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Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

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Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#371
post #109

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No. There is a lot of reasons to criticize Microsoft but they keep their services/apis alive longer than any other company.

Plays for Sure But generally speaking I don't disagree with your assessment. It's just that media for hire was never really their strong suit and the Zune was a bit of a joke. Where they must have suffered a world of pain is to keep old software compatible on newer Windows versions and I actually appreciate that.

> the Zune was a bit of a joke

Spoken like someone who never owned one. The hardware (built by Toshiba) was excellent as was the software - if you avoided the harebrained DRM scheme and loaded your own MP3s.

Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a VPN in a private VM.

Use a VPN in a private VM so you can use Google and get decent search results? Is your response satire? I want to believe it is.

It’s not, I do something similar. Google results are just that much better for certain content I have found

Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#374
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, duck duck go with the g! prefix, if you really must use google with bubbling turned off (instead of a reasonable alternative).

DDG isn't magic. It doesn't bubble you on its own results (or at least it claims not to), but it can't change how external providers behave.

Sadly, in this day and age, a good, usable search engine that does not enclose you into your own bubble is magic.

Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#375
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you build on someone else's platform, But isn't that the height of specialization? What does a platform mean anyways if its only used for one thing and not by others? It it somewhat unfortunate that things like this make it abundantly clear that such a reality is not possible.

Platform is nothing but a sales&marketing word. It means whatever the owner wants it to.

Google positions angular as a platform.

Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#376
post #114
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, they just did a Twitter. I lived through the Twitter ecosystem collapse and now I'm a VC I worry about investing in startups that are built on any large ecosystem where there isn't an alignment of clear economic interest. Google of all people doing this just made it tougher for everyone else to maintain confidence in large vendor platforms.

If you build on someone else's platform, the best case is you get to be a sharecropper and can make money as long as you don't make so much that your platform-betters get jealous. The more typical case is this, where you get to spend your time and money doing real-world R&D and discovery of what works for them, for free. If you're going to dance with a vampire, don't be surprised when it bites you.

One way or the other aren't most of us building for someone else's platform anyway?. Mobile, desktop, browser...

Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like Google search is already curated. At home I cannot find academic articles which appeared in the search at work, because my girlfriend trained the home's recommendation engine on searches for cute cat pictures and domestic things. In DuckDuckGo, at least I know I will be able to find the same results for the same search terms no matter where I am.

Use a VPN in a private VM.

Or, you know, you can just create a separate user in the OS. Or even just create a separate browser user profile (for Chrome, Firefox has it as well)

Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, I thought I was clear in suggesting it as a law - although realistically in a lot of EU countries you could make the case and get it returned. For example I'm in Denmark and we have a consumer ombudsmand were you can make complaints about violations of your rights as a consumer https://www.consumerombudsman.dk/about-us/ (it talks about marketing but I the Nest was marketed to have functionality it no longer ha…

This law would end up hurting the upstarts. Alternatives should be made and the consumer should be picking winners with their dollar.

Or, they could build it in a way where it can be modified (for self hosting for example) in the first place.

Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google, no one wants to work on existing things. You must create new product/feature to get promoted. Then you move on and thing gets shutdown. This is direct consequences of their internal incentive structure.

I heard that’s how PowerShell came in existence. Nobody wanted to improve conhost.

It's not really possible to substantially improve either conhost or cmd due to backwards compatibility considerations.

The risk of breaking something for someone is just too high.

Re: Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

#380
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I used to be a fan. They were explicitly not evil, gave lots of open source stuff away for free, made lots of other free services. Turns out they were just making us dependent on them, and now that they've got us, they do whatever they want. We need to make ourselves less dependent on Google. Move away from GMail, use Firefox, DuckDuckGo, OSM, federated social networks, etc. I don't have a good replacement f…

god I tried. DuckDuckGo just does not work as well as it needs to. It gets touted as a turn key google search replacement but it’s simply not. 4 times today, I searched 5+ different ways for something after poor results, each thing took one search to find on google. Granted, maybe I am just more familiar with how to get the most out of googles search, maybe it has such a vast profile on me that it understands what I…

You can use the !SP operator before your DDG search to invoke StartPage, which uses Google results. I mean, it's the same thing, just it doesn't look like you're using Google search ;)
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