ryan

🥸 well you see, you own a digital license to watch the movie so long as we have it available, have you read our terms of agreement–

Agreed that this is scummy marketing, though. The only real way to own media (legally) anymore is through physical copies, and even then maybe there’s some provision that makes a DVD illegal due to license shenanigans… but no cop’s gonna bust down your door for owning an illegal DVD of Aquaman.

It’s amazing how something so innocuous can provoke such a viscerally disgusted reaction in me.

Technology was a mistake. It’s time to return to the wilderness.

So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…

The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.

The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.

So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.

However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.

I think this is mostly what you want, but as far as I can find online (and I’ll test it again later today) it no longer shows traffic warnings and your current speed like the destination maps does. I think it used to, though, which is what’s annoying about this whole situation.

I actually lost this feature for a while - it used to be under the hamburger ≡ menu as “Just Drive” and then the hamburger menu disappeared, and I’ve just recently found it again as a widget.

So, yeah, Google kills all good things and I’m sure it won’t last for much longer, but it’s nice in the meantime.

OK so I’ve read this whole thing and I’m still a bit confused, so help me please: this refers to the “Driving Mode” which hides all my apps and gives some weird simplified interface, right?

Because there’s also a “Driving” mode which is only accessible via a widget (why, Google) which gives you a map while driving without having to specifically enter a destination. That one’s staying, presumably?

Important context autotldr missed:

The incident happened when the engineer was programming the software that controls the robots, which cut car parts from aluminium, The Information reported.

Two of the robots were disabled, but a third was inadvertently left on. As it went through its normal motions, it caught the worker in its claws.

Yikes, that should be checked multiple times before someone gets close to the clawed aluminum cutting robot. Failure of process, I suspect.

As we’ve been tracking, Google is now beginning to roll out “Profile discovery” in Messages for Android to establish your name and photo across the RCS app and others.

This is part of “Profile discovery,” which appears in Messages Settings > Advanced once rolled out to your phone. It is a Google Account-level setting that you can turn on/off. Google notes what phone number is associated with your name and profile image, with the ability to change things.

Ok, so good things:

• I’m glad it’s not auto-pulling from your Google profile, because you may not want that data actually visible to everyone who has your phone number.
• I guess it makes it more like iMessage which is cool (?)

Thoughts:

• So our text messages (which, I know RCS technically isn’t but for all intents and purposes it is a replacement and serves the same purpose) are becoming more chat-like.
• At the same time, Google has made Google Chat more like Messages, visually.
• If the intent is to eventually combine the two, the advantage is that Google has a stronger and more unified messaging platform, but the downside is Google’s RCS implementation is even more customized to the point it’s harder for others to hop on.
• If the intent is not to combine the two, I don’t see why making them look almost identical and yet having two separate apps is at all a good thing for Google. Their user base remains fragmented.

Hopefully this is some secret ongoing messaging solution cleanup plan by Google. I won’t hold my breath, but a small part of me still longs for the return of a Hangouts-esque combined system.

Looks like I’ll be part of the family soon! The Vivosmart does look like what I’m after - small activity tracker for small wrist that provides me all my bodily metrics for my weird metrics-loving self so I can cross reference it with MyFitnessPal (calories and macros) and Daylio (mood).

So… let me get this straight. Google sucks and Pixels are only sold in some countries, so their solution is to reduce Fitbit devices to those same countries?

This is foreboding. Could this be the start of either a rebrand of Fitbit or, worse, a culling of the line in favor of Pixel smartwatches?

Google, I swear if you fuck with my Fitbit I’m adding it to The List (right under Play Music and Inbox). I don’t want a smartwatch, I never wanted a smartwatch. I want my compact little step tracker that gives me a ton of metrics data.

This is almost certainly totally out of date.

Today, the confusing, intimidating pile of Google Messaging services is bigger than it has ever been, with Google Chat, Google Messages/RCS, Google Voice/Project Fi, and separate messaging services in Photos, Messages, Pay, Assistant, Stadia, Maps, and Phone.

• first three - still around
• Photos - yep
• Messages - duh
• Pay - I couldn’t tell you as moved out of Pay when Wallet rebranded to Pay and then Google inexplicably released a second app called Wallet
• Assistant - I think this technically doesn’t count since you can’t message people
• Stadia - RIP, thoughts and prayers to the five people who used it
• Maps - Took a bit of clicking around to find a business near me that used it, but, yeah. Still there.
• Phone - The most baffling thing on this list. Even ArsTechnica in the article doesn’t know if this is the same service as the above Maps chat or not. I’ve never seen this, so hopefully it was a short lived experiment that never took off… but maybe someone else here has seen it recently?

