…it hasn’t yet gotten absurdly over-commercialized…

As someone who grew up watching hockey, I’m sad to report that it seems to be trending that way.

In the early 2000s, most of the commercial sponsors were limited to ads between periods, at least on Hockey Night in Canada. Those ads were for things like pickup trucks and beer. I do know that American broadcasts would have things like “the KFC power play,” which was cringy.

I watched my first games in over a decade during the playoffs last year and was appalled by how betting odds and the associated apps had taken over both the ad space and the analyst desk.

My son will probably start getting into sports in the next few years, and I’m not looking forward to trying to convince him that no, we can’t win $10k from FanBet or SportsOdds or GambleKing or whatever.

Nah, just the sad message of “Pretty please love me (because we sunk a bunch of money into this).”

One of the things I initially liked about Pixels was that I could uninstall/disable a lot of the proprietary garbage that would be mandatory on other phones. But now it looks like Google is abandoning that flexibility in favour of shoehorning Gemini into everything.

My only interaction with Gemini so far was telling it to kick rocks when it sent me an unsolicited text message. I also barely use Assistant to begin with. So once my current phone dies, I guess I’ll have to find something new.

My wife is from an Eastern European country, and whenever we visit her folks I have a similar experience. Every single restaurant reeks of smoke, and there is apparently no political appetite to change that.

This is my read of it as well.

I will never again buy a Samsung product after they refused to honour the warranty claim on my dishwasher. It had a legitimate design defect, I alerted them well within the warranty period, and I provided all the appropriate receipts. They just plain ignored my complaint while putting on a contrite facade in every interaction.

I’ve never experienced that, and I’ve definitely told Google Assistant to fornicate with itself on multiple occasions.

I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget’s review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.

Maybe I’m too old-school and impatient, but I’ve never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It’s a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I’ve used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.

The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I’ve never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.