bss03

Enshittification will continue until morale improves.

The first one does tell you how to "completely remove Gemini from your smartphone" under that heading. I do not have the Gemini app installed.

The second one says:

Can you fully disable Gemini on Android?

No, and that’s by design. While you can turn off activity tracking, revoke permissions, and even uninstall the Gemini app on some devices, Google is actively replacing its Assistant app with Gemini.

But, I've also disabled Google Assistant across all applications, so I don't share data with Gemini/Assistant. I had to lose some features to do so.

Overall, your reply serves to confirm for me that I have disabled Gemini on both of my Android devices. Still, I appreciate the links!

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me either way. There IS a lot of telemetry and other BS that is definitely still on my phone, included in OS updates, and not uninstallable (I can "uninstall updates", but that would also give me back any security issues). But, I don't think that it is Gemini, or at least predates that naming convention.

To get free of Google telemetry, I'd have to install a non-Google ROM, and I haven't ever tried that.

Telemetry certainly can be abused, and Google should be legally (by regulation) required to provide a simple opt-out. BUT, telemetry really is a fairly normal thing to include in "web-scale" deployments and is primarily used to discover issues that have escaped into production without affecting a testing environment--or, at least, that what the telemetry systems I've interacted with as an software developer were for. So, I'm not too worried about non-personalized data collection.

EDIT: I confirmed that Google says I have no Gemini activity to delete, so while I'm sure my phone is reporting stuff, it's not to Gemini.

Do you have some sort of evidence for this claim?

I've lost features that used to work without Gemini, but I believe it is disabled on both my Pixel 7 Pro and the Pixel 8 I have access to.

Sign the bill to ingratiate yourself with the councilors. Then, each quarter publically and loudly donate 25k USD to programs that are being un- or under-funded by the council. Win-win.

Especially if this will convince the council to raise the NYC minimum wage to a living wage.

You tried to compare socialism at its best against capitalism at it worst.

I think you are confused. I don't believe I've tried to make a comparison between socialism and capitalism in this thread. Perhaps that was someone else?

If capitalism works perfectly, by design- anyone has a fair shot.

I don't believe "fairness" is a defining characteristic of Capitalism. Can you please provide a definition of Captialism so that I can be sure we are talking about the same thing?

We’ve really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials.

Cognitive biases seem to be unavoidable. Even if you are well-educated about a particular bias, it often takes reflection (internally or externally motivated) to recognize it in your decisions / behavior.

Fallacious reasoning is often just as good at convincing an audience, which is one of the reasons they are still in use despite many or most being documented and named in ancient times.

Individual training in critical thinking skills can help, but theocrats (in specific) and authoritarians (in general) spend a lot of effort making sure that public education is robbed of that. But, that's not enough to "intellectually move on"; even with that training, bias occurs. So, we have to build systems for bias detection and remediation if we want a just global society.

Rent seeking existed long before the term ever existed just like fascism. It has always been bad

IIRC, Adam Smith (from "Wealth Of Nations") decried rent-seeking behavior and implicitly defined a "free market" as one without (free of) rent-seeking, as a form on monopoly, among other things.

So, yes, it was a recognizable problem in Capitalism before it was ever given name, and I wasn't trying to deny that, just to note that the whole time I've been alive it's consistently gotten worse.

The intent was to shame as a method of correction to prevent / reduce the behavior of leaving useless comments, and I believe it has been minimally, but somewhat effective at that.

Although, my first comment was so vague and satirical that I didn't even upvote it.

I'm using the standard meaning of authoritarian socialism: "Academics, political commentators and other scholars tend to distinguish between authoritarian socialist and democratic socialist states, with the first represented in the Soviet Bloc"