Google dialer?

Ad free, not slow, but collecting all possible data on your calls.

I like that it’s blocking the spam calls, I get 10 spam calls for each real call. Unfortunately that needs to send back to them all my phone calls with their caller id.

I hate how it shows the call log. It only shows the latest action ever for a number and doesn’t even show the time. This is especially infuriating when you need to see what time someone called. For example my doctor office called to move my appointment, then when I showed up they said that wasn’t true and wanted to charged me for a no-show. I wasn’t able to prove immediately that they called me on which day and at which time to move the appointment because the “simplified” call log only shows the latest call action which was that I called back several days after that.

Why the fuck are they using a cloud tts on an Android device??? Can’t they use on device tts?? Seems extremely stupid for no reason

1. It’s expensive. They are paying a fee to the third party tts provider each single time someone needs a response. They boast “no subscriptions” - that means those fees are paid only by new customer purchases. Ponzi 2.0

2. It’s fucking expensive. Elevenlabs tts voices costs thousands of dollars per month plus $0.18 per 1000 characters. Ask the history of a monument and the verbose result that the LLM regurgitated costs them $0.15. Are they banking on the fact that most customers would just shelf the device after a day?

3. It’s slower. Each time the device needs to reply, it needs to stream an audio file instead of a few bytes of compressed text

4. For the more realistic voices it’s only cheaper in the short term. I get it - they don’t like the robotic free voices and licensing a good closed source one costs money. But then you don’t need to pay the “cloud” forever. Did they plan to shut down shortly after the launch? Where the money for running each user in a VM is coming out? (I saw from a YouTube video that it looked like they were using a browser automation tool in a VM)

At this point since everything is run on the cloud (=somebody else’s computer) this could not only be a smartphone app, but a smartwatch app.

I wonder if they will just fold and do a rug pull now blaming the hackers or fix the problem.

Fixing the problem seems difficult for them - need to fully rewrite the app and having everything proxied through their authenticated server, increasing their expenses (and a rushed fix isn’t secure/tested). But their money comes only from new investors and new customers, and at this point I doubt that they can sell more units or scam more investors.

I was also thinking like that until I discovered that the only dude on XDA that was packaging all kind of roms for my short lived Xiaomi, was doing it on random servers (hacked servers? He was always complaining on his telegram channel that he couldn’t find VMs with enough RAM or that “didn’t last enough”) and he sold the phone one year before so couldn’t test it. Just running a script and if it compiles, it ships.

After I finished to read his telegram channel I restored the original android 8 firmware and flipped it on eBay…

Should be the bare minimum

I stopped buying Xiaomi because they switched from “monthly updates for years to come” (until around mi 5-6) to “a single update in the phone lifetime, if you’re lucky” (RIP those idiots who purchased an expensive mix 3 5g and never saw any update) passing from “we gonna push ota updates without testing, you might softbrick LOL”

Although is understandable because they churn out 1 new phone every week, I guess it’s extremely tiring compiling and testing software for all those variants /s

They copy everything from the iPhone, they don’t copy the best part. Just three new models every year, updates for years. Why the opposite? People is going to lose track of what’s better between the mi 13s pro x and the Redmi note 16x pro 5g. Especially when you add more chaos by rebadging that Redmi as poco x33 pro 5g but changing some bits here and there to make software incompatible

For me it was annoying enough to switch to android. I really felt like I had to use iCloud, forced through my throat. I have ocd and a red dot means “I need to open this app immediately RIGHT NOW to clear it” - and then your can’t clear it until you subscribe

it’s a dark pattern deliberately chosen to let people get annoyed and pay for icloud. On windows people instead will accidentally fill their onedrive account and that’s it. They won’t even know that they’re using it. It might send some scary emails like “your cloud backup is full!!!11 you gonna lose everything!!111” but those go directly in spam. Error messages in windows for regular users appear like “����� �������� �����������” - their eyes don’t have the right encoding to understand the message, so they just click OK and dismiss it. Instead, the red dot is prominent in the home screen of every iphone and bother also those that don’t read the error messages…

They never reinstalled OneDrive after an update… yet

(I hate how I have to uninstall useless shit after updates)

Yes, it doesn’t get re enabled but I totally hate that annoying red dot on settings if you don’t set iCloud

Isn’t apple doing the same?

Designed to fill the 5gb immediately so you’re going to buy more cloud space immediately

When I had an iPhone, there was an annoying red dot on the settings icon “warning, you didn’t enable cloud backups for photos”, and if you enabled it become an annoying red dot “warning you ran out of iCloud space”

Well, first there are a million active forks.

Second, it’s literally useless. It just shows your PC specs so when you screenshot and share it online people can know that you could afford that specific hardware. E-penis 2.0

If it’s a small website like the one you screenshotted, yes, I disable the adblocker for them.

If the website is unreadable without an adblocker like XDA, then fuck them, I’m going to block the adblocker-blocker

Agree. At least email can be easily filtered but phone…

Should be kept more secret than SSN

Maybe it’s a regional thing. After all the function primary purpose is to serve ads (sponsored content) and drive visits to bing, so there’s a chance that this malware-like behavior is enabled only in specific countries that drive more ad revenue

The dialog goes away after a short time defaulting to “yes I want the useless search bar”

It happened on all my PCs, I was infuriated

maybe you need to try again.

Instructions:

1. install any windows 10 version released before october 2023
2. disable the search bar
3. install KB5015684 (or wait 2-3 days for it install automatically)
4. windows has added back the search bar “for your convenience”

no no no, it asked your permission. It’s just that the “we added back the search bar, is that ok” dialog defaults to “yes” after some short time. Extremely fucking annoying change

the dialog:

article: https://www.c-amie.co.uk/technical/windows-10-patch-for-october-2023-kb5015684-re-enables-the-taskbar-search-box/

AI taking more jobs.

Now you just need a execute single PowerShell line to upload the whole history to the attacker, no need to hire skilled hackers to code custom malware or infostealers.

What those malware devs are going to do now that ai replaced them?

presumably the reason that people paid $230 for a $30 toothbrush was the $200 smart speaker that doubled as charging base. Once that feature is remotely disabled, we can say that the device as a whole (smart speaker that can charge a generic toothbrush, bundled with a generic toothbrush) is essentially bricked

Disclaimer: it’s not that I’m denigrating the devs, making a program like gimp is super fucking hard and as a lousy programmer I could never be able to make it better. Ideally, it would need some talented designers to develop a more usable UI.

I see comparisons to photopea, but that’s a UI clone of Photoshop and that is not really wanted. It also didn’t come with technical debt from the 90s

Agree with this

I am not a native speaker and I never associated gimp with a sex meaning, even if my vocabulary is pretty expanded.

It could be called “DesirePix 2.0” or “SeductionStudio 4.0” but the main problem is that it gives a worse user experience than using Adobe Photoshop 5.0 on windows 95, on every single aspect. Features, speed, UI, ease of use, and so on