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j05h

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So, I used to think the same thing, and have several Alexa devices in my home. However, last week I got an ad from Amazon about shower head installation. I have never searched for that on any device, nor asked my Alexa about it. But I did have a meatspace conversation about it the day before I got the ad.

Maybe I said something which triggered it? No idea, but I'm sure that Alexa listening in caused the advertisement to show up.

I promptly set them all so they no longer listen and I'm trying to figure out a better solution (HomePod? Mycroft?). I absolutely love the (limited) capabilities smart speakers provide. But I'm done with Alexa.

Google Fights Back 7 years ago

So much this. Without a ride share app (and a few others) I just can't see going to Librem 5 as much as I would like to.

#2 true, but while it is complex, it isn't intractable.

My company enables direct to consumer beer and cider delivery. We mapped out the laws at the zip code level to avoid the legal issues and it works well.

The hard part is convincing the producers and consumers that it is even something they can do. And that shipping if actually worth it. Amazon has convinced the world that shopping is free.

Custom parser won't guarantee that all of the data is dumped...and some of it you may even want in the system.

Also -- lots of companies are seriously concerned about pushing their data externally. Making it a hard sell.

However, as a long tail service, this looks great.

Ubuntu for Android 14 years ago

Control, security, trust. Even if I got rid of all other computers, I'd still have a phone.

More and more I want to fully control my data on my terms. Maybe I'd be fine paying a service (linode?) to host my fully encrypted data in the cloud, but Google? Facebook? No thanks.

Way back in the olden days, I built a lovely reader (inventively called Reader) at Earthlink.

The key feature to Reader was that it did not have unread counts at all. You could flip through the articles and it would keep keep track of where you were. If you left for more than half an hour, the rest of the articles were marked as read.

It was very liberating to not feel like you were ever trying to keep up with your feeds.

These days, Fever App seems the way to go... http://feedafever.com/

When doing contract work, you don't normally get credit for a site on the about page. Sometimes you may get permission to add a footer link. I think this is great for those situations where you don't get either. My hope would be that most companies would not mind a simple text file in the root which isn't linked anywhere but is well-known.

My portfolio of sites becomes verifiable. Yes, I built these sites, and here are the humans.txt files to prove it.

I've been at plenty of companies and built many sites and can't really prove I had hand in putting building any of them.