If the username doesn’t have to be unique, couldn’t you impersonate people?

MSN Messenger for the win!

Right but do they pretend there’s any reason that would benefit you?

What do these things do that requires accounts with anyone, google or fitbit themselves? Or even internet for that matter? I thought they were for tracking fitness or health related statistics of the wearer, something that can only be done with local sensors on the thing itself, does the analysis of the data those sensors collect require so much complexity it can only be done on remote hardware?

I wonder if there’s a kind of positive feedback loop with one’s own thoughts being mistaken for other entities’ voices and the contents of the those thoughts.

For example, if you get a bit freaked out by suddenly hearing an unidentified voice in your head, you might fear it, and if you fear it and think it malevolent, you might start to imagine what type of things it might want or say and then by imagining it and simulating it, you essentially create the very thoughts this malevolent entity ultimately speaks to you but since you can’t identify the source as yourself and it becomes the voice of this malevolent entity.

Nothing beyond what you see here mate. Still looking. Best suggestion has ironically been basically another Chromecast albeit now sold under a different name.

Good thread. I’ll look at it in detail there were some interesting options. So this Chromecast with Google TV thing, is it like software one puts on an existing Chromecast or… What is it? I’m not really very interested in installing anything apps of any kind on to it because I’m perfectly happy operating those from my phone or computer with a web browser, my issue with the Chromecast aside from increasing unreliability, is that it tries to do anything other than just received video streams and display them on the screen. Could I use this Chromecast with Google TV in that way? Where there’s no apps, no on screen display, just video streams?

The specific application in this instance was that it creates “progress notes”. Admittedly, as I have only the information from the article itself, having no background in this field myself, I can only make assumptions what those are like, but as the name implies it’s charting a client’s progress through therapy and would also imply to me a lot of summarising of information gleaned during sessions. I guess in as much as it also would necessarily have to create a transcript in doing this for you, I guess it also provides that too. This is portrayed as tedious and time consuming work by the creators of the service, who obviously have a vested interest in casting it in such light, but taken at its word, I would say in my opinion the advantage would be in automating some of the tedious and time consuming aspects of the job.

As I suspect you were driving at from the tenor of the question, there’s a lot of ways this could go wrong, in particular privacy concerns when this service is offered in the manner that it is here where it’s processed outside of the therapist’s own clinic by 3rd parties and information is shared with additional parties and used for many purposes with only the flimsy promise of “de-anonymisation” which appears to be hollow. It could also maybe affect how the therapy is conducted, making decisions about how to summarise this information that will influence what decisions a therapist makes and perhaps that therapist might have summarised it differently if doing the notes themselves, then again this all hinges upon how effective it is considered to be. If it can be evaluated and found to be generally good, then it seems tentatively like this could be a pretty helpful tool for a therapist. But in general, my comment was really more directed at what I feel like is a sad state of affairs across the board with recent tech advances including generative AI as applied in any aspect of life or work, that I think is often lost in these conversations where the technology really shows promise or is quite impressive but because of the manner of its development or the surveillance profit model, it’s basically tainted and ruined. I feel like I often come across commentary that fails to make the distinction between the negative aspects of how these techs have come about and are monetized and the tech itself where the latter is simply cast as inherently undesirable even when there’s clearly reason enough for people to find it appealing in the first place for it to end up in use.

You know, as with a lot of these tech advances that impinge upon privacy and put us at risk in the name of profit, the buy-in, the thing they’re offering in exchange, IS actually pretty worthwhile. This is extremely useful. It’s such a shame that all this cool Star Trek shit that I would have been giddy about as a kid has been realised, but at a sinister and often hidden cost.

Is there any way this can be done on local metal? Would it achieve the same level of accuracy and sophistication of the progress notes? Because if this can be offered to the therapists that wanted it enough in the first place that they either knowingly or unwittingly sacrificed their patient’s privacy for it, maybe they can be given an alternative.

Must have been satisfying , it’s like a third his entire body size.

That’s cool but the headline made it sound like DNA analysis was going to shed light on the experience of life at the time, like work and diet and how comfortable or conditions generally. This is more like one additional piece of evidence to support theories around ethnic demographics during a period in ancient Egypt and then a more interesting bit about burial and arthritis giving a clue to the person’s profession except the interesting bit was barely a paragraph and had nothing to do with the DNA, just more traditional archaeology.

