wii-mote waggle style nonsense that abstracts things that should be button presses into complex motions constrained by physical reality that our computers/keyboards/mice/controllers allow us to escape.

Banning Social Media FOR KIDS. Is just a quick means to spy on what ADULTS are getting up to on the Internet. Right now if you don’t want to ID yourself to go see cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok, you can just sign up for an account and go searching for cat pics/videos. With this bill, if you want to go find cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok in the state of Florida, you’ll have to submit a government ID to verify that you’re not a kid, and I’d believe for about as long as I can breathe water that the linking of my real identity/government ID with a social media account will have no negative real world outcomes.

Cybersecurity is something that almost nobody takes seriously. I used to say that nobody takes it seriously until they’re hurt by their poor cyber hygiene, but these days the insurance policies pay the same either way so companies/people still do the bare minimum and call it a day.

I’d much rather pay a VPN provider to be out of that jurisdiction than ever give anyone anything that concretely ties my online persona to my actual identity and it’s just incredible that lawmakers so fundamentally misunderstand how this all works that they don’t know it’s that easy.