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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and Chris discuss Meta Ray Ban Display glasses, the shift away from Netflix streaming dominance, a federal jury ordering Google to pay $425 million for user privacy violations, Bitcoin’s daily trading volume outpacing Apple’s by 59%, Tesla working on redesigning door handles, football broadcasting experiences, and more.
“News Pick of the Week” with Ralph Bond
This week our science and technology reporter, Bond, Ralph Bond tells us that US military researchers have achieved a major breakthrough by creating a wireless power transmission system capable of delivering energy to create electricity more than 5 miles away!
Read more here.
William in Atlanta, Georgia asked: “I read somewhere that Google was going to force its Pixel users to start using Gemini instead of the Google Assistant and… that sucks because I’ve tried Gemini as my assistant and it’s terrible at tasks and reminders and scheduling things and asking simple questions. It can do the complicated stuff like ChatGPT can but it is not a good assistant and I use my assistant every day, constantly for reminders and stuff like that. Is Google really gonna force me to use Gemini in 2025, and if so, what other devices can I use to not have to use Gemini – or how do I opt out of that if it’s even possible?”
William, Googles plan as we know it so far is to force everyone it can into Gemini and kill off Google Assistant starting with Pixel devices but continuing with the rest of Android devices until theyve covered every Android device with hardware that can support Gemini.
Unfortunately, right now opting out doesnt seem like an option and going to a different brand will only save you for as long as it takes them to get to the rest of the Android ecosystem.
Jumping to Apple wont save you for very long either, Apple has been trying to enable Apple Intelligence on their own devices that opted to leave it turned off with most of their upgrades since they released it.
Ultimately, whether you find Gemini useful or not doesnt seem to be a concern, these companies appear to just be pushing a new way to extract and process your data so they can use it for your own purposes, so going forward your options are likely to get smaller and smaller unless youre willing to opt for degoogled Android-based operating systems like LineageOS or Graphene which come with their own set of compromises (especially Graphene which is very privacy centric and makes some of the things most people use their smartphones for difficult).
Sorry we cant offer you more hope but these tech companies seem to have found a new way to process and monetize your information through these models, and even with their high cost to run they seem to think its worth it and are not giving us any choice.
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