I will let you know if I figure out any way to bypass Google account creation.
Thanks :) Although I’m so far happy with my current setup.
I got tired of using a KB+M.
Using a mouse on the couch sucks, yeah. I still had an old unused Apple Magic Trackpad here, which (to my surprise) works perfectly with Linux, and with that it’s pretty nice.
I couldn’t bypass the Google account creation/login
That’s why I try really hard to avoid such things. I still try to (so far successfully) avoid having any Google-created operating systems anywhere in my home, because I trust them even less than Apple (for some years I used an AppleTV, but grew too frustrated with its limitations, and also Apple is becoming less and less trustworthy as well).
My solution currently: connected to an (older, non-smart) UST projector is a small HTPC (a little box from Asus based on an Intel N200, low power and fanless, but still has a GPU with a modern video decoding engine so it can decode even 4K video without issues). Since it’s a normal x86 system, I run a normal desktop Linux on it. To access streaming services, youtube, etc. I just use the web interfaces in Firefox. Big advantage of the setup is privacy, and best-in-class applications for playing local files (on streaming appliances that’s usually annoying and bad). And I can even watch broadcast TV on it with a USB DVB-T2 thingy, although I do that rarely these days.
Disadvantage: need to have desktopy computery input devices on the couch to use it (also have an IR receiver in there, but it’s not working well). Still, for me the upsides outweigh that downside.
Ugh. With this, and the recent articles about car makers collecting location data, and the multitude of news about car makers integrating LLMs, it seems that cars are going the same way as TVs, i.e. everything on the market is constantly violating privacy while also throwing ads in your face, and there’s no good models left to buy that don’t do it (to my knowledge). Wondering if there will be any good options left when it’s some day time for a new car…
Shows up like that in the local (non-US) version here too.
And this would have been such an easy way for Google to show a little bit of (at least symbolic) resistance to everything going on…
I like to use -- in plain text too! LaTeX user high five…?
Although I read somewhere recently that some people consider usage of em-dashes as a sign of AI-generated text. Oh well.
Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.
Oh why would they. They will just rewrite it from scratch in a weekend, right? And reading the original code would only pollute the mind with historic knowledge, and that stands in the way of disruptive innovation.
(btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)
This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?
Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?