What if we were *just a lil evil*?

Being an ad-driven company annihilated old google. Instead of developing precise and efficient tools (like they used to) all effort goes to convincing users to care about random crap, because the crapmaker is paying up.

As a programmer who enjoys a beautiful solution to a hard problem, this irks me every time I'm forced to interface with google.

Google was always an ad driven company. Google Adsense was kind of a big deal there for a while.
Once they started letting money affect their search results, especially with promoted / sponsored results, everything started going downhill.
It used to be that nobody went to the second page of google search (because the first page almost always had the result you needed), but now, the first page is almost entirely ads and paid content.
It's not the advertising part of Google that ruined it, because that part has always been there. It's the greedy executives that shoehorned ads into every other product and service possible, and are now cramming "AI" down everyone's throat, trying to make us all dependent on it, so they can rugpull it and charge us for access.

Fuck google. They don’t even index shit anymore. They index nothing. It’s not a search engine, it’s an ad engine. Everyone is stuck with Gmail now.

Resist! Host your own email!
- As someone who hosts a lot of things: Fuck email hosting. Just get your own domain for a few bucks a year, and use an established provider to host it.
- Or at least get your own domain and use it with a different provider.
I keep my Gmail for spam

I’m so mad. I bought and installed the thing in my wall before it was owned by Google, then they bought it and shut it down while it’s still working fine. It would cost them almost nothing to leave it working. It just does t collect quite as much creepy stalking information as the newer models, so now it has to go in a trash can.

I have learned from this experience to literally never buy anything that relies on an external server ever again in my lifetime.

Actually, it costs them a lot of money, my pihole is blocking 2000 requests per day from my nest thermostat. Multiply that for the millions of units they sold and you have a small scale "Perpetual DDoS Attack" to their servers. I don't know why a thermostat needs to call home that often, if it's to checking the outside temperature it could do it just twice a day, or just avoid it altogether when it's off (8 months per year in my case)
But yes, I will never buy this shit again from them, and the next must have the option to be controlled without internet. It doesn't make sense to send a message to a server in another continent to activate a device that's located in the same room I'm sitting in
- Even internet connected could be fine if they allow hooking into via something like home assistant 🤷‍♂️

The megacorp can have a little evil, as a treat :3

- So they are Vampires

Google is getting as bad as Microsoft with unusable old hardware. I mean fine stop supporting the older hardware but release the code/api to allow them to still function with people who know how to do it. Or at the very least allow the old hardware to be unlocked for third party firmware.

Unfortunately from a business perspective it's very hard to argue for this stuff since goodwill doesn't have a definable dollar amount but the engineering time to extract this and getting it working extremely definitely has a cost.
The back end of this smart crap is very likely inextricably intertwined with Google's internal services.
Remember Google exists to harvest data which means the important part of this thermostat is not being a thermostat but recording when you're home, what temperature it is, if you're awake etc etc.
- 100%. This needs to be a law or it can't be expected to happen.
I will say, MS make a decent mouse.
- Does MS make a decent mouse or did all of their competitors like Logitech just jump off a cliff with a drop in quality? I suppose "decent" could be a relative term.
- Yeah no doubt. I’ve got 20 year old MS mice that still work.

for no particular reason last night, I pulled my 2009 windows 7 laptop out of the grave and fired it on, and after I got through the wave of Smart errors and CMOS messages, When I opened up Chrome, not connected to internet, the cached version of google was still using its late 2000s early 2010s appearance. and it made me very sad.

