"A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw cartel practices."
If the article is true, it would be worse than a cartel, it would be effectively a monopoly with a few sockpuppet competitors.
In an actual cartel or oligopoly, you'd expect at least the cartel members be relatively equal in power. But if the article is right, then Google has basically all the power to decide the course of web tech going forward, as the other browsers devs can't meaningfully deviate from whatever vision Google has for the web, without risking their funding.
Of course it’s a cartel. They agree not to compete with each other in online search advertising, one company collects the monopoly profits and then distributes them to the other cartel members.
This is where Apple Arcade is an excellent value IMHO.
People like to disparage Apple Arcade as some sort of failure for not having enough "AAA" titles, whatever they are supposed to be.
But yet, Apple constantly adds new titles to the catalogue, and you can play them all for a reasonable cost without vile ads for gambling, casino, adult and microtransaction games!
Also, in my experience the games all seem to run fine on old-ish hardware like the iPhone 11.
It's my, somewhat lazy, philosophical opinion, that there isn't any purpose and there doesn't need to be one.
I don't see why the universe would need a purpose for anything. Things are what they. Things changing state. Entropy.
I see reproduction as more of built in motivation to our system than a purpose as such. But that's semantics, and my purpose in life is not to argue about words! ;-)
Gemini never sets alarms for me and always points me to the app. Trying to call people is a crap shoot. Presumably there are settings for this somewhere, but there are like fifty sharing settings in four different places and it's impossible to know which apply to the old assistant or Gemini or both or just on the lock screen or to connected devices or... It's a mess.
It's even worse, when I tell it to set a timer now, it'll happily tell me it's been set -- but it hasn't (nothing in the app and I waited, to be sure). This is all reproducible and on a Pixel 8.
Thanks, apparently utilities is disabled because I disabled something called Apps Activity because the data sharing involved seemed both bonkers and vague.
Sharing chat transcripts I'd hate but deal with, but they're also getting files and images shared (ie possibly my screen whenever it thinks it heard hey Google or registers a double tap), related product usage which could mean anything, and seemingly unrestricted access to your ___location. https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?sjid=12105...
Not sure why I can use Gemini in general but can't have it set up an alarm without all that. Or why the AI thinks it can set up an alarm when it doesn't. I guess I'll opt in and try it out a bit.
It was really bad at first for this type of thing. I just tried a few of them because I too had given up on them and they seem to work perfectly now. It even cancelled the alarm I had previously set when I simply said "cancel the last alarm".
Try setting a "timer" for 15 minutes instead of an "alarm".
Not sure if this is a regional dialect thing, but in North America, a timer has a duration, but an alarm is set for a specific time, which would possibly explain the confusion.
While I agree it'd let the user use the system, the system should do the right thing for either situation, or at least abort and say it doesn't understand. That's the problem with LLMs so far. They can't admit they don't understand.
These sound like fairly dated anecdotes. I don't doubt them at all - I had similar horror stories. I disabled Gemini on my phone in order to keep the old assistant for a long time, but it really has gotten a lot better in the last few months.
I can replicate your weather one! I think it's taking "this week" extremely literally and the week ends on Saturday. Asking for "this weekend" gives Saturday and Sunday. Asking for the next few days gives 3 days out, etc .
Definitely not addressing the spirit of the request.
GP said they were in Sydney. As far as I know, the week officially starts on Monday in Australia. That's also the case for most of Europe, BTW. Maybe their locale wasn't set right or it's another case of American software assuming weird American standards for the rest of the world.
Yes, the weekend is Saturday and Sunday in the United States. I guess you could consider it like "bookends", for us it's the start and end of the week.
<rant>Google is seemingly giving up on localization entirely. The whole world gets to be Yankee.
It's now started giving me F temperatures on my homescreen, for no particular reason. It knows I'm in Canada. I have set my units in the past to metric. What gives?
I still don't have Canadian English as a locale in Android or Chrome, after what, 15 years of Android? It's got words highlighted all over my page here as mis-spellings. They're not. I really did mean to type colour you piece of crap. I can switch to British but then get spanked for colourize instead of colourised etc.
And it seems to tie choice of English variant to things like pronounciation of words and accent for voice assistant. My car speaks to me in a British accent because I have it set to British English (the closest thing to my own spellings).
They never even tried to handle the facts of the (40M person) Canadian bilingual market. Navigation is either French or English, but many Canadian road sides are in both and it tries to read them out and butchers the pronounciations. Drive into Quebec and have your phone set to English and it's laughable what it does. (Notably doesn't do this for Spanish words in the US, which it seems to have no problem with).</>
But I appreciate and read the Google Gemini AI generated response at the top of the page.
Also, I'm an iPhone user. But I have a Google Pixel phone for deve work.
I find myself now using 'Hey Google' a lot more because of the Gemini responses.
It's particularly fun playing with it with the kids on road trips as we ask it weird questions, and get it to reply in olde english, or speak backwards in French and so on!
It is. The actual text of the law makes it very clear and it has been discussed a lot. That Home Affairs webpage that tries to spin it is yet another disturbing sign.
Hopefully the market will correct the pricing situation once the goldrush calms down.
Even my local pharmacist ranted about what a rort it is last time I asked LOL
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