The real creepy thing is the way they force you to give up your data with these products. If it were just useful add ons, it wouldn’t bother me, but the fact that Gemini requires you to turn activity history off for paid plans for the promise they won’t train on your data or allow a person to view your prompts is insanity. If you’re paying $20 for Pro or 249.99 for Ultra, you should be able to get activity history without training or review or storing your data for several years.
I have a pixel watch, and my main use for it is setting reminders, like "reminder 3pm put the laundry in the dryer". It's worked fine since the day I bought it.
Last week, they pushed an update that broke all of the features on the watch unless I agreed to allow Google to train their AI on my content.
My Android phone comes hobbled unless I give it all my data to be used for training data (or whatever). I just asked, "Ok Google, play youtube music." And it responded with, "I cannot play music, including YouTube Music, as that tool is currently disabled based on your preferences. I can help you search for information about artists or songs on YouTube, though.
By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity."
I'm new to Android, so maybe I can somehow still preserve some privacy and have basic voice commands, but from what I saw, it required me to enable Gemini Apps Activity with a wall of text I had to agree to in order to get a simple command to play some music to work.
We need consumer protection laws that protect against functional regressions like this -- if a widget could do X when I bought it, it should keep doing X for the life of the product and I shouldn't have to "agree" to an updated license for it to be able to keep doing X.
International coordinated action by consumers taking a company to small claims court at the same time around the world to see redress about defective products would be an effective strategy.
Yeah my pixel watch went straight into the trash. All set. Based on my conversations with folks working on these price products, it seems they simply can’t fathom why anybody is so concerned about privacy when giving it up yields so many useful products and services.
That’s something that really pisses me off - I WANT to use the Gemini pro that is £1.50 more than the £7.99 subscription I was originally paying Google; I said no to using my data to train the AI, and I can’t have history. That’s just ridiculous and means I won’t use it for anything more than maybe images. I’ve had a discount with Claude and that works well for me (audhd translator mostly).
Lots of things in life seem to be the majority having to go along with the decisions of the minority. I remember in 2012 when Facebook put white chevrons for previous- and next-photo in the web photo gallery product and thinking how this one product decision by a handful of punks has now been foisted on the world. At the time I was really into putting my photography on FB and, somewhat pretentiously, it really pissed me off to start having UI elements stuck on it!
Car dashboards without buttons, TVs sold with 3D glasses (remember that phase?), material then flat design, larger and
larger phones: the list is embarrasing to type because it feels
like such a stereotypical nerd complaint list. I think it’s true though — the tech PMs are autocrats and have such a bizarrely outsized impact on our lives.
And now with AI, too. I just interacted with duck.ai, duck duck go’s stab at a bot. I long for a little more conservatism.
This is what happens when you let companies become empires, with the tacit agreement of your "democratically-elected" government. In no sane world should my electricity bill go up because Google wants me to put glue on pizza. Unfortunately, I don't think we live in a sane world.
Microsoft is all about this. You know how they also force stuff you don't want on the OS? Somewhere within Microsoft there might be a dashboard where they show their investors people are using Bing and Copilot. Borderline financial scam if you think about it.
Copy and paste is not working reliably in in windows anymore; coincidentally it's breaking at the same time Msoft is moving to replace all copy/paste with OCR only. It's garbage
I haven't used windows for years but the shear amount of commentary on recent changes and the claims are so beyond beliefs...
It reads like a company that is only there to squeeze money out of existing customers and hell bent on revenues above growth. Like one of those portfolio acquisitions.
I haven't noticed this, also how exactly would OCR copy paste work? In order to copy text I would need to select text, which would mean it's already encoded as text.
That's why this was the year I finally dropped Windows and VSCode forever. Not that hard for me because all the games I play work flawlessly in Proton, and I already used Linux at work.
AI reminds me of the time Google+ was being shoved down our throats. If you randomly clicked on more that 7 hyperlinks on the internet, you'd magically sign up for google plus.
Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30 articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was called to help because the load time for the page had grown from seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag.
It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but I'm tired of the busy work around it.
All that time and effort that went into forcing Google+ everywhere and its legacy is just lots of people accidentally ending up with 2 YouTube accounts from when they were messing with that
The difference was that Google Plus was actually kind of cool. I'm not excusing them shoving it down your throat, but at least it was well designed.