Do I misunderstand emby or does it just not seem like a good deal on the basis of it being an ongoing subscription? I use the free version of emby and it’s really great. There was at least one feature that required payment to unlock. I like emby already and when I tried using jellyfin, the core features that were on both it and the free version of emby worked far less reliably and the paid feature on emby that was free on Jellyfin, worked extremely unreliably. Obviously resources and development had been spent to make something that worked very well and their paid feature probably would too. I use emby to make it easier to cast media locally to my chromecast and to access media on my computer, from my phone in my bedroom, so for me, it’s a fancy file browser and media player. The feature I wanted was to do with free to air tv streaming and I was thinking I’d be happy to pay for the Emby software to unlock this since they made good software that works. But here’s the thing, it’s FREE to air TV and yet they want me to pay, ongoing, in a perpetual arrangement to use it. I don’t get it. I use it to play media, but the media is my media stored on my machines. I understand software development isn’t free, I was happy to pay ONCE, but why would I keep paying when they don’t actually produce the media I use it to play? That seemed unjustifiable.

that’s what I’d hoped, and was the first thing I tried, but it just at some point figured out I was on android and redirected to a google sign-in. On desktop it was some useless link that essentially brought me back to the page where the link to add to apple wallet started on.

Thanks, that’s actually the one I’m using but I mistakenly called it “Android Pass” originally. I’ve edited my post now to reflect this correction. Unfortuantely, at least in the only 2 situations I’ve ever tried to use a wallet which was now twice in days, I was receiving emails from organisations, one with an auto club membership digital card and one with a ticket to an event, on both occasions, I was given a link to add to my google wallet or a link to add my apple wallet and neither link actually leads to a pkpass file or any downloadable file. In the case of one of them at least I saw it links to some unrelated company that I guess they teamed up with for distributing these passes called urban air ship. I assume if you go ahead an sign-in it eventually goes on to give you a pkpass file or something similar that a google wallet app deals with but I obviously wasn’t going to do that. I was wondering if there was any commonly known way to just get the pkpass file from links like those since both seemed to work in much the same way and I assume somewhere at the end of the hoops you jump through you get an actual file.

I think I’d be pretty pleased with that actually, so long as it’s on my local machine. That’s because I often find myself wanting to locate a particular email that is along certain lines, or on a certain topic, or involves an organisation’s name that kinda sounds similar to this one word but isn’t actually that word or things like “the email where they mention they’ve had a kid” but I can’t actually recall either what they called their child, or what gender they were, or when the email was received. Or actually, even better, in that last example “What’s Dave’s kid’s name again?” and just getting a 1 word, correct response, with the ability to open the email it found where this was mentioned for additional context if I want it. Or things like “how long has it been since we moved out of that house?” and instead of finding the earliest email I can on the topic of moving house and reading emails to surmise when we discussed leaving and then finding which one might have mentioned that actual date we moved out, I could just get an answer, in English again hopefully with a link to the email or emails that provided the rationale for how the answer was arrived at.

Often in those simpler search situations I mentioned where I just need to find a specific email, keyword searches don’t always cut it. I have an absolutely appalling memory so figuring out pertinent details to things happening now based on what was going on in my inbox at some point in the past are a very important way that I get by. If I could achieve this more easily by asking relatively vague, English language questions that will help direct search efforts that are being done for me would be really helpful. Sure, theoretically all existing means of filtering and searching email should eventually find me that message but they’d likely be more effort than just asking directly like you’d ask a person tasked with digging through a filing cabinet for you, and sometimes even after extensive filtering by all kinds of clues: date, senders, keywords, labels, subject lines, emails I remember around the same time that I can find; I just for whatever reason can NOT dig up that email only to discover it later when it’s too late to be useful to me anymore and get to see what obscure reason it was none of my clever search methods caught it…

I wonder what the reasoning was behind it being the 2nd place prize. Is that inherently more believable?

Or to market paid privacy focussed products towards you lol.

“You can always choose not use the street, no one forced you to sign up for an outside account”

Yeh, it’s not like virginity, the organisations chasing this data don’t live entirely off of new additions to their databases, the data is valuable to them when it’s a constant flow so if you are interested in guarding that data and stopping it from being shared too widely then there’s never a point at which it’s entirely too late. It is worth noting that it’s near impossible to maintain the type of privacy you might have expected maybe in the 90s, early 2000s but, if you succeeded in reducing how much data you give away even to some limited extent then you are successfully starving those that seek that data of something valuable. Information about you that’s years old is probably not worth very much. It all feeds in to the machinery of this surveillance economy so I’m sure it’s useful to some extent, but that machinery seems to be endlessly thirsty so it obviously needs a continuous supply.

I don’t know I thought it was pretty good.