My Nest thermostats are the last Google thing and the last I’ll ever buy. I’ve completely degoogled my life except for the Nests, because they still work fine in HomeKit via my Starling. Once they kill the Nest thermostat E (and I doubt that’s very far off), I will be completely free of that shitty evil company. I’m almost looking forward to it.

completely degoogled
What do you use for email?
- I registered my own domain and use purelymail.com. Super cheap, not difficult to set up if you’re mildly technically inclined. Plenty of instructions on how. Beauty of using your own domain is you can take it and use it anywhere without having to change your address again.
- I use Tuta.
What do you do for maps? Specifically directions while driving?
I've tried apps based on OSM but they get too unreliable outside of heavily populated areas.
- I just use Apple Maps. I know, “Apple bad” and all that, but in a duopoly I will choose the lesser of evils. No, I will not mess with custom ROMs on a Google-produced phone. I need my banking apps, and Google is now kneecapping most apps.
  Most newer cars also have “good enough” navigation these days.
- Not who you're replying to, but I got an older Garmin GPS on ebay for like $30 (the nuvi 2589). Get one with LMT (lifetime maps and traffic) and a traffic receiver cable. I had to buy my traffic receiver separately, cost me $12 on ebay, but you could get a current one for $70 and it may work better.

When Nest thermostats came out, they seemed interesting, then I saw that they required an outside connection and I immediately forgot about their existence. I'm not surprised about this latest development.

Welcome to the Google graveyard

Wait, Chromecast was killed?
I'm out of the loop.
- It's a "box" instead of a dongle now. Called TV Streamer. Essentially the same thing.
- Yes and no, old model is obsolete, new model has a different name and is supported for now
Wow. A lot of these things look pretty niche. -like AngularJS
/s

google openly says why they're such a shit company now. They made their search results worse, so people will click on more and more pages so they see more ads. They're a shitstain company. Stop using google.

Don't you want an AI summary that doesn't make sense? But first, click on this annoying popup and select how many cookies you want...

Wait, when did they start saying they were gonna EOL Nest thermostats?

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/16233096 1st and 2nd gen learning thermostats are going EOL by October 25th without any option to control locally (other than, yknow, the thermostat itself)
But don't worry! They'll let you purchase the 4th gen for only $149.99 if you're one of these owners!! Yippee!!!
- On totally unrelated news, I'm finding the my new ecobee to be pretty sweet. Supposedly it can be two stepped into homeassistant via Apple's webkit?
- Shite. At least my Nest 3rd is safe...for now
- I'm going to go give my dumb thermostat a li'l pat on the head. It does everything I need all by itself.
- You're given the opportunity to pay us money to get the same functionality you currently enjoy!
- Also super cool of them to disable the thermostat just when heating starts to become safety critical.

I was given a GSA! Flashed with non-Google firmware and maxed out in RAM (154GB?)

I have no idea what to do with it.

Oh man that would be awesome to have just the hardware alone is worth decent money.
- Really? I assumed they’re old and huge and heavy and not worth anything hahaha. He was gonna recycle it but asked if I wanted to have it. I bought a bunch of 2.5” SAS drives, but I honestly don’t know what I’m doing with it. I should have a friend over to help me get it set up.

Looks like there's an open source PCB hardware mod for nest thermostats:

Sett Open-Source Home Thermostat
- https://sett.homes/blogs/updates/the-lcd-display-reverse-engineering-the-display-interface

That looks dope as hell. Unfortunately the one I took out of service is a 3rd Gen, but I have no qualms about tearing it apart to see what's inside

Enshitification working as promised, as valued a few years later on the stock market (2004, even tho they didn't have much revenue).

That on prem solution cost minimum $50k USD. In the early 2000s. That's like one condo in today's money 🤣

I was in IT at the time and we'd been using a Microsoft index server solution to search our data at the time.

IDK, I think google was never focused on anything particular except profit.

I worked at a company for a while that had one of these set up.... It wasn't great.
I can't describe it, but it was just bad. Compared to what Google search could actually do, this felt like the most basic kind of indexing possible by comparison.
That search actively made my job harder.
It was bizarre.
I came across 2 of them at an ITAD I was working at a few years ago. A few of us were in a bidding war between ourselves until it got listed on eBay and sold for a lot more than any of us wanted to put down (and way more than we were making, fuck that job)

We welcomed skynet when it first came