I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.

It wasn’t the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.

lol, Jesus. It is like what a screen writer would come up with for a movie that contained a terrible company run by terrible people doing stuff so outlandishly terrible everyone watching would think “the absurdity of the terrible is how you know it is made up”.

We are going to move away from Google, by basing our new future on AOSP, which is also primary maintained by Google…I smell another FireOS level product on the horizon. Still Android, but worse.

I used to think the idea of a phone that is also my desktop would be really cool. But then I got to thinking just how locked down iOS and to a lesser extent Android are compared to Linux/Windows/MacOS, and decided I wouldn’t use my Pixel as a replacement for my desktop or laptop even if the feature was there.

There are a lot of things at Apple that I, as the paying customer, would rather Cook care more about than AR/VR boondoggles.

It would be better to not allow Google to have a major stake in the control of the Chromium project itself. Same for Android, force them to spin AOSP off into a nonprofit or sell it to EFF or something and forbid them from having a huge stake in it.

Let them use it for their own products, but remove their financial influence over the underlying software.

He might need everyone working 60 hour work weeks. But that doesn’t mean anyone should do it.

While this is nice, I would really like to see more fully independent options that are not just a proxy for Google/Bing. I realize that is a lot easier said than done, but this kind of solution is not providing a real alternative in anything but name only. Google/Microsoft fully control the APIs being used. so this only exists so long as those they are trying to provide an alternative for allow them to exist. Which will not scale if they are anything but a blip on the radar.

Sounds to me like Amazon is reducing the value proposition of their product. For me, additional roadblocks to being able to enjoy something they way I want when I have paid for it reduces the value of the product itself.

For example, if a DRM free book in an standards compatible format costs $20, then the DRM version I can still download for offline viewing is worth $10. The DRM version I can’t download is now worth more like $1-$5 depending on how badly I would want to read it while still supporting the author.

And yes, ebooks from the major sellers aren’t worth much to me and I rarely rent (because you’re not really buying) them.

There might be things that are better these days in the technical sense. But there is always value in having something “good enough” that is freely available and compatible with nearly everything that has speakers to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.

I wish I could get found guilty and still be able to negotiate on equal footing with the prosecution about what my punishment was going to be.

As the general rule I feel the same about more or less all of the “AI” that is available to consumers from the likes of Google, OpenAI, etc.

It just seems more like a different way to do things with digital assistants or search engines that we have already been able to do for years.

The world of mobile phones is a real world example of what we avoided on the PC back in the day when the IBM BIOS got reverse engineered, allowing for someone to put out an IBM compatible PC without having to pay the tithe to big blue first. Not that IBM didn’t do their level best to put those efforts in the ground with their lawyers and the courts as soon as they found out about it. Thankfully the legal system of the time didn’t allow that to happen.

It has been pretty depressing to me that the tech literate have been so easily lulled into accepting such things in the name of “cool toys” and “security” virtually everywhere in modern life besides the PC/laptop/server spaces.

Phones, TV set top boxes, smart TVs, IoT gear. They are all a cesspit of locked down propitiatory and gate kept gardens where nothing happens without the gardens keeper getting a cut and having final say over everything.

This sort of control and gatekeeping from the likes of Google, Apple, and Qualcomm was not something that was hard to see coming a mile away, yet we all collectively let it happen anyway.