If the reporting is accurate, your data is still sent to Google’s servers for processing. This doesn’t appear to improve privacy, it’s more like an extension of the user surveillance business model that Google has pursued in the past decade.

I was in a small town in Maine that did that informally, there were a handful of shops and a ban at one store was applied everywhere. They all had signs warning about the policy. It was apparently very effective.

so if you shoplifted in a Nottingham Tesco’s, be prepared to be banned from Sainsbury’s in Swansea

This got a genuine chuckle from me, I love a bit of good writing in the wild!

I’m still convinced these statements will age like milk.

A built-in ad blocker is easily the least problematic announcement coming out of Mozilla in the last year.

That’s probably a fair assessment, but still a rather damning indictment of the industry writ large.

There are definitely better versions of cryptocurrency that I think could be more useful, but the industry is definitely not headed in that direction. Instead, it’s all pump-and-dumps, rug-pulls, and other schemes that render them nothing more than highly speculative asset classes in which the underlying asset has no intrinsic value.

It’s just grift all the way down with crypto, isn’t it? Scams layered on scams layered on scams.

Mint

I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.

Amazon Music

I invested heavily in the Amazon Music ecosystem, I bought hundreds of albums on there, and the platform is now very nearly unusuable. I cannot even listen to the songs that I paid for without also having to listen to ads. And the Android app now hides the downloads in some hidden folder so I can’t even download them and listen to them on another player. It makes me furious.

I’ve actually gone back to CDs, if you can believe it. It’s kind of nice sometimes, especially for full album plays, but I do miss a nice big playlist of my favorite songs from all artists.

I really wish there was a better alternative to push my friends to. I do use Bandcamp, so at least I know more of my $$$ are going to the artists and I can take the music with me, but I’m not sure about the platform long-term.

ChatGPT is pretty crap branding too, for the record. They just somehow managed to mainstream it. All the LLMs after it try to have cooler names (Bard, Copilot, etc.) but the kludgy first name is still better known.