But when you see a reply from a small account with few interactions high up under a popular post, you’re still going to know it’s a paying simp.

It’s like putting a clown nose whilst wearing your nazi uniform. People can still see the uniform, but now they also think you’re a clown.

Hopefully the native version, coming soon, will be a bit smoother than the pwa and have better integration with the OS.

It’s probably the best pwa I’ve ever used, but it’s still a pwa. And the native version will still just be a wrapper on the pwa, but it has the potential to be better.

Homepage is great. I like that you get little snippets from the apps it links through but is more customisable than something like Heimdall which does similar. It’s become my go-to having tried pretty much every other dashboard out there over the years.

No Linux or MacOS support? Presumably that means just for their software and it will still present as a normal keyboard, so will still technically work?

You don’t even need a loyalty card at that retailer. Your payments get sold by the payment processing companies to data harvesters, including Google.

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.

For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn’t happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they’re listening to you. They’ve spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they’ve fucking nailed it.

That’s far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don’t even say out loud. It’s terrifying.