Welp, never mind, not that out of date.

These clowns want to push a messaging standard. Jump to RCS, Google says. Hey, Google. How about you standardize your shit first. Nearly all of these could be collapsed into a single messaging platform with little integrations into your other services via the Messages app (aka sent as links and displayed as integrations in compatible devices).

You’re telling me I can meet a potential partner, have video calls with them, get scammed out of money, and tweet about how sad I am, all from the same platform? Sign me up.

I haven’t used a Samsung and I know the settings options are different, but on Android it’s Settings > Battery and then you can check which apps are draining the most battery. You can check for anything you don’t have open that might be draining in the background.

If the phone is draining that battery only in use though, it might just be the screen. What if you reduced screen brightness?

2024: Google Assistant formally deprecated in favor of Google Bard, now appearing on all new Android phones
2026: Google Bard development ceases and is left to languish as Google promotes their new Google Mobile Co-Pilot
2027: Bard finally ends service, Google Mobile Co-Pilot is rebranded to Messages Co-Pilot and is integrated into the Google Messages app for some reason so you have to basically text it for help
2029: Google Assistant is relaunched with new technology and Messages Co-Pilot now only responds to tell you to use Google Assistant instead

Boo, uncool. Shouldn’t have announced it at all if it were that unfeasible.

I realize that letting people outside Tumblr read Tumblr posts means losing ad revenue on new users, but keeping Tumblrites on Tumblr and allowing them to bring in Mastodon/Lemmy/pixelfed posts would keep the existing users more glued to the platform (more ad revenue). I guess they’re gunning for new users primarily.

bendy phone: goofy as hell, but I imagine the tech would eventually be used in smartwatches and such. Imagine a smartwatch where a larger portion of the band is the display and it can be wrapped around both big and tiny wrists. Kind of a neat idea.

moto AI: oh boy, another copilot. I hope one of these ends up being the phone assistant I was promised last decade. Is it so much to ask to have what is essentially a phone secretary that will tell me if I have conflicts when trying to schedule a meeting, or remind me that I told someone I would follow up with them via text, or suggest to me at bedtime that I need to set my alarm earlier because I have a morning meeting I haven’t accounted for and I usually set my alarms one hour before the first meeting of the day? Just. All the data is there. Please, big tech, you can read all my data anyway, just make something useful out of it. I will buy whatever stupid phone with a stupid custom OS that has an actual semblance of proper assistance.

“transforming crinkled receipts into pristine documents” yeah that’s neat, I don’t really scan and keep paper documents but I can imagine it will be very useful to a certain market.

Frankly, I like the idea of connecting this stuff up, even the silly ones like refrigerators and washing machines, for two reasons:

1. monitoring - if my fridge is having temperature issues, I would like a warning
2. notifications - my ADHD brain tends to forget to empty the dishwasher or laundry dryer and having a notification on my phone would help me remember.

Of course, my appliances are not smart enough to actually connect in the first place, and it’s not worth buying new ones simply for this functionality, but if it’s there then I can see some of the appeal. :)

The matchmaking feature is kind of cute. For some reason I thought Tinder was a hookup app and not a dating app. Has that changed or was I just always misinformed?

Separately, to answer your question… It’s generally been assumed I suppose, if a product is invented and people use it, that means it’s providing some positive impact. Like asbestos did initially.

What this research says is that there are products that make the users’ lives worse, and would be even worse than that if they didn’t because their peers are using the products and they would be left out.

Like, the ideal scenario for happiness might be if Tiktok didn’t exist, but since it does it’s now a choice for school aged kids between “using Tiktok and absorbing harmful messages” and “not using Tiktok and feeling left out and possibly being ostracized by their peers”. The very existence of some products cause usage simply because it’s the least bad option of using/not using.

Asbestos is strong, cheap, has great fire insulation, sound insulation, heating insulation, fire protection, and resistant to water. What a wonderful building material! It wasn’t until later that we discovered the health hazards (or, maybe they were known but it only became widely and publicly known later, I’m not sure).

Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about the new app. The old one was basically the same but still somehow a little interesting. I don’t know if it’s the new font, or the sickly grey-green they decided to use, but the redesign just looks kind of anemic and sad.

And yeah, the whitespace sucks, everything is so spaced out and you have to scroll. I always thought good web design (and now app design) was ensuring all the important stuff was visible before having to scroll. Google has apparently gone to a rival school where the tenet is “always be scrolling”.