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Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

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Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#91

Post by RajT88 »

huhtenberg wrote: post #36

The best part is that Microsoft and Google are working together towards the end goal of locking users out of their own machines. Microsoft is really pushing for its trusted OS platform, with a completely locked down kernel, that will grant them full control over what can and cannot be done on the computer. Google is pushing for the same, but in the browser space. Except their Web Integrity effort has no chance of suc…

I am the last guy to play apologist to Microsoft and Google.

While the potential for abuse is there, these are the same sorts of concerns raised over UEFI secure boot, and the sky failed to fall over that. You can still run Linux if you want, it's fine.

Things will likely be OK. Maybe more annoying than before.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#92

Post by londons_explore »

derefr wrote: post #72
Retric wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could do with your data to make more money that they aren’t? Sure in theory they could be selling access to anyone’s Gmail account to the highest bidder, but that’s going to lose them money by actively driving their customers away. Google may be actively harmful/evil, but they aren’t stupid.

Indexing and fingerprinting your browser history locally in Chrome, to generate a set of demographic and special-interest identifier tags, that are then attached to your Google account; where the special-interests are used by Google Ads to personalize the ad auctions, and the demos are used by Google Ads to price your CPMs.

Most people don't want to see ads... But if they do see ads, they don't really care how it is decided which ones to show... Phase of the moon, random numbers, or the third word of every email in my gmail account are all equally fine in my eyes.

However, I do care about what other uses my data might be used for.

Therefore, googles solution of using all my private data, but with the opensource code running on my machine within my control, is actually perfect for both me and them.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#93

Post by darklycan51 »

bagacrap wrote: post #81
ftlio wrote: post #49

Google search has become nearly unusable, while Microsoft’s core consumer products still seem OK - you can still install Windows 11 without a Live account through a workaround. I can run games on Linux and do work on a Mac. Search is still a problem, but I am increasingly turning to ChatGPT for searching anything non current event, with Bing increasingly. I was a full Google stack, Android, Home, TV, everything, for…

> Google search has become nearly unusable This is a weird meme given how many billions of searches Google handles daily.

I legit have to go to bing (or duckduckgo if I wanna keep it private or so they claim at least) to get actual search results lol...

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#94

Post by whynotminot »

jareklupinski wrote: post #48
whynotminot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s YouTube supposed to do about that?

stop pretending that paying them extra money removes all ads would help "Removes _some_ ads!" probably wouldnt sell as many subscriptions though haha

It’s not some ads. It’s like 90% of ads.

Whenever I use someone else’s account or am not logged in I’m shocked by how ad filled YouTube is. Easily my most automatic subscription and worth every penny.

The creators typically have one 30 second spot where they often do a humorous riff. Not that big a deal.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#95

Post by wiseowise »

whynotminot wrote: post #45
jareklupinski wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads because it doesn't do away with _all_ the ads: every video still has the video maker themselves talking about their 'sponsor' for at least a minute, reminding us to 'like and subscribe' for at least ten seconds, and a patreon scroll of users that have paid extra for another three minutes

What’s YouTube supposed to do about that?

YouTube censorship works really well whenever it hears swear words or god forbid you show a bit too much of human body, but apparently 10 to 60 seconds of ad crap is undetectable to them.

Demonetize the shit out of the video, on subsequent offense demonetize whole channel.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#96

Post by duxup »

bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #67

I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts of stuff. Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support o…

> Uncritically

Blindly pick one to trust sure that’s a poor choice.

But we make choices based on our experience and what information we have. I won’t trust anyone forever blindly, but I will pick some for now over others who I find untrustworthy.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#97

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #5

I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever s…

I also love Youtube (I've learned a staggering amount from it), but maybe qualify your "anyone" here ;-)

> nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads

Assuming you mean the no-ads-plus-music offer, in the UK that is £12.99 a month. So the yearly cost is worth more than a whole month of food for me, and I don't eat badly (I just shop well).

A month's worth of food for a single adult is objectively not a very small amount of money, spread over a year.

Me, I skip the ads, for now.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#98

Post by rectang »

bastardoperator wrote: post #17
candiddevmike wrote: post #8

This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.

Ehh, I think this is also a bad take. Turn off telemetry, delete ChatGPT conversations, and I like having an LLM for GitHub versus Give us all your personal data and we're sharing it with ad partners, your personal data is our number one product and secondary products are only made to support the first endeavor.

> I like having an LLM for GitHub

That LLM was trained on FOSS software that others like myself wrote and did not consent to have used in such a manner. Even if you're also a FOSS contributor and you're fine with it, I'm not.

So you like it, but you're not the party whose consent matters. You're the customer consuming the laundered goods from the fence.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#99

Post by tadfisher »

Permit wrote: post #42
bastardoperator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh, I think this is also a bad take. Turn off telemetry, delete ChatGPT conversations, and I like having an LLM for GitHub versus Give us all your personal data and we're sharing it with ad partners, your personal data is our number one product and secondary products are only made to support the first endeavor.

> sharing it with ad partners, What do you mean by this? What kind of information do advertisers get to receive?

None, because the data asymmetry is how Google earns revenue. If they just sold the data, you'd set up a competing ad network that undercuts AdSense by operating on slightly outdated snapshots.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#100

Post by 542458 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #61
cypress66 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github wasn't abused to train LLMs. Whatever website existed that openly hosted OSS repositories would have been scrapped if it had such a large number of repos. You don't need to be Microsoft to train on github.

The question is: How much private repos went into copilot? I guess for specific software (how to use a commercial database? How to use some enterprise framework?) they'd find more relevant samples there, which might be worthwhile scanning.

GitHub has always said that they only train on public repos. I don’t see why they’d lie about that - including private repos would only add a relatively small amount of data to the corpus and would risk alienating all their corporate customers.

> GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...

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