bitwise

u/bitwise@lemmy.ca
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Today, I asked Gemini to play my Lofi playlist (my car has smart bullshit 'cause EV) to help my kid relax during a road trip, and it started playing music from the Rocket League soundtrack (and no, it wasn't the lofi releases).

I remember when Google Assistant came out more than a fucking decade ago and it was vastly more capable of correctly interpreting speech, but they just kept cutting its capabilities to save on compute.

Now, Gemini is just as fucking dumb right out of the gate, but you can pay Google a monthly fee to get the "better" version, which I'm sure will only be better for a little while until they make it dumb too and introduce a higher tier to bilk us some more.

It's because they'd be more expensive if decentralized; all of the extra equipment required to transform the output, step down voltage and such would need to be replaced with thousands (millions?) of smaller units that do the same thing at an individual home/building level, requiring a larger trained labour force to install/maintain/replace them.

Personally, I think that would be rad, but most people don't care to learn enough to safely be power engineers and if you're in a 2 year backlog to get your home solar sorted out after a hurricane, you'd probably wonder why they didn't do it this way instead.

Forcing side-loading through hoop jumping is primarily being used to push people towards the easy-mode method of using Google Play. How much longer before your government ID is required to download apps from the Play Store, too?

Microsoft was forced to bundle a browser installer in the EU for something that was definitively less onerous than the new barriers proposed.

Google shouldn't have the right to decide how I install software on my computer, and the idea that we can just install a different OS wasn't a convincing enough argument for the EU, so why is it that you're happy to be told how you can use your property?

Matt Hatfield, executive director of the non-profit advocacy group OpenMedia, suggests the telecoms may be refusing to fold because even if they lose the battle, they will still have made money during the period they were able to charge the fees.

"Over that time, they will collect more revenue than what they expect they'll be fined," he said. "So it's in their financial interest to do it."

We need a law that automatically increases a fine to include all revenue earned directly or indirectly with proof of connection to the violation.

Fines being a cost-of-business is nothing more than flagrant disregard for the just rule of law.

Israel will just launch a campaign through proxy groups and bought politicians calling out Indigenous genocide, then label everyone involved as anti-Semitic terrorists before pushing to curb our protest and free speech some more.