We stayed at a motel in Santa Fe that has Echos in the rooms. First thing I did when we got to our room was to unplug it and put it in a drawer for the four days we stayed there. Bah!
Fuck Amazon.
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So i use Yahoo Mail, yes you may chuckle at my poor choice of email provider, and a couple of days ago they forcibly updated my email inbox to the new version. They had done so last year as well but you had the option to revert to the old version, but that option is now gone. You get what you get and you better like it, and what comes with the new digs? You can probably guess it is AI summaries for your emails. From what i can tell with my search is that you used to be able to turn it off in the settings and they very conveniently disappeared that option.
Thankfully i can use uBlock Origin to zap the whole thing entirely so i don’t have to see it at all, but i know its there in the background. Waiting to spring out at me 
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I never update my Yahoo app, so I’m hoping to keep that AI crap off. Fingers crossed! I did notice that they suddenly want me to confirm a recovery email address and TOS. Not gonna do it.
(I also use Yahoo email as a throwaway email contact for receipts, etc.)
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I use both Yahoo and Gmail, but i use Yahoo for more things since it is literally the first email address i made as a kid in the 90s so old habits die hard. Even if the email address is really embarrassing when i’m writing it or spelling it to other people.
Some day i’ll get around to actually making a normal email with a non-shitty domain 
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I love graffiti and stickers. I even like tags. I hate most adverts and I loath screens.
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Same. Somehow I missed this news before getting a message from a zmail domain and thinking it was spam:
https://thehustle.co/newsletters/🖥️-zmail-is-the-new-gmail
I use variations of my name with those services to make it easier to tell who is sharing my data. I figure that makes us even.
Drones and screens sound kinda…fragile, right? 
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Heeeeerrrrrrrre we goooooooo:
I think most of us could see this coming.
It’s not like Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan were exactly quiet about selling us out to their oligarchs, corporate masters, cronies, et similia.
https://www.tni.org/en/article/the-living-legacy-of-privatisation-in-the-united-kingdom
The living legacy of privatisation in the United Kingdom Energy transition country struggle
As a consequence of privatisation, UK consumers and workers have suffered from increasing energy prices, fuel poverty and thousands of job losses. Between the early 1990s and 2001, 60 per cent of jobs in the energy sector were lost to efficiency gains, involving outsourcing and downsizing.2,3 Meanwhile, private firms are recording ever-growing profits. The privatised transmission grid operator National Grid, for example, paid out record dividends of £1.4 billion in 2021.4
While the fragmented and liberalised energy market fails to meet people’s basic needs, unions, activists and some within the Labour Party are putting forward proposals to restructure the country’s energy sector around public ownership, democratic governance and just transition.
Thatcherism and its legacy
To strengthen the post-Second World War economy, fundamental industries, including electricity, railways, coal and steel, were nationalised by the Labour Government. Yet following the 1979 election of the Conservative Party, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, the government pursued aggressive privatisation policies. More than 40 UK state-owned businesses, employing 600,000 workers, were privatised between 1979 and 1990.5 What’s more, Thatcher’s model for energy privatisation and liberalisation became a template enforced across the world for years to come.
Arguing that privatisation would make firms more efficient and increase labour productivity, Thatcher moved to privatise the country’s energy market in the mid-1980s, in the aftermath of the global energy crisis of the 1970s.6 To transform this natural monopoly into an artificial, competitive market, the energy sector was ‘unbundled’ into the separate components of generation, transmission, distribution and supply. In 1986, the gas sector was privatised. The electricity sector followed in 1990, when twelve regional electricity companies in England and Wales were sold off to private firms. In the end, virtually all components of the energy system were placed under private ownership.
…
Where we’re heading, if we are not indeed already there:
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Yeah, but on the other hand a small handful of people has earned millions and billions off these public institutions, so the system works!
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On a smaller note, I think I just saw evidence that Amazog does targeted pricing. I don’t like to use them, and don’t much, but sometimes I can’t find something elsewhere.
I wasn’t signed in when I checked a price. I added the item, at 30% off, to my cart, then signed in. My cart was then empty, and when I looked up the item, it was only 19% off.
I didn’t buy it. I’ll keep searching elsewhere.
Fuckers.
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The user interface has gotten enshittified in so many ways. Like a lot of people, I used Amazon fairly often at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. It would’ve been easy to stay in the habit and support Bezos. But he’s making it really easy to break that habit!
It used to be that I could actually shop, as in look around and find something good to meet my needs, on the site. Now it’s all just garbage suggested by idiotic algorithms. If I need something, I’m better off doing the shopping part on the wider web, then look on various sites to see if I can buy that exact thing.
One example: clothes. Does no one else care about fabric? Because though you can filter search results by seemingly infinitesimal detail, I can’t for the life of me find a linen anything that’s actually linen, or wool or whatever.
We supposedly have access to everything, but it’s so poorly curated that all we get is a faceful of shite to choose from. More than a face full. A landfill full. A million landfills full.
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Sorry but that makes me think of ZOG.
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I have seen projects to gut Google Home speakers and replace the mainboard with something like an ESP32 to reuse some of the parts. I haven’t seen anything like that for the Amazon devices, but that’s certainly an opportunity. Home Assistant is making progress on their implementation of a voice assistant that can run entirely locally, so there is a future where you can get what you probably want from a device like that without all of the compromises that the Google/Amazon/Apple devices have built into their plans.
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I noticed yesterday that when i first opened my Youtube app it automatically started playing a Youtube short. Thought i might’ve fat fingered the screen and accidentally clicked on something so i didn’t think much of it.
However this morning when i launched it again it did the same thing. So i presume YT has made this behavior the default or they are testing it (or maybe it’s a bug), and honestly it’s annoying enough that i might use YT on my mobile browser instead if there’s no way to turn that off.
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I’ve got a Home Assistant Green, but still mostly rely on Google Home for my automations, as HA can be a bit of a faff.
Also, if you want to drive it remotely, it requires a Nabu Casa subscription, which ain’t exactly cheap.
Still, I keep promising myself that one of these days, I’ll take a week off and dedicate it to getting HA properly set up.
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They’ve also changed the browser experience, so that Shorts now appear on the same row as regular videos.
I wouldn’t mind them playing with these new layouts and features if they just allowed me to turn them off.
As it stands, I have an increasingly large library of FIrefox plugins dedicated to deshittifying Youtube.
Edit: Personal recent favourite, Fix Pink Youtube that removes the stoopid pink shading from the progress bar, which had me thinking my monitor was damaged.
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I don’t mind shorts as a format. What I do mind is the complete interface and mental model change that comes when one views a short. Yes, I am interested in the short-format content from the creators I follow. No, I do not want to experience YouTubeTok.
(Incidentally, if you tinker with the URL you can view shorts as regular videos. If I knew more about writing a browser plugin I’d make one that did the URL rewrite any time it encountered a shorts URL.)
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Oh don’t get me wrong, I quite like Shorts. But why do they need to loop?!
And I’d like them in their own section.
But nooooo, Google knows what’s best for me, or rather what’s best to “drive engagement.”
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I’ve got a Yellow, although I started with a Raspberry Pi at first due to the shortages of CM4s at the time. I’d probably recommend a Green for anyone that’s starting new. Much less to mess around with just to get a working system.
I don’t know the specifics of the OS on the Green, but there is a Tailscale client for Raspberry Pi/ARM that may work. That’s probably the fastest/easiest way to set up a VPN for remote access without a monthly fee. The Nabu Casa solution is probably easier and better integrated, but it’s not required.
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