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Google is going ‘all in’ on AI. It’s part of a troubling trend in big tech

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    Guess my next phone is coming from Oneplus or Fairphone.

    bUt AnDrOiD!!!

    ...can be chained to its desk and limited, I agree.

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    Luckily, 90% of what Google goes all in on fails. I remember Stadia and Google Glass.

  • Nothing I can do to resist?

    I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.

    Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

    Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems "not secure enough" (it's lacking TMP 2.0)

    This means you can get a great deal on one of these "inscure pc"... but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. ... and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.

    Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

    Currently, many banking apps won't run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.

    Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).

    Gmail? I don't remember when I opened mine the last time...

    Today things like "email reputation" make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better "reputation".

    My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.

    You are arguing for the sake of arguing...

    TPM has nothing to do with any privacy invasion, AI, or anything bad really. It was conceived by a computer industry consortium called Trusted Computing Group (TCG). It evolved into TPM Main Specification Version 1.2 which was standardized by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

    Advancement in technology will always happen, and if your prose is to stop progress, you are up by your own by your own choice. Your argument about TPM is moot.

    Quite a lot if banking apps are compatible. If your banking app doesn't work, use the jail/sandbox compatible mode.

    The fact that Linux has 2, 3, 4, 64467% has nothing to do with what is available at your disposal. Strawman fallacy here.

    No one talked about hosting your own email server, there are alternative to the fucker-corps with privacy in mind.

    You, my friend, are already defeated, but rest assured there are a ton of us still on our feet.

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    The rich are cashing in our tax dollars to try to automate their control of an enslaved human race.

    They will do anything besides just pay taxes and contribute to society

  • Nothing I can do to resist?

    I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.

    Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

    Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems "not secure enough" (it's lacking TMP 2.0)

    This means you can get a great deal on one of these "inscure pc"... but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. ... and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.

    Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

    Currently, many banking apps won't run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.

    Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).

    Gmail? I don't remember when I opened mine the last time...

    Today things like "email reputation" make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better "reputation".

    My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.

    We can, but part of it is accepting that our tech will be a decade or two behind. Its not the worst thing. Life is more convenient now, but all in all i think it was better before.

    The masses will go for convenient, and thats ok. You have near total control of how you live your life; you just cant have your cake and eat it too is all

  • Guess my next phone is coming from Oneplus or Fairphone.

    bUt AnDrOiD!!!

    ...can be chained to its desk and limited, I agree.

    Since when does Oneplus support Calyx or Grapheme?

  • Switch over to the Qwant search engine for your basic search and a good email provider like Tutamail or Proton. I have for a few months and there really is no reason to go back. It's simple and it works.

    For search I'm really happy with Kagi

  • And it’s fucking awful.

    DLSS? No way lol. DLSS often gives better image quality than native resolution, and gives you a choice in image quality vs performance increase options. It's a god send.

    DLSS is even worse cancer than TAA

    You've clearly never used DLSS, at least not DLSS3 or 4. I've got a 4070 Super and Ryzen 7 and I use DLSS by choice literally every time it's available.

    Lolwut? No it doesn't? Yeah it turns off TAA so it might look sharper at first, and if you turn off the ugly ass sharpening then it's playable but literally any other option looks better than TAA, including TXAA from early 2010s lol.

    Do you maybe mean DLAA? I Have an RTX 3090 and a 9800X3D. It's ok. When the option exists I just crank up the res or turn on MSAA instead. Much better.

    If you mean DLSS, my condolences. I'd rather play with FXAA most of the time.

    The only game I'll use DLSS (on Transformer model+Quality) in is CP2077 with Path Tracing. With Ray Reconstruction it's almost worth the blurriness, especially because that game forces TAA unless you use DLAA/DLSS and I don't get a playable framerate without it, but also don't want to play without Path Tracing. Maybe one day I'll have the hardware needed to run it with PT and DLAA

  • Switch over to the Qwant search engine for your basic search and a good email provider like Tutamail or Proton. I have for a few months and there really is no reason to go back. It's simple and it works.

    I'm self-hosting my mails; no need for another third party that will decide whatever whenever. The major difficulty is the decades of things that are reliant on the old one.

    And I just said that google works fine for search, despite people claiming it's on the decline, broken, unusable, etc. That's not to move toward qwant, who are no less shady, burn money (sometimes coming from public money…), and despite wonderful claim of an autonomous index, completely stop working when Bing is down. As far as recommendations for search engine goes, google (and Bing for that matter) are far less disingenuous.
    All usable search engines these days are backed by the big ones anyway. Something like https://openwebsearch.eu/ would be a better alternative, assuming it follows on its promises.

