There are numerous benefits in IoT / smart home and ubiquitous computing. Used in the right ways it can make your life so much better and even save lives. It is just sad to see all the wasted potential, the greediness and straight up noncompliance with basic human rights and needs for simplicity and privacy in its design.

Funny enough, it got me into reading some threads of people reverse engineering air fryer APIs (didn’t expect that to ever happen) and it reminded me again of how great and compassionate some people are. Makes the stupid cat and mouse game seem even more stupid when 3 guys in their spare time can rebuild a 5 layer deep authentication stack with some unknown Philips / Xiaomi server that probably needed tens or even hundreds of engineers to build in an obfuscated manner in the first place.

Manufacturers: To deliver solutions to nonexistent problems. Free money.

Politics: To save our economy. It can only survive if people buy new stuff all the time. Could also come in handy as surveillance measure one day.

People: Oh how cool, I can monitor my chicken nuggets from my couch ~5m away.

This is not a selling point but rather a unfortunate but comprehensible circumstance. Nexus and later Pixel phones have not been anything more than reference hardware without significant sales until the Pixel 6. Google has been a software company that has greatly benefited by android being an “open” platform you could contribute to and use their services on.

The App / Cloud ecosystem has gained a lot of competitors, so Google is doing their best to reverse this course of action by pulling more and more functionality out of AOSP into Play services and now into Cuttlefish. We can only wait and see how other phone manufacturers react to this.

Would be great indeed, but “more neutral” in this case seems to mean vendor agnostic by abstracting the hardware away and have anything run on a closed source google container.

The GrapheneOS team is very aware of their dependence on google. They are planning to either find an OEM for their own line of hardware or a brand whose phones support their requirements other than google. That being said, it will complicate work a lot, but for now it would be to early to jump to that conclusion.

Also, Google couldn’t care less if <1% of buyers flash a custom ROM / OS on their phone, this is about tying the android ecosystem closer to google in general. Most other big phone manufacturers know this and are trying to come up with their own solution, like Huawei had to because of the ban when the orange man has been president the first time.

“The ultimate goal of Google Beam — and it’s manifested on HP Dimension — is to feel like you’re there,” Andrew Nartker, general manager of Google Beam, said during the briefing. “You feel just like you’re there at the table working together … It’s all meant to bring us together and ultimately feel like we’re completely physically present.”

OK but why? There are not a lot scenarios where I would need or even want to spawn a hologram of a single coworker. Looks a little gimmicky to me.

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Thank you for your insights, they seem valuable at least to me, who is even further away from being a lawyer lol.

the normal way that Corpos avoid situations like this lawsuit is by making qualified statements, estimates within a range, non absolute statement

Would be nothing less than crazy stupid if they were to be found guilty for letting marketing be to honest / lawyers be to negligent.

Now again I am not a lawyer, but in many kinds of cases… well, anything that is entered as evidence, could potentially become public knowledge…

So, forcing this lawsuit may also serve as a way to make such records more widely available.

Would be great to see some antitrust level cases against LLMs using this - as well as hopefully even clearer and more qualified cases - as precedent.

There will be a lot of businesses who feel the (justified) need to hide the entrypoint to their infrastructure behind a VPN.

Wait, this can’t just be another useless DNS blocking, or is it?

Edit: Didn’t get the joke first lol

I’m shocked that this many people feel the need to disobey a rule that is only there to help the children. Next step must be to ban VPNs altogether, and enforcing all Internet users to be identified with their real identity (/s obviously).

Google has scraped Reddit and has basically all of its information, as well as the… basically the entire rest of the internet.

This is a big problem in the making, not only for reddit but for everyone. Apart from the societal implications of people getting their information from a non-deterministic system, deployed by one of ~5 big corporations whose intentions clearly differ from the ones of the people, while also feeding back details about themselves, losing their ability to think straight for themselves, impeding connections to other humans, …

Apart from all that, it will render primary and secondary sources irrelevant. This kills reddits and everyone elses business model on the web as we know it today.

Current lawsuit is over that ‘No’ being a lie, as well as whether or not it was an intentional lie, as in, they knew it would, and lied, and said it would not.

So this might as well be a blatant lie. What I tried to say before is that this question in this particular case is far from being able to deliver a solution to the root cause of reddits own misery. They had a good run, better and longer than most other big platforms out there. But this lawsuit is only some millionaires feeling the need to blame someone for wobbly stocks.

Reddit made it unmistakably clear that they don’t want traffic from people using their API and that they don’t want google or anyone else to scrape “their” content, which I’m pretty sure will have significant impact on SEO. They also have made sure to please potential shareholders by banning a ton of users and communities before their IPO.

As a result, the quality and quantity of discussion on the platform has lowered, some people even tried to mass delete their posts and comments which makes some threads to appear like ghost towns, which has also revealed the insane amount of inorganic communication (bots and the like).

So how exactly did google kill their userbase?

I think you are mixing this up with the function of the executive goverment in a state with alleged separation of powers (one of the fundamentals of democracy).

A president himself sending out forces is in fact not normal.

I always choose the side of science, but coming to false conclusions and questioning things later on has always been a part of that. Labelling scientific findings as ground truth in a world that changes so rapidly, especially in media and its consumption, seems a bit ignorant to me. Porn not being harmful is such a conclusion imho.

Also noporn does not equal nofap and people use those topics interchangeably on purpose it seems. Sadly that one guy I picked seems to be just a troubled soul with the right intention but wrong execution which is being used as an excuse for people to justify their own behaviour, which is comprehensible.

But then again, probably I myself am wrongfully shouting in the void here. I am not a bigot trying to convey people into thinking what they are doing every day is inherently bad for no reason, but a guy who thinks that this is an overlooked and trivialized topic. As with every controversial and emotional topic though, discussing this with a hivemind is difficult to impossible.

You are purposely missing the point. Just research instant gratification.

His vita is partly problematic, but he clearly states that this claim goes against the research currently available. One of the reasons is that it would be hard to justify necessary studies morally. Another one is that porn is a giant industry with many “independant” contractors who want to justify themselves. Also, the hyper availability of porn as we know it today over the internet is a pretty young phenomenon. As a comparison, there was a time not too long ago when smoking was advised by doctors.

Anyways, it’s always funny to see the cognitive dissonance of people when it comes to negative effects of instant gratification like with drugs, social media, overeating or any other thing that can seriously fuck with your mind when done wrong or too early in life, but porn always somehow gets trivialized out of that exact discussion. Maybe it’s because it affects us all, just like covid, and that did not foster a healthy culture of discussion as well iirc. It also kind of reminds me of stoners trying to tell you that weed is not addictive.

There are enough issues in our modern society where this could, not alone by itself, and as we both stated just as a scientifically unproven claim for now, be part of the explanation. I’d say let’s wait until AI gets shoved into this equation as well for long enough to see what it does to the people lol.

It does imho. You are somewhat forced to use your imagination and explore what you like both mentally and physically instead of hyperfixating on a screen, which will lead to a better experience alone and with someone else.

Aylo was purchased by private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners in 2023, whose partner Solomon Friedman told reporters in a call Tuesday that the law is “ineffective” and “dangerous,” noting concerns over privacy. “It’s a matter of putting our values first, and that means communicating directly with the French people to tell them what their government is refusing to tell them,” Friedman said, according to Politico.

Despite the name, of course they would be against this. I mean they are right in their reasoning, but laws like these will hurt their revenue as well, which might as well be the reason for their stance on this after all.

You are, but not as instant gratification, but as the result of work of some kind.