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I Fired Google

theartofdoingstuff.com

41–50 of 142 posts

Re: I Fired Google

#41
post #15

I Fired theartofdoingstuff.com for extremely obnoxious ads - particularly the "Would you like to save this stuff?" one that greys out the rest of the article you're trying to read to... checks notes ... ask if you want the article emailed to you? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

And a clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted post.

Re: I Fired Google

#42
post #3

> Then I went directly to Amazon and ordered an Alexa. Dear lord.

I got rid of my Alexa devices after they would not shut up. "Alexa what is the weather for today?" "The weather for today will be ... By the way, did you know that you can set alarms? Just say ..."

I do not care about whatever stupid feature you want to build engagement around. Do what I asked you to do and then shut up.

And don't get me started on the Alexa Show that had the audacity to display ads.

Re: I Fired Google

#43
post #15

I Fired theartofdoingstuff.com for extremely obnoxious ads - particularly the "Would you like to save this stuff?" one that greys out the rest of the article you're trying to read to... checks notes ... ask if you want the article emailed to you? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

I promise you that she went through the effort of putting less ads than what Adsense does by default.

Re: I Fired Google

#44
I had Claude whip up a local solution for me using Gemma 4 26b-a4b on my Mac and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It can do web search (valyu), file reading -- I have business & personal context stored in many markdown files -- weather, Apple reminders, and has cross-session memory. Streamline but capable agent that has been pieced together over a few weeks after using Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern, with bits of Hermes logic. Orpheus-TTS streams the spoken reply back with the first word usually landing in half a second. Voice input is openWakeWord for the wake word plus faster-whisper for speech-to-text, all on-device. I can run it straight on the Mac but I use it with the pi satellite and a cheap USB speakerphone (ConfCall MS13B). You can barge in by just talking over it rather than having to say the wake word again. Pretty handy Google Home replacement.

Re: I Fired Google

#45
post #41
post #15

I Fired theartofdoingstuff.com for extremely obnoxious ads - particularly the "Would you like to save this stuff?" one that greys out the rest of the article you're trying to read to... checks notes ... ask if you want the article emailed to you? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

And a clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted post.

It’s not clear to me. What makes you sure it’s AI assisted?

Re: I Fired Google

#46
I wondered how long it would be until someone took the obvious step of wiring a voice assistant up to a full blown LLM model. Seems like the thing I failed to consider was whether that was actually a good idea.

Re: I Fired Google

#47

> Nobody asked for cars that require IT support and 3 sub-menus to lower the air conditioning. (Screens are cheaper to install than buttons and knobs.) perhaps, but people did ask for cheaper cars.

Did they? No one buys cheap new cars, at least in the US.

Re: I Fired Google

#48

The only things these "smart" speakers are good for is timers, adding to lists (especially grocery lists in the kitchen), and playing music. And even then they often stutter...

They can't do any of those three things anymore

Re: I Fired Google

#49
post #44

I had Claude whip up a local solution for me using Gemma 4 26b-a4b on my Mac and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It can do web search (valyu), file reading -- I have business & personal context stored in many markdown files -- weather, Apple reminders, and has cross-session memory. Streamline but capable agent that has been pieced together over a few weeks after using Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern, with bits of Hermes logic.…

Do you have a GitHub or something for the project? Sounds lovely.

Re: I Fired Google

#50
This is a chronic LLM style, particularly the multipart dramatic flourishes and the Haiku paragraphs. But at this stage, there's a good chance that LLM re-diffusion of this style is feeding back into human culture. God save us.
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