  • Lolwut? No it doesn't? Yeah it turns off TAA so it might look sharper at first, and if you turn off the ugly ass sharpening then it's playable but literally any other option looks better than TAA, including TXAA from early 2010s lol.

    Do you maybe mean DLAA? I Have an RTX 3090 and a 9800X3D. It's ok. When the option exists I just crank up the res or turn on MSAA instead. Much better.

    If you mean DLSS, my condolences. I'd rather play with FXAA most of the time.

    The only game I'll use DLSS (on Transformer model+Quality) in is CP2077 with Path Tracing. With Ray Reconstruction it's almost worth the blurriness, especially because that game forces TAA unless you use DLAA/DLSS and I don't get a playable framerate without it, but also don't want to play without Path Tracing. Maybe one day I'll have the hardware needed to run it with PT and DLAA

    What are you talking about “temporal+quality” for DLSS? That’s not a thing.

    DLSS I’m talking about. There are many comparisons out there showing how amazing it is, often resulting in better IQ than native.

    FXAA is not an AI upscaler, what are you talking about?

  • the fuck does service now even need AI for?

    I hate any company I work for that uses ServiceNow. And now it's getting worse??

    Need? None. There are certainly areas that "ai" tools excel at but what I saw was a company literally forcing it into every aspect of the system. Every single booth at the conference, regardless of the topic, made a point to talk about agentic AI. It was my first time there and I left feeling like I got screwed, because I missed out on quality content that I could use in lieu of AI that I'll never use.

    If I were I prospective customer, I'd be looking at other solutions for sure.

  • “Bad” is SN’s claim to fame. Everybody hates it. Apparently, the worse they make it, the more companies will throw money at them.

    I think the biggest problem, is anytime you try and create a universal, low/no-code platform that anyone can use, it results in a poorly optimized, sandboxed, half cocked product. Sure, you can do anything with the platform, but half the time it's like shoving a square peg in a round hole. I have had to write bad code and processes because that is the only way to get somethings done in the platform.

    Also, if I go out and custom create an app, like say I create a fully loaded app for HR, and it's similar to a product they sell, they will charge you for that product.

  • Luckily, 90% of what Google goes all in on fails. I remember Stadia and Google Glass.

    I remember some people very vehemently telling me that I was dumb to be skeptical of Stadia, that it really was going to just take over the industry...

  • The rich are cashing in our tax dollars to try to automate their control of an enslaved human race.

    They will do anything besides just pay taxes and contribute to society

    AI is not needed to automate the control of the human race. I feel like it's already essentially automated from the rich's perspective.

  • Luckily, 90% of what Google goes all in on fails. I remember Stadia and Google Glass.

    In that case, we should encourage google to go all-in on climate change, racism, and war; they should back the conservative party as well. Then 90% of those will fail.

  • I remember some people very vehemently telling me that I was dumb to be skeptical of Stadia, that it really was going to just take over the industry...

    I still don't understand how Stadia got out the door the way it did. It was the exact same business model Onlive tried back in the day. And it predictably failed the exact same way.

  • AI is not needed to automate the control of the human race. I feel like it's already essentially automated from the rich's perspective.

    it is "automated" by some "peasants" they are already paying "too much". maybe they want to reduce those costs too.

    also AI serverparks may consume so much power that they are more costly (for now?), but at least they don't question your commands. maybe that's how they see it.

  • Not sure how far back you’re talking but for a VERY long time they have been and continue to be in the business of what feeds the machine.

    Why do you think we have computers in our possession 24/7? Not because we wanted it, but because they told us we wanted it and it enabled us to be available to feed the machine 24/7. You can work more. You can buy more.

    Social media? Feeds the machine.

    Television? Feeds the machine.

    Cars? Feeds the machine.

    Phones. Telegraphs. Fucking lightbulbs.

    All used to feed the machine.

    True, in a broad sense. I am speaking moreso to enshittification and the degradation of both experience and control.

    If this was just "now everything has Siri, it's private and it works 100x better than before" it would be amazing. That would be like cars vs horses. A change, but a perceived value and advantage.

    But it's not. Not right now anyways. Right now it's like replacing a car with a pod that runs on direct wind. If there is any wind over say, 3mph it works, and steers 95% as well as existing cars. But 5% of the time it's uncontrollable and the steering or brakes won't respond. And when there is no wind over 3mph it just doesn't work.

    In this hypothetical, the product is a clear innovation, offers potential benefits long term in terms of emissions and fuel, but it doesn't do the core task well, and sometimes it just fucks it up.

    The television, cars, social media, all fulfilled a very real niche. But nearly everyone using AI, even those using it as a tool for coding (arguably its best use case) often don't want to use it in search or in many of these other "forced" applications because of how unreliable it is. Hence why companies have tried (and failed at great expense) to replace their customer service teams with LLMs.

