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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The best part is if you have Google Home/Nest products throughout your house and initiate a voice request you now have your phone using Gemini to answer and have the nearest speaker or display using Assistant to answer and they frequently hear eachother and take that as further input (having a stupid “conversation” with eachother). With Assistant as the default on a phone, the system knows what individual device it should reply to via proximity detection and you get a sane outcome. This happened at a friend’s house while I was visiting and they were frustrated until I had them switch their phone’s default voice assistant back to Assistant and set up a home screen shortcut to the web app version of Gemini in lieu of using the native Gemini app (because the native app doesn’t work unless you agree to set Gemini as the default and disable Assistant).

    Missing features aside, the whole experience would feel way less schizophrenic if they only allowed you to enable Gemini on your phone if it also enabled it on each smart device in the household ecosystem via Home. Google (via what they tell journalists writing articles on the subject) acts like it’s a processing power issue with existing Home/Nest devices and the implication until very recently was that new hardware would need to roll out - that’s BS given that very little of Gemini’s functionality is being processed on device and that they’ve now said they’ll begin retroactively rolling out a beta of Gemini to older hardware in fall/winter. Google simply hasn’t felt like taking the time to write and push a code update to existing Home/Nest devices for a more cohesive experience.






  • Where is that not the case when talking about politics anywhere? Theater and life are coiled up around eachother and writhing, grasping at one another’s throats; whether lovers’ kisses, enemies’ venom is the intent, usually one comes out on top. In your good faith opinion, what will it mean when Trump loses anyway? What is the auteur going for in that scenario?

    (In keeping with good faith I’ll disclose my personal bias that I would prefer a different candidate to oppose Trump but that I also think almost any of them can get it done after Georgia, Georgia, and… Georgia where the wrong politician was topping everything by every conventional understanding or metric.)







  • Intention doesn’t always carry over well via text, but going from “shocking” and “I guess…” to “Do you not understand…?” comes across as a bit condescending/aggressive. Perhaps you thought I was being hostile? Or, perhaps I’m misreading the intent.

    At any rate, keeping in mind the things that don’t carry across over text, I wasn’t disagreeing with you and was merely speculating in a parallel fashion about those that don’t return and/or are deemed unacceptable defection by the leadership in Pyongyang. I haven’t picked over my initial comment but it’s possible that I put a period somewhere a question mark was supposed to go or something. Regardless, I apologize if I came across as trying to argue against what you were saying, it was not my intention. I don’t tend to process things in a strictly linear progression and that translates to words that come out sometimes a bit disordered seeming or perhaps seemingly lacking in explicit context where it might be needed to ensure clarity in what I’m saying.

    To answer the question rather than treat it as rhetorical: It’s quite possible that I don’t know how North Korean defection usually works because I’m not North Korean nor a policy analyst/SME specializing in North Korea. I read the article and your comment and found myself speculating, given the situation and deepening ties with Russia (who are objectively experts at tracking down dissidents abroad) about what policy and procedures might be in place now the event of would-be permanent defectors that end up becoming anti-Pyongyang mouthpieces or are high rank enough to leak meaningful intel to an adversary (I doubt they are sending any such people to Ukraine). But, I’m not an expert, I’m just a person speculating and commenting because I enjoy doing so and seeing what others have to say (including you). Thanks for sharing the article, have a good one.







  • ding ding ding The microwave analogy they were going after makes no sense. I mean, there are semantics at play and I could have explicitly mentioned I wasn’t talking about firmware in order to exclude things that are essentially calculators and clocks but I didn’t anticipate someone going the direction of absurdist bespoke microwave OSes given that firmware alone is enough. Even at that level, you have examples like Seiko Epson inventing precision timed ticket printers for the 1964 Olympics - they’re still dominant in the arena of commercial printers to this day, yet they have allowed other manufacturers to adopt their ESC/POS language as a standard that’s still widely used across brands today, allowing for feature parity on the software functionality side from competing brands while Epson competes on the hardware reliability side. (This isn’t an endorsement of Epson, their consumer printers are trash because they’re not Brother laser printers lol.) Spoiler alert, the price tag of a commercial printer doesn’t have much to do with it being compatible with network standards (???! - standards being the key word here) and has more to do with reliability and general feature sets (in that order once competition exists for a device, see Epson vs feature identical Beiyang (insert other generic clone brand here)) and the same would hold true even if we decided to network our microwaves in some scenario where we’re also automating food going in and out of the microwave.

    All of that said, if I were to modify what I was saying while keeping the sentiment the same, I would just simplify it by saying “no hardware vendor is allowed to lock their hardware to running specific software” (doesn’t mean they have to provide technical support for errors in another vendor’s software) since that gets at the root of the issue. But, going back to the original sentiment, open standards that have nothing to do with specific hardware are clearly better. Look at Apple vs x86 vs ARM, specifically Apple during the period between PowerPC (at least there were partners here, so the chips had lives outside of Apple hardware) and their M-Series - they wouldn’t have had an excuse not to offer something like BootCamp during the x86 era given that their OS clearly was able to run on off the shelf PC components and the inverse with Windows and Linux being able to run on their hardware was also clearly true. Is it a good thing that Apple hardware is once again locked in to running only their software?