41–50 of 195 posts
These days, the general rule is to avoid buying anything 'smart'. They are all filled with advertisements and data-sharing practices and are designed to target you through their user interface and applications. They bombard you with offers for their other products and deals.
To stick to the metaphor (apologies if this isn't HN friendly)
Smart TV? Fart TV
Smart display? Fart display
Smart fridge? Fart fridge
Is Amazon charging businesses who use their ad platform a fee based on how many times they display a product page?
I recently bought a Kindle/Fire device pre-owned, to save money. But seeing full-screen shitty consumer products ads on the 'covers of my books', sitting around my home was so depressing, I paid the extra $10-$15, to retroactively turn it into an ad-free device.[1] Though, even with Special Offers disabled, it still puts oversized icons for marketing promotions, bursting out of the search bar at the top of the home s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then don’t buy from them, plenty of venues
Many with trade offs. I recommend the pocketbook 4. You can disable recommendations easily, and the unit mounts as a disk so you can read and write books as if it were an SD card. No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!
These days, the general rule is to avoid buying anything 'smart'. They are all filled with advertisements and data-sharing practices and are designed to target you through their user interface and applications. They bombard you with offers for their other products and deals.
I'm technically ignorant on this but would GDPR apply to this type of thing as well? (I hope so)
Anecdotally, I think that open-source software/hardware only ever gets better (because if it got worse, someone would fork it, etc...) while proprietary software will eventually succumb to rent-seeking and decline. I've seen many open source projects go from barely usable to matching their proprietary counterparts.
Shoutout to Immich, full-featured self-hosted Google Photos alternative and my new favourite open-source project.
We're way overdue to abolish the DMCA, in particular the "anti-circumvention" felonies. It shouldn't be a crime for me to customize the product I purchased. Or to sell people a kit to do the customization themselves.
They don't have to make it easy, but they should be forced to give a way to opt out of walled gardens and bypass "secure boot".
But then I recently found neon which allows me to repurpose the device. And, it is incredible.
I recall trying to build something for the Google devices and it was an awful experience. Getting root ssh access on my Mycroft device is amazing, and I have tailscale on it to boot.
And, no ads, ever.