The company made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to AI Overviews …
… making the feature rely less heavily on user-generated content from sites like Reddit
So it prefers the results that Google normally deprioritizes? I guess we have that in common
It also explicitly states in the posted screengrab that the opting-out user’s workspace won’t contribute to the underlying models. How would that be separate from using info on their workspace as training data for any kind of model? My interpretation of that is the data would be used to inference on the models, not train them.
It dominates the market in vertical tabs IMO. I tried Vivaldi, Firefox extension, the works. The best-feeling alternative was Safari
Correct me if I’m wrong, but on PS5 you’ll need to send individual images to a friend, to be able to download them from your chat session on the mobile app. Or on Xbox, you’ll need to pay for OneDrive or it’ll be removed after 90 days. Both more annoying from my perspective.
Good news, they have had a better fix for several years now. About a month after the PS5 came out, so what you described was possibly an actual factor in it.
As an Apple hater; Apple Music. Cheaper, good cross-platform frontends, more equitable to artists (though by no means satisfactorily so), has a Wrapped equivalent (though who actually cares). Maybe Spotify added something it doesn’t have in the several years since I switched but, I doubt it
You put forward a couple of different points - I’m not conflating things, just hoping to skip past the constitutional one (which in my opinion is non-sequitur) to address the other. I might have boiled it down to a one-liner, but here’s some light further reading/viewing which may help to scratch below the surface of why this corruption as you put is probably happening: https://youtu.be/Fhgm5b8BR0k
If Tiktok doesn’t deserve to spy on Americans, is it the counterpoint that US big tech does?
I think we just need to move on from this methodology of data collection. Firefox is often cited as very unpopular because it blocks statcounter tracking by default, social networks have absorbed some search volume too. I do think it makes logical sense that people are dropping 11; I did so myself last year. But this data is likely bad, so it’s pointless to try and extract a reason based on it.
Literally the interference is with Cloudflare, i.e competing silly internet restrictions.
You can easily install a harmless Firefox extension and be blocked from all the same sites, for example.
Practically, the biggest obstacle to overcoming EV suppression is Tesla. They are mainly profitable through sales of carbon credits via various emissions offset schemes, which they sell to other manufacturers such that they can show required carbon offsets by just paying some money. A whole lot easier than upending their business model to actually produce EV’s, and creates a positive feedback loop where Tesla retains position as only significant EV game in town. The EV development happening right now is targeting China, not the US.
I don’t think entry level users are what will be converted, at least first. It’s users like you and me. Users that, for whatever reason, haven’t preferred Linux historically. I’ve tried the new popular distro every few years to ‘check in’ with Linux, and each time I ended up running into some issue which reaffirmed my preference for Windows sooner or later.
Until I tried Debian 12 a couple of months ago, that is. Between nonfree drivers, Wayland and its compatibility throughout the ecosystem, and updates to GNOME, it’s honestly been refreshingly user-friendly and feels more optimised than Windows.
Importantly, in searching for alternatives to Windows-only software I use, I didn’t have any problems and in one case actually ended up finding new software I prefer.
The peace of mind of my OS not trying to sell me something or trying to farm my engagement is nice too, but not why I’d recommend giving it a try. I’ve always gotten behind it in principle support of free software, but now I can get behind it actually using it. I’d recommend it because it genuinely seems better in my general use.
This makes me sad. I had so much fun growing up learning about compression and encoding, ripping, tagging, spectral analysis. Listening to 24/96 vinyl FLACs on my parents old stereo with my pinky up. Hanging out with a bunch of 40-year olds on IRC. Good times, man
You’re right. But then it’s also their cost incurred. Their decryption keys to revoke on exploited devices, and their engineers to try and come up with a software patch for their hardware-level CDM. It’s costly was my point.
Well the good news is Widevine is very expensive, and doesn’t work. It’s not as simple as right click / save target as, but Widevine decryption is why you can torrent any of the shows/movies on those streaming services.
Everytime someone requests a video on those services, the service pays a fee to Widevine. $0.50 USD per request for the first 30k requests/month. How much you think Google is willing to pay someone for you to watch cat videos for free?
It’s a false dichotomy. We can’t make it so only Google can spy on us, and conceding to Google has no impact on other malware. Besides, it’s the largest advertising company in the world by a large margin, with a near monopoly on online advertising. It probably wouldn’t even make a difference.
That’s pretty cool! But hell, I bet even Siri could do it. My gripes are with the google VA in its current state. I can’t just call out “Hey Bing” and get an answer from my phone unfortunately
The only thing I want it to do is use simple context when searching something for me. If I have a sports event in my calendar, tickets saved to my wallet, and I say “Hey Google, what time does the {team} match start today?”, it currently gives me a garbage answer linking to a Reddit post where someone asked that a year ago or something. The ecosystem already understands the info I want in this situation, they have all the data points, theres no sophisticated logic required to connect them. But Google Assistant can’t do it, making it pretty useless other than for setting alarms and stuff. If your question isn’t on the list of discrete preprogrammed functions then it just searches what you asked, which for my case should actually be “'{team} fixtures” or something. So it’s often faster to just search manually in the first instance rather than trying to learn the obfuscated scope of what Google assistant can actually do.
Firefox blocks statcounter tracking by default. It’s an inherently flawed metric, though Firefox is definitely in the minority still vs Chrome