When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it's shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.
AnarchistArtificer
joined 2 years ago
To be fair, it is difficult to rebuild one's understanding of the world after finding out that your previous understanding was built on fundamentally wrong ideas. Not that I'm excusing people who respond to cognitive dissonance by digging deeper into willful ignorance — after all, the reason why I know it's hard is because I've done that work myself (a couple of times). I do have some sympathy though.
I wonder how useful this kind of approach would be.
I'm reminded of a podcast recently where someone described that some of their colleagues in their day job (a very union heavy job) got pissed off at some cops at a petrol station, basically saying "ay, why are you protecting the Tesla dealerships, you're union too — you're meant to be on our side". The podcast guy said that although he really wanted to say to his colleagues something like "just because they're union doesn't mean they're on our side. Cops only exist to protect the interests of capital", he felt it was more productive to stoke the existing anger of his working class colleagues by leaning into their concerns
They're so close to getting it, but so far.
It seems like the relevant section in the Ubisoft EULA says
"Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession."
I read this wording of this to be stricter than the BG3 example you shared, because the BG3 one seems to be saying "if you don't agree to this EULA (or if you agree, but later terminate that agreement), then you must uninstall the game". Whereas the Ubisoft one seems to include Ubisoft terminating the agreement, rather than just the user. That's just my interpretation of these snippets though, as someone who is not a lawyer. It's possible that the BG3 EULA also includes other parts that would mean similar to what people are unhappy about on the Ubisoft EULA
"A torrent is never dead, it's just waiting for seeders"
You have reminded me that StreetComplete exists. I used to use it a while back, but for the last few years, I lived in an area that was already pretty thoroughly mapped. However, I would wager that where I live now is more sparsely documented; I've only recently moved here, and StreetComplete could be a nice way to become more settled.
I think maps can be used for other stuff than just navigating. You're quite right that this would be useless for actually navigating (which is probably the main purpose of using a map or other navigation software), but it could be a fun concept for looking back on things.
I don't use Google stuff as much nowadays, so they might have gotten rid of it (knowing Google, I wouldn't be surprised), but I remember that one of the sections within the Google maps app was a "Timeline" section. I used that section a few times to check whether I actually went to a particular appointment that was scheduled a month or so prior, or to check which restaurant I ate at when I was last in [city]. I also found it fun to look at the overview of things, like being able to see the pins corresponding to the silly road trip I took with friends a few years ago. It's nice to look back every now and then.
Location data is one of the things that you can export through Google takeout , I believe — though I'm not sure what format that would come in.
I don't imagine it would be too hard for a dedicated nerd who is procrastinating other work to write a thing to parse that data and view it in a map based on something more open, like Openstreetmaps.
He looks like he's the kind of dog who, upon finding another good branch, would attempt to carry even more sticks, even though his attempts to do so are silly are best.
A friend of a friend is the daughter of a Russian oligarch. It was a messy situation in which she was at risk of being drawn into the politics, even though her dad was an asshole who she would've been glad to see defenestrated. I only know the surface level info, but it sounds like a fucked up situation in many ways
I don't know as much as I'd like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.
I think that's part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn't going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.