It Is a Google thing. It’s a script that Google gives to third party to promote logging in with their account, and it can access Google cookies, so it can get populated with your name and email (which is absurd as some other malicious js on the same page could parse the HTML to extract the personal data of the user without consent)

If you’re logged in, there’s a setting buried in the Google account (really buried, very difficult to find) which hides this nag.

Why the fuck are they using a cloud tts on an Android device??? Can’t they use on device tts?? Seems extremely stupid for no reason

1. It’s expensive. They are paying a fee to the third party tts provider each single time someone needs a response. They boast “no subscriptions” - that means those fees are paid only by new customer purchases. Ponzi 2.0

2. It’s fucking expensive. Elevenlabs tts voices costs thousands of dollars per month plus $0.18 per 1000 characters. Ask the history of a monument and the verbose result that the LLM regurgitated costs them $0.15. Are they banking on the fact that most customers would just shelf the device after a day?

3. It’s slower. Each time the device needs to reply, it needs to stream an audio file instead of a few bytes of compressed text

4. For the more realistic voices it’s only cheaper in the short term. I get it - they don’t like the robotic free voices and licensing a good closed source one costs money. But then you don’t need to pay the “cloud” forever. Did they plan to shut down shortly after the launch? Where the money for running each user in a VM is coming out? (I saw from a YouTube video that it looked like they were using a browser automation tool in a VM)

At this point since everything is run on the cloud (=somebody else’s computer) this could not only be a smartphone app, but a smartwatch app.

I wonder if they will just fold and do a rug pull now blaming the hackers or fix the problem.

Fixing the problem seems difficult for them - need to fully rewrite the app and having everything proxied through their authenticated server, increasing their expenses (and a rushed fix isn’t secure/tested). But their money comes only from new investors and new customers, and at this point I doubt that they can sell more units or scam more investors.

Well at least finally after three long years Microsoft added the option to combine icons on the taskbar.

Without that option, explorerpatcher was a forced install on w11

Now it’s possible to live without it

It sees that I’m with a different browser locale and it automatically redirects to a different website, that gives a 404 error. Hate those “helpful” sites with a passion

What’s the content of the page, downloads of books from the 80s?

Me too

I’m guessing from the thumbnail and title that Microsoft said that Minecraft users need to merge their Minecraft account (100% in Microsoft hands) with a Microsoft account. The user said no because reasons and then now they can’t play

They still need to cache them anyway when they’re crawling the pages.

It wasn’t a full backup like archive.org but a broken text only view

Can’t find recent stats of money printed by the argentinian central bank, but in the first semester of 2022 they printed $5 billions.

Amateurs. Tether is printing that amount every month.

Ah yes tether, the “we’re 1:1 backed by dollars, pinky promise don’t worry coin” that’s printing money at a rate that makes the Argentina central bank chief an amateur

Printing stats: https://nitter.1d4.us/usdcoinprinter

Other idiots with FOMO

it’s a meme coin so apparently it gives 100x value

Solana (a company that created a crypto coin) created a $700 smartphone dedicated to crypto and other shitcoins. It was a massive failure. Nobody bought it. Until they created a new coin from thin air, and gave that for free to phone owners. Suddenly everyone wanted to buy the phone as you could get $900 by getting buying the phone, getting the free coins, immediately sell them, throw the phone.

Video review of the phone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRSMJGs0YMg

It seems to read an article from an alternate universe. Neo store and droidify can already automatically update third party apps from years ago, just give the permission once per app.

Don’t like the automatic update? Disable it in the setting pretending to be Angelina Jolie’s character in Hackers. The third party app store didn’t allow to disable automatic updates? Just uninstall it and get a new one.

For example, when neo store forced the user to give the permission to stay always loaded in memory to check for updates all the time, first I checked GitHub to see if it was a bug. When I saw it was a deliberate choice from the dev and that they were unwilling to reverse it, I just uninstalled and move on. There’s choice.

Freemium games would never redirect the user to their website for saving some fees because:

1. Friction. As a play store IAP a whale can buy $50 in useless game coins with just a scan of the fingerprint. Otherise open the browser, create an account, type billing address, type cc numbers, get the otp… insane bounce rate that’s higher than the fees

2. Chargebacks. Nobody does chargebacks against Google because they would nuke your Google account for fraud and that is a disaster. But a chargeback on an idle clicker where you’re already bored that bears no conseguences? Oh yes!

You don’t even need to open the settings and find the option, as it just present you the toggle when you open the apk…

1. That windows 10 desktop looks so out of place, couldn’t they use a win98 computer for that? Or any Linux de with a Redmond skin. Icewm for example

2. Not a single sign stating what’s that and the age is so weird in a museum

Also: 30+ years for rape? While rape is a hateful crime, usually people don’t get all that prison time for that.

That’s what you get when you’re poor, black and homeless?

The other unjustly accused guy, who was black but not poor and not homeless got much less time and went out of prison twenty years ago

“this guy came to report a missing wallet, let’s add him to the list of the suspects” - what kind of reasoning is this???