tjhart85

Losing access to personalized YT would suck, but losing decades of emails would suck even more (when I initially got GMail, I imported all my old emails in … I guess I should probably look at making a backup periodically, like I used to). I share your sentiment that I fear what these companies are going to do next in the pursuit of more money they can burn and/or give to shareholders as they continue to tank their reputations.

I, personally, don’t see that happening, but I can easily imagine them making it a TOS violation to use adblock and then killing your account if you continue to do so :-/

Same with Google’s ads in general. For a long time they were whitelisted by default on just about every adblock list out there because they were so unobtrusive it didn’t make sense to bother blocking them, especially when you compared them to the other ads that were common at the time. They were also generally relevant ads, so people actually did click on them and use them since it actually related to the thing they were searching for.

They’re obviously more profitable now, but you have to wonder by how much and if they’d be a more trusted company today (and what’s that worth monetarily) if they hadn’t gone down this race to the bottom.

ETA: Part of what I mean is that now they create things like Stadia and most people didn’t even bother trying it because they knew it’d hit the Google Graveyard in a few years. Had Google been a more trusted company, people may have been willing to give it a try and they could possibly have printed money since by all accounts the service was actually pretty good.

Right?! Super easy to be “privacy focused” when you just flat out refuse to acknowledge anything as personally identifiable information!

Ah, my apologies for the assumption, it’s been almost a year but I’m still too used to Reddit apparently!

Yes, the default launcher had ads, the SHIELD itself didn’t, but I also didn’t like any of the 3rd party launchers I used but I don’t remember specifically why. Then, the SHIELD stopped booting so I didn’t want to buy another one and went with the ATV instead.

As I mentioned, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to someone who knows they’d regret not having the cast functionality, but, if you just want a device that works very well and doesn’t ever have so much as a hiccup during navigation, it’s been great!

I would still recommend the SHIELD for someone that wants cast or who wouldn’t have a problem with (mostly) relevant ads being shown on the device (stock).

Yeah I used to have a PC and a Harmony remote that would send macros to a custom script and Kodi would do different things or it could switch to Netflix and … Like, we just want to watch a movie or TV show not have to perform tech support whenever Netflix changed their webpage!

My SHIELD would just randomly restart itself until eventually it stopped coming back online.

I definitely got my monies worth out of it, but didn’t like that a device with no ads all of a sudden became a device with ads (and this is a Google thing not an Nvidia one, but still)

You specifically said you use a 3rd party launcher. You know why you specifically mentioned that.

We’re a non-iPhone household and went with the AppleTV when my Nvidia SHIELD died.

Ads were getting put on the SHIELD and I definitely didn’t want to buy another one because of that and it has been a while since its had a refresh, so went with an AppleTV instead.

The device itself is fantastic, the UI is so smooth and so much nicer. OTOH, I miss being able to cast to the TV more than I expected. It works decently with the Macbooks though (we’re a weird household … like Macs, hate iPhones).

So … if ya’ll have iPhones or don’t care about casting, I’d definitely recommend an AppleTV with Plex (the Dropout, Youtube, Disney+ apps are all good too).

ETA: Apple is also making some pretty awesome TV content as well and IIRC you’ll get a couple months free with the purchase … verify that yourself though in case they’ve removed it, but Foundation, Severance & See are fantastic shows if you’re looking for something to watch.

I use Synergy for the KB/Mouse sharing.

You basically just load software on all wanted systems and tell the software where their screens are and you can seamlessly move your mouse from screen to screen and system to system. You can optionally allow it to keep the clipboards in sync too.

I got in on it like 10 years ago as part of a crowdfunding campaign, but they’re still around and look to be relatively reasonably priced.

I think aliens would be horrified by so many things we do (or don’t do!) that wearing an entertainment device on your face wouldn’t even break the top 100.

ETA: The guy in the cyber truck though. That might get shown as an example in some of the other items in their list.

Right‽ The brand new Steam Deck Killer! Better in every way, except it costs 3x as much and weighs more because it’s got a giant battery (or conversely the battery life sucks).

Like, no shit you can make something more powerful, finding the happy medium of performance to battery life and then making it cost effective AND actually portable are the most difficult parts of what Steam did and those are the things the competitors just seem to completely ignore.

From what I’ve seen: Linus didn’t ever typically rip into first time contributors, it was usually always the people that he either expected better of or people that just kept submitting crap after crap.

Still sucks to be on the receiving end of it though.

Very true!

At least non-cops can only scope out your place for a future robbing, be a perv or plan to blackmail you.

An officer can do all that and also kill you with an almost 0% chance of facing any consequences!

TFA has an example of a fake warrant being used and the fake being clearly fake but accepted anyways.

I know a few people who happily have ring doorbells in their house as cheap cameras and don’t seem to care at all that all an officer has to do to get INTERIOR footage of their house is to ask for it and they get it no questions asked.
I hadn’t even thought of how easy that makes it for non officers to just do the same thing.

The article, while interesting feels like 3-4 articles copy/pasted together haphazardly

Same, it’s kind of a symbolic gesture since I apparently haven’t used DB since 2018, but still, I cited them sharing files with AI companies as the reason.

I’ve got a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero’s that emulate a mass storage device (basically it acts like a USB drive) that I have connected to 3D printers and my wife’s embroidery machine.

Instead of using it with a network share like in the link, I share the folder with SyncThing.

It’s super convenient to not have to move a USB drive around and can just leave it connected and get the files on there seamlessly.

Even in at will states (which, let’s be honest here, plenty of cities have more people than the population of the only non-at-will state - Montana, so it’s not really even worth the distinction) there is a pretty huge difference between being fired for having red shoelaces and being fired for physically adding a device to circumvent building security or removing a security implementation from your work PC.

Sure! Click the link at the very top of the page! You know, what this entire conversation is theoretically talking about? It takes you to a Home Assistant page and even has some details on their philosophy and links to even more details about their privacy focused philosophy! I thought saying essentially “read the fucking article” would be pretty asshole-ish and wouldn’t contribute anything to the conversation, but I also thought that your question contributed nothing, so I downvoted.

Did that answer your question sufficiently?