flop_leash_973

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flop_leash_973 ,

If they aren't going to charge for access otherwise then I don't think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.

flop_leash_973 ,

I still don't understand how Google thought it had a chance at success. They had the same model as Onlive had 10 years prior. It ended up failing for much the same reasons.

flop_leash_973 ,

Whats crazy is Hangouts is still going (in the form of Chat and Meet). I've had the same group chat going with a few buddies on it for years and years now. And it is still better than anything outside of Signal in my opinion for messaging.

Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp ( www.reuters.com )

Amazon (AMZN.O) is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company's plans.

flop_leash_973 ,

I wouldn't be able to find a use for Alexa if they were paying me $10/month to use it.

flop_leash_973 ,

I wonder how long it will be before they start giving discounts on tickets for interacting with the ads a certain number of times during the flight.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information ( futurism.com )

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

flop_leash_973 ,

Then it sounds like the "web" tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.

flop_leash_973 ,

If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.

flop_leash_973 ,

Crypto is a textbook example of why we as a society can't have nice things. To many people are selfish and self serving, and not enough people are willing to ostracize those types of people from society for such actions.

flop_leash_973 , (edited )

Disclaimer: The below rant does not include things like healthcare where choice in the market is either not a thing or not possible. Lest someone think I am being absolutist. It is purely railing against the average consumer widget, not grandmas oxygen tank refills.

That depends on how many people want them.

Companies will make, or stop making/doing, nearly anything if the money for doing it goes away. But not enough people want "dumbphones" bad enough to stop buying "smartphones".

Just like not enough people want small phones to stop buying the big ones. Or not enough people want the price of Netflix to go down to stop paying for Netflix, etc. Consumers in general need to learn the power of and build up the mental discipline to do without when the available options aren't what they want. Apple, Google, etc can't force you to buy it from them after all.

Companies prey on the inability of the consumer to go without when they find the terms of the deal distasteful to great success. Large chunks of every companies marketing department think about nothing else.

The real "sin" in all of this is there not being enough smaller players around to fill those smaller segments, because we kept buying from the company that bought up all of the competition years ago despite finding those practices distasteful.

Companies, and politicians, have figured out that the average majority is all bark and no bite. And the average majority would be wise to start to figure that out.

flop_leash_973 ,

I agree. The world requires way to much subtlety to function well for everyone for single truth ideas and ways of doing things to work at large scales.

flop_leash_973 ,

Not everyone can be right about everything.

Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ ( www.theguardian.com )

More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.

flop_leash_973 ,

I use AWS to host a far amount of servers and some micro services and for them if you don't build the backup into your architecture design and the live data gets corrupted, etc you are screwed.

They give you the tools to built it all, but it is up to you as the sysadmin/engineer/ dev to actually use those tools.

EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again ( www.techspot.com )

EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...

flop_leash_973 ,

Good thing seeing that a game is published or developed by EA, or one of its subsidiaries, is 9 times out of 10 enough for me to not bother with the game to begin with. They don't make a thing that is worth dealing with them to get to play.

That company burned all of its good will and trust with me years ago. So sure go ahead and put as many ads as you want EA. I know for sure I won't be seeing them.

flop_leash_973 ,

No way in hell would I do that if I had that kind of knowledge. Look what happened to Snowden for doing something like that.

He would still spend the remainder of his life in federal prison or be executed if he ever steps back on US soil or the soil of someone with an extradition treaty that is looking to get some brownie points.

That wouldn't happen to all of them, but I bet you there are some working on some classified mess that would be found and made an example of in short order to shut the others up.

flop_leash_973 ,

As much as some of us may dislike it when a company does these kinds of things. You can't really blame them for following the laws of the country that they are headquartered in.

You can blame them for operating there to begin with in cases like Apple in China, but you could hardly blame them for following the laws of the US where they are headquartered for example.

If the law of the land where the headquarters is requires them to give up the data they do have to partner nations then they don't really have much choice in the long run if they want to continue to exist.

flop_leash_973 ,

I think Rossmann tends to be a drama king about things sometimes, but the general overarching message he is trying to get across, sometimes poorly, is something I usually agree with. This included.

The whole thing reads like just some lawyer on retainer was sent a memo telling them to send a threatening sounding letter and no further thought or research went into it on Googles or the lawyers part.

flop_leash_973 OP ,

Last time I had a Roku you could block the static home screen ads with PiHole. So as long as they don't start serving these from the same domain as something you need for the box to work right or start hard coding a different DNS server into the OS that won't respect your local network settings it will probably keep working.

But if they are not doing one of the above to get around DNS adblockers yet, they will eventually in the name of those sweet sweet ad dollars. Best to just start planning an exit from Roku products if you care about such things.

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