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Being an ad-driven company annihilated old google. Instead of developing precise and efficient tools (like they used to) all effort goes to convincing users to care about random crap, because the crapmaker is paying up.
As a programmer who enjoys a beautiful solution to a hard problem, this irks me every time I'm forced to interface with google.
All ux must be sloppified.
The sloppification will be televised (during increasingly regular ad intervals) !
Google was always an ad driven company. Google Adsense was kind of a big deal there for a while.
Once they started letting money affect their search results, especially with promoted / sponsored results, everything started going downhill.
It used to be that nobody went to the second page of google search (because the first page almost always had the result you needed), but now, the first page is almost entirely ads and paid content.
It's not the advertising part of Google that ruined it, because that part has always been there. It's the greedy executives that shoehorned ads into every other product and service possible, and are now cramming "AI" down everyone's throat, trying to make us all dependent on it, so they can rugpull it and charge us for access.
Fuck google. They don’t even index shit anymore. They index nothing. It’s not a search engine, it’s an ad engine. Everyone is stuck with Gmail now.
Resist! Host your own email!
As someone who hosts a lot of things: Fuck email hosting. Just get your own domain for a few bucks a year, and use an established provider to host it.
Or at least get your own domain and use it with a different provider.
Been there... Done that.... mailbox.org'ed it...
I’m so mad. I bought and installed the thing in my wall before it was owned by Google, then they bought it and shut it down while it’s still working fine. It would cost them almost nothing to leave it working. It just does t collect quite as much creepy stalking information as the newer models, so now it has to go in a trash can.
I have learned from this experience to literally never buy anything that relies on an external server ever again in my lifetime.
Actually, it costs them a lot of money, my pihole is blocking 2000 requests per day from my nest thermostat. Multiply that for the millions of units they sold and you have a small scale "Perpetual DDoS Attack" to their servers. I don't know why a thermostat needs to call home that often, if it's to checking the outside temperature it could do it just twice a day, or just avoid it altogether when it's off (8 months per year in my case)
But yes, I will never buy this shit again from them, and the next must have the option to be controlled without internet. It doesn't make sense to send a message to a server in another continent to activate a device that's located in the same room I'm sitting in
Even internet connected could be fine if they allow hooking into via something like home assistant 🤷♂️
My Nest thermostats are the last Google thing and the last I’ll ever buy. I’ve completely degoogled my life except for the Nests, because they still work fine in HomeKit via my Starling. Once they kill the Nest thermostat E (and I doubt that’s very far off), I will be completely free of that shitty evil company. I’m almost looking forward to it.
completely degoogled
What do you use for email?
I registered my own domain and use purelymail.com. Super cheap, not difficult to set up if you’re mildly technically inclined. Plenty of instructions on how. Beauty of using your own domain is you can take it and use it anywhere without having to change your address again.
Proton, disroot, mailbox.org, tutanota, riseup (anyone have an invite? No? Ok maybe not riseup).
What do you do for maps? Specifically directions while driving?
I've tried apps based on OSM but they get too unreliable outside of heavily populated areas.
When Nest thermostats came out, they seemed interesting, then I saw that they required an outside connection and I immediately forgot about their existence. I'm not surprised about this latest development.
It was extremely predictable.
Google is getting as bad as Microsoft with unusable old hardware. I mean fine stop supporting the older hardware but release the code/api to allow them to still function with people who know how to do it. Or at the very least allow the old hardware to be unlocked for third party firmware.
Unfortunately from a business perspective it's very hard to argue for this stuff since goodwill doesn't have a definable dollar amount but the engineering time to extract this and getting it working extremely definitely has a cost.
The back end of this smart crap is very likely inextricably intertwined with Google's internal services.
Remember Google exists to harvest data which means the important part of this thermostat is not being a thermostat but recording when you're home, what temperature it is, if you're awake etc etc.
100%. This needs to be a law or it can't be expected to happen.
I will say, MS make a decent mouse.
Yeah no doubt. I’ve got 20 year old MS mice that still work.
google openly says why they're such a shit company now. They made their search results worse, so people will click on more and more pages so they see more ads. They're a shitstain company. Stop using google.
Wait, when did they start saying they were gonna EOL Nest thermostats?
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/16233096 1st and 2nd gen learning thermostats are going EOL by October 25th without any option to control locally (other than, yknow, the thermostat itself)
But don't worry! They'll let you purchase the 4th gen for only $149.99 if you're one of these owners!! Yippee!!!
On totally unrelated news, I'm finding the my new ecobee to be pretty sweet. Supposedly it can be two stepped into homeassistant via Apple's webkit?
I had heard good things for Ecobee, but at some point last year they shut down their developer registrations. Still 100% accessible through the HomeKit integration, but it didn't feel like a good move for them.
I ended up going with a Meross MTS300 to replace my Nest. It feels like the local-only smart thermostat market is pretty dry, so I gave them a shot. There's some 3rd party Home Assistant integration for it, which I actually saw a Meross dev offering up some internal docs in an issue so they could build better support. I thought was pretty chill of them. A much better attitude than "oh we don't support this platform officially, cease building for it". Supposedly it can operate entirely separately from their infra with some tweaks, but I've unfortunately ran out of weekend. Even without those tweaks it can operate without internet over Matter
Wouldn't recommend it personally yet until I have more time to find the quirks about it. In any case it's been significantly more reliable than my Nest ever was
I'm going to go give my dumb thermostat a li'l pat on the head. It does everything I need all by itself.
You're given the opportunity to pay us money to get the same functionality you currently enjoy!
I was given a GSA! Flashed with non-Google firmware and maxed out in RAM (154GB?)
I have no idea what to do with it.
Oh man that would be awesome to have just the hardware alone is worth decent money.
Really? I assumed they’re old and huge and heavy and not worth anything hahaha. He was gonna recycle it but asked if I wanted to have it. I bought a bunch of 2.5” SAS drives, but I honestly don’t know what I’m doing with it. I should have a friend over to help me get it set up.
At the very least, keep it and in a few decades that will be an impressive piece of history that you will own!
Looks like there's an open source PCB hardware mod for nest thermostats:
That on prem solution cost minimum $50k USD. In the early 2000s. That's like one condo in today's money 🤣
I was in IT at the time and we'd been using a Microsoft index server solution to search our data at the time.
IDK, I think google was never focused on anything particular except profit.
Enshitification working as promised, as valued a few years later on the stock market (2004, even tho they didn't have much revenue).
We welcomed skynet when it first came
