A rare, levelheaded take.

The changes are fine. Nothing earth shattering, nothing wildly or fundamentally broken, just a visual update to better fit with Google’s new material design language.

They’re shutting down Assistant everywhere, in favour of Gemini.

Right. There’s plenty to criticise Apple for, both in general and for chasing the AI trend, but looking at it purely in terms of user privacy within AI features they’re miles ahead of the competition.

Yep, I totally feel that. 10+ years ago I was into all sorts - psychological thrillers, crime and mystery, prestige TV drama, etc.

Ever since the pandemic, my taste has flipped dramatically to comfort TV (sitcoms and panel shows) and YouTube content like retro gaming channels, GMM, and Dropout.

I see these huge shows like Succession, White Lotus, etc and while they might’ve interested me in the past I just do not have the energy any more.

Horrendously editorialised, too; it’s written in such a way as to specifically get people riled up. Tabloid-style rubbish.

Both funny and sad how quick folks are to comment just so they can dunk on Thing They Dislike, without bothering to look past the headline that misrepresents the point of the article.

‘Bluesky bad, updoots to the left’ mentality that I naively hoped had been left behind on Reddit.

YouTubers - especially large channels like this - constantly A/B test with different thumbnails and stick with whatever one drives the most traffic (no pun intended) to the video.

You might not like it, but it’s unfortunately the reality of operating a content creation business on an algorithm-driven platform.

There are plenty of channels I follow that make fantastic videos, but sometimes you have to tolerate the shitty thumbnails because that’s just the reality of the system they’re operating within.

If anyone else is wondering, I’ve not found a verbatim quote of the steps but I did see an article that mentioned the consequences. It seems like you will be able to turn this off but it will disable Voice ID:

anyone with their Echo device set to “Don’t save recordings” will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that “if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work.” As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don’t let Amazon store their voice recordings.

If you do not want to set your voice recordings setting to ‘Don’t save recordings,’ please follow these steps before March 28th:

Am I the only one curious to know what these steps are? The image cuts off the rest of the email.

Sadly that’s often the way of things in games - writers brought in far too late, when the bulk of the design and development is already done, and being told to ‘just write something that connects these levels together’.