Most of the AI efforts currently represent misadventures in software design at a time when my Fitbit charge can't even play nice with my pixel 7 phone. How does that even happen?
I remember believing Google+ will win because it was quite nicely done. But I guess it never caught on with the masses to be successful in Google's definition of success (Adsense?).
PS: I was thinking that I didn't notice it being shoved down because I was high on the Koolaid. But I do remember when they shoved it in YouTube comments.
The neat thing about all this is that you don’t get a choice!
Your favorite services are adding “AI” features (and raising prices to boot), your data is being collected and analyzed (probably incorrectly) by AI tools, you are interacting with AI-generated responses on social media, viewing AI-generated images and videos, and reading articles generated by AI. Business leaders are making decisions about your job and your value using AI, and political leaders are making policy and military decisions based on AI output.
I do have a choice, I just stop using the product. When messenger added AI assistants, I switched to WhatsApp. Now WhatsApp has one too, now I’m using Signal. Wife brought home a win11 laptop, didn’t like the cheeky AI integration, now it runs Linux.
Visa hasn't worked for online purchases for me for a few months, seemingly because of a rogue fraud-detection AI their customer service can't override.
Is there any chance that's just a poorly implemented traditional solution rather than feeding all my data into an LLM?
Even if my favorite service is so irreplaceable, I still can use it without touching AI part of it. If majority who use a popular service never touch AI features, it will inevitably send a message to the owner one way or another - you are wasting money with AI.
I personally think all the gains in productivity that happened with WFH were just because people were stressed and WFH acted like a pressure relief. But too much of a good thing and people get lazy (seeing it right now, some people are filling full timesheets and not even starting let alone getting through a day of work in a week), so the right balance is somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps… the right balance is actually working only 4 days a week, always from the office, and just having the 5th day proper-off instead.
I think people go through “grinds” to get big projects done, and then plateau’s of “cooling down”. I think every person only has so much grind to give, and extra days doesn’t mean more work, so the ideal employee is one you pay for 3-4 days per week only.
Not for nothing did the endless WSJ and Forbes articles about "commuting for one hour into expensive downtown offices is good, actually" show up around the same time RTO mandates did.
It really gives me the same vibes as the sort of products that go all in on influencer marketing. Nothing has made me less likely to try "Raid Shadow Legends" than a bunch of youtubers faking enthusiasm about it.
It's a sort of pushiness that hints not even the people behind the product are very confident in its appeal.
> And let’s be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
In general, I think we want to have it, just like nuclear fusion, interplanetary and interstellar colonization, curing cancer, etc. etc.
We don't "need" it similar to people in 1800s don't need electric cars or airports.
Who owns AGI or what purpose the AGI believe it has is a separate discussion - similar to how airplanes can be used to transport people or fight wars. Fortunately today, most airplanes are made to transport people and connect the world.
All of my family members bar one use ChatGPT for search, or to come up with recipes, or other random stuff, and really like it. My girlfriend uses it to help her write stories. All of my friends use it for work. Many of these people are non-technical.
You don’t get to 100s of millions of weekly active users with a product only technical people are interested in.
Is it possible to permanently disable Gemini on Android? I keep getting it inserted into my messages and other places, and it's horrible to think that I'm one misclick away from turning it on.
You don't like some features being added to products so you want laws against adding certain features?
I might not like a certain feature, but I'd dislike the government preventing companies from adding features a whole lot more. The thought of that terrifies me.
(To be clear, legitimate regulations around privacy, user data, anti-fraud, etc. are fine. But just because you find AI features to be something you don't... like? That's not a legitimate reason for government intervention.)
I uninstall the gemini app and disable the google app. It seems they are heavily linked so remmoving it may do the trick. As a practice I don't use any google apps if I can find a good replacement so I am not sure if messages is impacted.
This might be obvious but I think the only way forwards is to disengage in services offered by these mega-tech companies. Degoogling has become popular enough to foster open communities that prioritize their time and effort to keep softwares free from parasitic enterprises.
For instance, I am fiddling with LineageOS on a Pixel (ironically enough) that minimizes my exposure to Google's AI antics. That doesn't mean to say it is easy or sustainable, but enough of us need to stop participating in their bad bets to force upon that realization.
