I was recruited as an R&D engineer by a company that was sales focused. It was pretty funny being recruited like a new sales hire: limo from the airport, etc. Limo driver didn't work direct for the company but she did a lot of work for them, it was an hour drive both ways to/from the "big" airport they used. She said most of the sales recruits she drove in were clueless kids, no idea how the world worked yet at all - gunning for a big commission job where 9/10 hires wash out within a year. At least after I arrived on-site I spent the day with my prospective new department, that was a pretty decent process. The one guy I didn't interview well with turned out to be the guy who had applied to the spot I was taking and had been passed over. As I was walking in on my first day he was just finishing moving his stuff out of the window-office desk he was giving up for me, into a cube. I can understand why he was a little prickly.

A whole article about how terrible this is, then towards the end they got clarification from Google and, surprise surprise, it was all an overreaction and they were fear mongering. “This update is good for users: they can now use Gemini to complete daily tasks on their mobile devices like send messages, initiate phone calls, and set timers while Gemini Apps Activity is turned off. With Gemini Apps Activity turned off, their Gemini chats are not being reviewed or used to improve our AI models. It’s just giving Gemini more local assistant abilities.

Batch scripts run on my locked-down work laptop. Powershell requires administrator privileges that I don't have. I don't make the rules, I just evade them

Didn’t he pay a hitman to murder a couple of people?

Did I say that it did? No? Then why the rhetorical question for something that I never stated? Now that we're past that, I'm not sure if I think it's okay, but I at least recognize that it's normalized within society. And has been for like 70+ years now. The problem happens with how the data is used, and particularly abused. If you walk into my store, you expect that I am monitoring you. You expect that you are on camera and that your shopping patterns, like all foot traffic, are probably being analyzed and aggregated. What you buy is tracked, at least in aggregate, by default really, that's just volume tracking and prediction. Suffice to say that broad customer behavior analysis has been a thing for a couple generations now, at least. When you go to a website, why would you think that it is not keeping track of where you go and what you click on in the same manner? Now that I've stated that I do want to say that the real problems that we experience come in with how this data is misused out of what it's scope should be. And that we should have strong regulatory agencies forcing compliance of how this data is used and enforcing the right to privacy for people that want it removed.

This is not a typical home or office printer, very specialized.

How's that going? I just read that there are several lawsuits about these SSDs loosing all data.