Nope, Chuck Testa!

The best part is if you have Google Home/Nest products throughout your house and initiate a voice request you now have your phone using Gemini to answer and have the nearest speaker or display using Assistant to answer and they frequently hear eachother and take that as further input (having a stupid “conversation” with eachother). With Assistant as the default on a phone, the system knows what individual device it should reply to via proximity detection and you get a sane outcome. This happened at a friend’s house while I was visiting and they were frustrated until I had them switch their phone’s default voice assistant back to Assistant and set up a home screen shortcut to the web app version of Gemini in lieu of using the native Gemini app (because the native app doesn’t work unless you agree to set Gemini as the default and disable Assistant).

Missing features aside, the whole experience would feel way less schizophrenic if they only allowed you to enable Gemini on your phone if it also enabled it on each smart device in the household ecosystem via Home. Google (via what they tell journalists writing articles on the subject) acts like it’s a processing power issue with existing Home/Nest devices and the implication until very recently was that new hardware would need to roll out - that’s BS given that very little of Gemini’s functionality is being processed on device and that they’ve now said they’ll begin retroactively rolling out a beta of Gemini to older hardware in fall/winter. Google simply hasn’t felt like taking the time to write and push a code update to existing Home/Nest devices for a more cohesive experience.

I feel like every article out there is missing this and keeps blaming Windows Update vs an update pushed to a specific piece of software by a third-party developer. I get end-users not understanding how things work but tech writers should be more knowledgeable about the subject they write about for a living.

Time to rebrand as CloudShrike to prevent future fuckups.

You have to tell them that you love them, everytime, or it’s not even close to a proper bye. That’s how you get an in with the HR folks really quickly so you know that they have your back. Work on easy mode, more or less. Like and subscribe for more social lifehacks.

banned

Believe it or not, also Rule 1. Wait, wrong instance.

ding ding ding The microwave analogy they were going after makes no sense. I mean, there are semantics at play and I could have explicitly mentioned I wasn’t talking about firmware in order to exclude things that are essentially calculators and clocks but I didn’t anticipate someone going the direction of absurdist bespoke microwave OSes given that firmware alone is enough. Even at that level, you have examples like Seiko Epson inventing precision timed ticket printers for the 1964 Olympics - they’re still dominant in the arena of commercial printers to this day, yet they have allowed other manufacturers to adopt their ESC/POS language as a standard that’s still widely used across brands today, allowing for feature parity on the software functionality side from competing brands while Epson competes on the hardware reliability side. (This isn’t an endorsement of Epson, their consumer printers are trash because they’re not Brother laser printers lol.) Spoiler alert, the price tag of a commercial printer doesn’t have much to do with it being compatible with network standards (???! - standards being the key word here) and has more to do with reliability and general feature sets (in that order once competition exists for a device, see Epson vs feature identical Beiyang (insert other generic clone brand here)) and the same would hold true even if we decided to network our microwaves in some scenario where we’re also automating food going in and out of the microwave.

All of that said, if I were to modify what I was saying while keeping the sentiment the same, I would just simplify it by saying “no hardware vendor is allowed to lock their hardware to running specific software” (doesn’t mean they have to provide technical support for errors in another vendor’s software) since that gets at the root of the issue. But, going back to the original sentiment, open standards that have nothing to do with specific hardware are clearly better. Look at Apple vs x86 vs ARM, specifically Apple during the period between PowerPC (at least there were partners here, so the chips had lives outside of Apple hardware) and their M-Series - they wouldn’t have had an excuse not to offer something like BootCamp during the x86 era given that their OS clearly was able to run on off the shelf PC components and the inverse with Windows and Linux being able to run on their hardware was also clearly true. Is it a good thing that Apple hardware is once again locked in to running only their software?

Pail Pot

Ahh, so that’s where the phrase “Mowed them down” came from.

Here me out, iMessage on any OS, wait, no, not just that, how about no hardware vendor is allowed to produce software that only runs on their hardware and for any given core function the hardware must prompt the end user with a competitive selection of capable apps to accomplish said function (to be downloaded and installed upon selection) instead of coming with a default option enabled. Let’s get crazy and say that any hardware vendor must allow software they produce for their own hardware to be uninstalled and replaced by software of the end user’s choosing.

I’m talking some “treating United States v. Microsoft” as legally binding precedent" shit.

Meanwhile, regulators be like… .

(Side note: what’s up with the bullshit where Apple makes an Android-native AppleTV app that will install on a phone fine but is blocked from running once it detects it’s not an AndroidTV device? Apple acts like it would be an undue burden to make iMessage for Android (and pretends they didn’t make the decision to not release an Android client with their hardware business in mind) but their Apple Music app somehow runs better on Android than it does on iOS…)

This seems like the thing that could be accomplished with just a QR code or NFC tag. Sleep As Android (alarm app) allows you to set up alarms so that you must get up and scan a QR code or tap a NFC tag in order to stop an alarm - no brick needed. It’s not a huge leap to expand that functionality to other use case scenarios (maybe this already exists, I haven’t looked into it). It seems kind of silly to have a service and retail device for something that can be handled locally on-device with BYOH for the unlocking mechanism.

edit: others have pointed this out already

The inverse of this is where subscription services that previously had no ads for paying subscribers then add in ads on paid plans while also increasing the fees associated. It’s a pretty standard practice, NYT included. Adblocking is necessary.

It helps with the ergonomics of needing to lean in to read Teams on a shitty dim low resolution display they somehow sourced from 20 years ago. HR is thoughtful when it comes to this kind of stuff.

I’m aware of how it turned out, but, for the sake of clarity, I was speaking about a month prior to that outcome where the President of South Africa made it clear that he would now allow Putin to be arrested in the event that Putin chose to attend in person. Assuming his statements were straight forward, I even get the logical underpinnings of what he was saying here - it just seems an odd contrast for the SA government to turn around and champion the ICC months later. It’s hard to take a country that recently publicly pragmatized away the need to uphold the legitimacy of ICC authority seriously when they’re now using the ICC as a threat. Another country would be better to lead the charge here on behalf of the ICC.

Setting aside (but stating) my stance that Israel’s policy of collective punishment against innocent Palestinian civilians is completely wrong and thus unconditional support from the US government for Israeli actions is also wrong - South Africa isn’t a good faith actor here.

What was South Africa’s official position last summer, as a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC and thus a nation obligated to arrest those with an ICC arrest warrant that step foot in their territory, about honoring their obligation to execute an arrest on the ICC warrant issued for Putin for war crimes should he step foot in their territory? It almost seems like they’re trying to distract from something or are maybe working towards mutual goals with some other entity (or entities) behind the scenes… Hmm.

John Kirby then further elaborated, saying “We have not seen the Israelis employing dodecahedron formations consisting of smaller Koch snowflake arrangements - if we see this kind of serious business, we’ll need to assess our red line. We remain vigilant but have seen no evidence of them using this kind of major strategy.”

Thanks for the levity/chuckle.

I’m not convinced that Democrats wouldn’t just happily go down down with the ship, so to speak, if they believed stopping the genocide was the singular issue that people’s votes hinged upon. I don’t know where that really leaves us all either, given how horrible the alternative is. If the Citizens United decision hadn’t of happened we might have politicians that didn’t act beholden to far-right Israelis, but, even considering the unfettered money poured into politics, it’s ridiculous the hold that they seem to wield over both main parties in the US.

Biden’s red line just so happens to be an infinitely elastic rubberband.

Removed by mod