No one with a white-collar job in the US can get away from Google and Microsoft. We're forced to use one or the other, and some of us are forced to use both.
That's not to mention all the other tech companies pushing AI (which is honestly all of them).
My Healthcare providers App in Germany refuses to work on anything that isn't a Phone running official Google^tm verified^(r) and hardware attested OS. Same with some banks.
Readit News
Last week, they pushed an update that broke all of the features on the watch unless I agreed to allow Google to train their AI on my content.
I'm new to Android, so maybe I can somehow still preserve some privacy and have basic voice commands, but from what I saw, it required me to enable Gemini Apps Activity with a wall of text I had to agree to in order to get a simple command to play some music to work.
you rented/leased a watch for an undefined amount of time.
Do the terms allow YouTube/Google to use the data collected for any purpose
this is pretty much everything everywhere right now. except local linux mostly.
Car dashboards without buttons, TVs sold with 3D glasses (remember that phase?), material then flat design, larger and larger phones: the list is embarrasing to type because it feels like such a stereotypical nerd complaint list. I think it’s true though — the tech PMs are autocrats and have such a bizarrely outsized impact on our lives.
And now with AI, too. I just interacted with duck.ai, duck duck go’s stab at a bot. I long for a little more conservatism.
They're the ones who are just asking for it ... they, themselves need more forceful training. It's up to us to move slower and fix things.
It reads like a company that is only there to squeeze money out of existing customers and hell bent on revenues above growth. Like one of those portfolio acquisitions.
Source?
Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30 articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was called to help because the load time for the page had grown from seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag.
It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but I'm tired of the busy work around it.
Most of the AI efforts currently represent misadventures in software design at a time when my Fitbit charge can't even play nice with my pixel 7 phone. How does that even happen?
PS: I was thinking that I didn't notice it being shoved down because I was high on the Koolaid. But I do remember when they shoved it in YouTube comments.
It felt like I had some level of control of my feed and what I saw and for the time it existed the content was pretty good :(
Pretty much my sentiment too.
Your favorite services are adding “AI” features (and raising prices to boot), your data is being collected and analyzed (probably incorrectly) by AI tools, you are interacting with AI-generated responses on social media, viewing AI-generated images and videos, and reading articles generated by AI. Business leaders are making decisions about your job and your value using AI, and political leaders are making policy and military decisions based on AI output.
It’s happening, with you or to you.
Visa hasn't worked for online purchases for me for a few months, seemingly because of a rogue fraud-detection AI their customer service can't override.
Is there any chance that's just a poorly implemented traditional solution rather than feeding all my data into an LLM?
we’ll force you to come back to justify sunk money in office space.
Perhaps… the right balance is actually working only 4 days a week, always from the office, and just having the 5th day proper-off instead.
I think people go through “grinds” to get big projects done, and then plateau’s of “cooling down”. I think every person only has so much grind to give, and extra days doesn’t mean more work, so the ideal employee is one you pay for 3-4 days per week only.
It's a sort of pushiness that hints not even the people behind the product are very confident in its appeal.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46096603
In general, I think we want to have it, just like nuclear fusion, interplanetary and interstellar colonization, curing cancer, etc. etc.
We don't "need" it similar to people in 1800s don't need electric cars or airports.
Who owns AGI or what purpose the AGI believe it has is a separate discussion - similar to how airplanes can be used to transport people or fight wars. Fortunately today, most airplanes are made to transport people and connect the world.
Outside of tech circles no one I talk to wants AI for anything
You don’t get to 100s of millions of weekly active users with a product only technical people are interested in.
I might not like a certain feature, but I'd dislike the government preventing companies from adding features a whole lot more. The thought of that terrifies me.
(To be clear, legitimate regulations around privacy, user data, anti-fraud, etc. are fine. But just because you find AI features to be something you don't... like? That's not a legitimate reason for government intervention.)
For instance, I am fiddling with LineageOS on a Pixel (ironically enough) that minimizes my exposure to Google's AI antics. That doesn't mean to say it is easy or sustainable, but enough of us need to stop participating in their bad bets to force upon that realization.
That's not to mention all the other tech companies pushing AI (which is honestly all of them).