Is it bad that I stopped using Google docs and plan on moving to OpenOffice instead?
I’d recommend libreoffice, because oracle also kinda sucks.
Why would that be bad?
Thats nothing, the Play Integrity API is trying to block usage by other operating systems like CalyxOS and Graphene. Imo much more insidious and opaque.
Every Google Drive action I do now is shifted over 20% for ✨
The good news is that this may cure my laziness. I’ve been preparing to leave most of google service for a while now.
I tried to ask it how I could remove it, Gemini told me that in order for me to help it I needed to active some of the “smart” features I didn’t have active on my account, essentially helping do the opposite. It follows the ever increasing practice of trying to shove basically illegal behavior into “it’s just the algorithm, bro, there was no intent!”
Or I ask to go to Costco, and where Assistant previously would route me to the nearest one, Gemini sends me to one 80 miles away
I love the dedicated piracy folder lmao
This is probably the most ‘old man yells at cloud’ thing about me but I hate voice assistants and they have yet to work consistently enough to be worth my time.
It is completely insane to me that something simple like “Add ____ to the grocery list” has worked and stopped working nonstop for years now. How hard is that to get right? Cannot believe such a simple action is so inconsistent.
My Google smart speaker used to integrate with my shopping list app. The loss of that integration and other features makes it basically a glorified white noise machine now.
I think a lot of that has to do with that Google used to be a company with engineers wanting to make the best software.
Now it’s an ad agency that happens to have some software to make money, and they don’t care about the software anymore. Money is not only bottom line, it’s all the lines. You see the results in the quality of their software, it’s all gone down hill.
That’s my biggest gripe with Gemini; it’s not a proper replacement for Google Assistant and yet it’s still treated as such.
Feels like Google took at least two steps back when it comes to Gemini on Pixel devices…
there is nothing forcing you to keep using google though
For now
I just tried it for the first time. I like how it tried to educate me
I didn’t like the verbosity overall
It felt dumb that using it via android studio it didn’t have any capacity. It didn’t know I was building for android. It couldn’t implement any of its own suggestions and a lot of the suggestions were incomplete.
After asking chatgpt, Gemini and deepseek I still can’t get Godot to build an android export that contains the sqlite shared object accessible to the code.
I’m losing my mind.
to be fair, Microsoft is also shoving Copilot down our throats. They keep adding unremovable Copilot buttons to Outlook.com
They replaced the “M365” app icon with “M365 copilot” and the copilot icon on android the other day. I Uninstalled it.
It’s nice to be able to use copilot in some of these apps, it is shit to be forced to have it everywhere.
Oof, luckily I don’t have to use o365 at work anymore.
I would say that neither corporation forcing AI on us is fair by any stretch
It is one of the few useful usecases tho. It can summarize meetings if transcribe is on.
But can it summarise them correctly?
Wanted to say it feels like Microsoft doing same thing with Copilot, but at least you can disable that. At least on enterprise plans, home / small business apperently is a different story now.
I wasn’t able to disable Copilot in Office without threatening to cancel via my account management page. It’s only then that they give you the option to fall back to the originally priced plan that specifically doesn’t include Copilot. And even after that, Copilot apparently won’t be removed from my locally installed copies of the Office apps until my plan renewal date in April! I’m pretty sure I’m gonna use the time to transition all my documents to LibreOffice and fully cancel my MS Office plan before it renews.
Google was “cool” 2 decades ago… or before they combined both monetization (through ad) with power (through monopoly) they inexorably transformed EXACTLY to Microsoft the same way Facebook/Meta did the Google playbook.
Those huge tech corporations are pulled by the market to follow the same, sadly successful, strategy playbook and keep no uniqueness.
Google has been the new Microsoft for years already but through careful marketing consumers somehow believe they aren’t.
Google is slipping. Duck duck go is a better search engine. There are better mail systems as well. Meta is done as well.
When the leaked internal video came out about Google’s real vision, everyone said it is fake. It does not look that fake now.
Which video was this?
Thanks! I’ll give this a watch.
All of it is. Or pushing copilot into all Microsoft products like anyone is using this shit.
Every time I’ve opened an Office app this week it has given me some copilot welcome screen and opened it’s own sidebar. I tried to use it to proofread a word doc and got prompted to purchase a license. So they basically just filled 1/3 of my screen with an ad.
Problem with Gemini is that is sucks badly in comparison with more mature solutions.
It really is terrible. I’ve tried a dozen times to get it to do anything that the free version of GPT can do…fails every time on the few things it even tries.
They’re laying down the road and try to get you to use it. The toll booths come soon enough when every alternative gets blocked as much as possible.
Use a hardened Firefox, use a different search engine
I don’t even have chrome installed. I use Firefox and Duckduckgo. It in android phones and gsuite products that people have to use for work.You have to go to extreme lengths to uninstall on desktop as outlined in the article, and cannot uninstall or opt out of on android.
My power button on my phone now opens Gemini… Every damn time it’s bumped. Press to wake? Oh hello Gemini
Install LineageOS or e/os/ on your phone and bye bye Gemini 🙂
