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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.





  • Setting aside (but stating) my stance that Israel’s policy of collective punishment against innocent Palestinian civilians is completely wrong and thus unconditional support from the US government for Israeli actions is also wrong - South Africa isn’t a good faith actor here.

    What was South Africa’s official position last summer, as a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC and thus a nation obligated to arrest those with an ICC arrest warrant that step foot in their territory, about honoring their obligation to execute an arrest on the ICC warrant issued for Putin for war crimes should he step foot in their territory? It almost seems like they’re trying to distract from something or are maybe working towards mutual goals with some other entity (or entities) behind the scenes… Hmm.




  • I’m not convinced that Democrats wouldn’t just happily go down down with the ship, so to speak, if they believed stopping the genocide was the singular issue that people’s votes hinged upon. I don’t know where that really leaves us all either, given how horrible the alternative is. If the Citizens United decision hadn’t of happened we might have politicians that didn’t act beholden to far-right Israelis, but, even considering the unfettered money poured into politics, it’s ridiculous the hold that they seem to wield over both main parties in the US.