    This push is much more top down.

    Now drink your New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.

  • it is "automated" by some "peasants" they are already paying "too much". maybe they want to reduce those costs too.

    also AI serverparks may consume so much power that they are more costly (for now?), but at least they don't question your commands. maybe that's how they see it.

    That's absurd, the AI is not more costly than a human worker, it's just not as capable. The energy cost of a human alone is greater than that of any AI agent that would take its place. If you really think that AI costs that much energy, you just don't have a sense of scale. The server-farm costing a lot overall does not at all mean that an individual API call is expensive.

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    I've been playing Watch Dogs Legion so I know how this ends.

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    What if everyone started talking about how “woke” Apple, Amazon, and Google are? Maybe it would pass, then. Remember, we don’t need to define woke, we just need to point and say the magic word and GOP politicians will vote against it.
  • Browser Alternatives to Chrome

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    I've been using Vivaldi as my logged in browser for years. I like the double tab bar groups, session management, email client, sidebar and tab bar on mobile. It is strange to me that tab bar isn't a thing on mobile on other browsers despite phones having way more vertical space than computers. Although for internet searches I use a seperate lighter weight browser that clears its data on close. Ecosia also been using for years. For a while it was geniunely better than the other search engines I had tried but nowadays it's worse since it started to return google translate webpage translation links based on search region instead of the webpages themselves. Also not sure what to think about the counter they readded after removing it to reduce the emphasis on quantity over quality like a year ago. I don't use duckduckgo as its name and the way privacy communities used to obsess about it made me distrust it for some reason
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    In this year of 2025? No. But it still is basically setting oneself for failure from the perspective of Graphene, IMO. Like, the strongest protection in the world (assuming Graphene even is, which is quite a tall order statement) is useless if it only works on the mornings of a Tuesday that falls in a prime number day that has a blue moon and where there are no ATP tennis matches going on. Everyone else is, like, living in the real world, and the uniqueness of your scenario is going to go down the drain once your users get presented with a $5 wrench, or even cheaper: a waterboard. Because cops, let alone ICE, are not going to stop to ask you if they can make you more comfortable with your privacy being violated.
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    A carrot perhaps... Or a very big stick.
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    Nlow that was a great show. I always wanted in on that too. Back when Radio Shack still dealt in parts for remote control cars.
  • WhatsApp provides no cryptographic management for group messages

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    Just be sure to add only the people you want to be there. I've heard some people add others and it's a bit messy
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    Only way I'll want a different phone brand is if it comes with ZERO bloatware and has an excellent internal memory/storage cleanse that has nothing to do with Google's Files or a random app I'm not sure I can trust without paying or rooting. So far my A series phones do what I need mostly and in my opinion is superior to the Motorola's my fiancé prefers minus the phone-phone charge ability his has, everything else I'm just glad I have enough control to tweak things to my liking, however these days Samsungs seem to be infested with Google bloatware and apps that insist on opening themselves back up regardless of the widespread battery restrictions I've assigned (even was sent a "Stop Closing my Apps" notif that sent me to an article ) short of Disabling many unnecessary apps bc fully rooting my devices is something I rarely do anymore. I have a random Chinese brand tablet where I actually have more control over the apps than either of my A series phones whee Force Stopping STAYS that way when I tell them to! I hate being listened to for ads and the unwanted draining my battery life and data (I live off-grid and pay data rates because "Unlimited" is some throttled BS) so my ability to control what's going on in the background matters a lot to me, enough that I'm anti Meta-apps and avoid all non-essential Google apps. I can't afford topline phones and the largest data plan, so I work with what I can afford and I'm sad refurbished A lines seem to be getting more expensive while giving away my control to companies. Last A line I bought that was supposed to be my first 5G phone was network locked, so I got ripped off, but it still serves me well in off-grid life. Only app that actually regularly malfunctions when I Force Stop it's background presence is Roku, which I find to have very an almost insidious presence in our lives. Google Play, Chrome, and Spotify never acts incompetent in any way no matter how I have to open the setting every single time I turn Airplane Mode off. Don't need Gmail with Chrome and DuckDuckGo has been awesome at intercepting self-loading ads. I hope one day DDG gets better bc Google seems to be terrible lately and I even caught their AI contradicting itself when asking about if Homo Florensis is considered Human (yes) and then asked the oldest age of human remains, and was fed the outdated narrative of 300,000 years versus 700,000+ years bipedal pre-humans have been carbon dated outside of the Cradle of Humanity in South Africa. SO sorry to go off-topic, but I've got a big gripe with Samsung's partnership with Google, especially considering the launch of Quantum Computed AI that is still being fine-tuned with company-approved censorships.
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    redfox@infosec.pubR
    Yeah, damn, I always forget about that...just like they want...