Gauss we've all got a fresh option for a gen AI handheld: A Samsung device Upcoming versions of Samsung devices will come equipped with Generative AI features starting next year after the chaebol launched its own tool – Gauss – on Wednesday. "Samsung Gauss is currently used on employee productivity but will be expanded to a variety of Samsung product applications to provide new user experience in the …
My current Samsung mobile has Bixby (complete with dedicated hardware button), which doesn't work as I have steadfastly refused to agree to the "give us all your data" EULA required to enable it. It also has Samsung Health, which I have never used for the same reason. Am I safe in assuming that Gauss will hide behind the same requrement? And all information will be beamed back to Samsung so that they can monetise it?
Or should I just admit defeat and let them gather my personal data, and sell it to anyone willing to pay for it?
What you should do is bolster the modern Samsung device firmware efforts so that we can port privacy- and freedom-respecting firmware to them. i.e., try to install various open source firmwares that fit your privacy and ethical models, modify them to work if you have the knowledge, report bugs, write guides for users, spread knowledge, engage with like-minded individuals.
If Samsung won't respect your privacy, and you don't respect Samsung's corporate stance, then do something about it.
Yes, you'll be missing out on all the proprietary features, but using those features requires you to sell yourself as you describe. In my opinion, it isn't worth it.
But you're still rewarding Samsung for building such privacy-invading devices by buying the hardware. After you've bought it and they have your money, they don't give a shit.
For me, nothing of theirs "just works" without some sort of issue. A friend bought a 49" monitor and it had major problems waking up from powersave. Another friend has a Samsung dishwasher that doesn't wash dishes.
I just refuse to buy Samsung products.
Samsung make excellent cordless vacuums that beat the pants off the market leader's very pricey efforts.
Out of interest is the powersave wakeup issue caused by conflicts between built in powersave and Windows trying to manage the monitor, creating conflicts over the monitor's USB hub? I had that with my Asus monitor, which would sit there incessantly bingly-bonging with a blank screen. I turned off power management for the monitor in Windows and let the monitor manage its own power save and the problem disappeared.
Regarding Sammy software - yeah, POS. But that's what you get - hardware makers don't understand and can't do software, because in their world thinking is "get the product mostly right for no recall and minimal warranty claims, sell once, ship and forget". When the boot is on the other foot, software makers often struggle with hardware because their mind set is "ship a half baked and incomplete product ASAP, iron the problems out afterwards and look to squeeze recurring revenues sorting the inadequacies". Those distinctions between product and software are universal, except for any form of domestic heating control gear, where that sector has it's own unique aspiration of "how can we make this as obtuse, counter-intuitive, irritating, poorly documented, functionally limited and unergonomic as possible?
That's why you buy used. And if your next answer is "well then you're funding someone to buy another Samsung device," your tax dollars are funding the military industrial complex, the destruction of our environment, and countless other atrocities committed by your government. Are you going to stop paying taxes?
The moral grandstanding has to end somewhere else you become neutered and incapable of adapting to your environment.
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