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I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

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Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#111

Post by netsharc »

Drakim wrote: post #73
hackernewds wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to delete the YouTube app simply because there was no way to disable Shorts. Those things are hopelessly addictive and unavoidable. If I wanted shorts, I'd install TikTok.

It's crazy, when I remove the YouTube Shorts pane it says "Shelf will be hidden for 30 days". It feels like a slap to the face by some promotion seeking Google Manager who tells me that he knows better than me. It's crazy. I didn't stop using YouTube like you did but I was darn close. I guess they do know better than me, in a way.

On Android you can install https://newpipe.net and turn off a lot of things: no more trending/start screen recommendations if you don't want them, you can turn off comments, or "watch next" recommendations.. the shorts show up in the search results like other normal videos, with a slider so you can still navigate it.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#112

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

akhosravian wrote: post #55
cromka wrote: post #12

It is only a matter of time before a class action is filed against Google for reducing the functionality of products they previously sold. The Assistant in Mini speakers I use at home has become amusingly bad: not that it doesn’t understand what I want, but it will often just not execute my orders, despite understanding. For example, it recently ignores my “yes” to its “do you want to know more?” follow up questions.…

Maybe instead of hoping for a lawsuit just stop buying shit google makes. They’ve repeatedly dropped whole product lines on short notice, and even the Android phones they have produced have sometimes had pathetically short supported lives.

The Google Play store is the chokepoint for Android. I maybe can get roughly the right functionality via an alternate app repo, but there's always going to be some mass consumer app that's important and unsupported, or some glitch or incompatibility. There ought to be law....

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#113

Post by netsharc »

robin_reala wrote: post #75
Drakim wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy, when I remove the YouTube Shorts pane it says "Shelf will be hidden for 30 days". It feels like a slap to the face by some promotion seeking Google Manager who tells me that he knows better than me. It's crazy. I didn't stop using YouTube like you did but I was darn close. I guess they do know better than me, in a way.

It’s the same in Instagram: removing recommended posts only has an option to remove for 30 days. The consistent enshittification of products with these sorts of behaviours just makes me want to use them less. Unfortunately I’m sure they’ve got data that shows that my reaction is a minority.

Black Mirror anyone? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=99&v=5P_HqwgDFJM

Fascinatingly this content is narrated by a robot voice...

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#114

Post by sgerenser »

leipert wrote: post #7
bitwize wrote: post #4

While touring the house we eventually bought, my wife spied a Nest on the wall and said, "Oh, that's one thing bitwize is gonna want to rip out." Hooking your home up to the cloud and depending on cloud services for its operation just strikes me as the king of dumb ideas. You've got private, intimate data flowing to who knows where, cloud malfunctions affecting regular home operations (this has already happened at le…

Jup. A family member has Nest thermostats. Server went down. The thermostats cranked up to 30C / 86F as the failure mode. Just makes no sense. I get that you don’t want freezing pipes, if the server goes down, but come on.

I find this hard to believe. The thermostat has a local copy of the heat/cool setpoints, why wouldn’t it just keep using those if it can’t access the server? At a minimum it’s a bug, not just the normal operation when it can’t access the cloud.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#115

Post by nologic01 »

I read 'smart phone' instead of 'smart home' and for a brief blissful moment I thought, wow, what did I miss? Is this the year of the linux phone?

Old enough to live perfectly well without a smart home but alas young enough so impossible to live without a smart phone.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#116

Post by pabs3 »

account-5 wrote: post #86

This sort of shit is the reason they will never get me to use their passkey implementation. The sooner there's a truly portable open source offline version of passkeys I'm all in. Until then I'm sticking with my password manager. I do feel the only thing you can really trust from Google are the things that make them money. Chrome, and any software that allows them to hook into for advertising money. It makes me worry…

There is a pull request for adding passkeys to KeePassXC:

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/8825

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#117

Post by pabs3 »

blibble wrote: post #105
ssbash wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe security keys are the offline version of passkeys you're looking for. I am afraid that websites will somehow disable support security keys and only support passkey implementations from big tech (similar to how websites only offer signin with google, fb , etc). Can someone clarify if WebAuthn protocol allows for this filtering against hardware authenticators?

yes, there's an attestation cert as part of the register request

I hear that the way Big Tech implements passkeys means that it is impossible to require attestation to prove use of their implementations.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#119

Post by cogman10 »

largepeepee wrote: post #53
Corrado wrote: post #2

I feel like this is just one more thing that Google leadership is failing at. I have some similar examples to the ones in the article. I recommended that my brother-in-law get a Google wifi AP some years ago. Recently, I got an email from Google saying that they are no longer supporting it and after a certain date you will no longer be able to make changes to it. WTF?!? My Apple Airport Extreme is older than the Goog…

I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored. Many of Google's software eventually get worse too. YouTube for example has killed most of their social features by removing dislikes, limited searchability of videos by channel, allowed bots to fill the comments. And Google search has so much malware in their ads that pop up first, that even govts are recommending ad blockers by default.…

Google is just shit.

As my company briefly decided to look into using them for a cloud provider it quickly became apparent that they are just awful stewards of any software that isn’t related to advertisements.

It’s beyond shocking how amateurish GCP is being operated.

My assumption is it comes down to really awful leadership. They only care about making and selling new things. You simply can’t trust that any piece of software or hardware will receive ongoing support, including their cloud offerings.

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