Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.
Maps refuses to show your *current* location if you don't enable location accuracy i.e. if you won't allow it to spy on your WiFi or Bluetooth it refuses to show your current location at all. GPS, what's that?
We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?
I've just turned off location accuracy, google maps displayed a popup said results will be better if I turn it on, and after dismissing the popup it did use GPS to localize me with no issues.
Yeah, I am hugely annoyed by this. I kept paying for the subscription for a year and a half, but I think I will stop now, as I feel that the added value is very small in comparison to Claude Code or just using openrouter open models.
This is a risk issue. They need users to explicitly opt in or they risk user-data-related compliance suits. This has always been Google's problem, as an advertising company, and why they've taken so many seemingly awkward paths over the years with both Android & Cloud.
A malicious version of Anthropic’s Claude Code VS Code extension, version 2.1.313, was published to the Open VSX registry on Oct. 30. According to ChainCatcher, security researcher Paul McCarty, known as 6mile, described the finding in a post on the OpenSource Malware blog. Researchers confirmed the analyzed Open VSX release was malicious and submitted a threat report about the same version on Microsoft’s VS Code Marketplace as a precaution.
Wasn't this an official build though? A signed updated version of a package released by the same developer as the one you've already installed, the supply chain was hacked.
As someone from the UK, all these points seem ridiculous to me, are they really valid elsewhere?
I get that point 1 is extremely valid in a place like the US where everyone can have a gun.
Do other countries not enforce fines?
In the UK you can have your car confiscated on the spot if the automated number plate recognition in a patrol car flags you don't have insurance. Fines are enforced, but escalating that to non-payment of fines seems like something they could do (people might complain, but only the ones not paying their fines!)
Re point (1), it's definitely not just guns. In the US:
- Suppose a vehicle chooses not to stop. What's the safest way to complete the stop? High-speed chases are dangerous. The eventual spike trap or pushing the tail end of the car or whatnot is dangerous. The fleeing person won't be in a sound state of mind for safe driving even if not followed. Toss in a little human error like forgetting to turn your lights and sirens on, and these are predictably extremely dangerous. Just under 1% end in a fatality.
- There's an elevated risk of wrecks, side-swipes, and whatnot by virtue of being on the side of the road, often in dangerous areas.
- Most assaults on police officers don't involve guns. There are something like 7-8k assaults on officers due to traffic stops annually, despite knowing they carry guns. A little over a hundred of those result in serious injury to the officer, most of which don't use guns in the process.
- Don't forget injury to the passengers. 100k/yr are injured by the police at a traffic stop. Again, that's usually without guns. And why wouldn't they be? The police have nearly a carte blanche, and they're being placed into an environment where they know they're at risk, with perceived risk being higher than actual risk.
You mention the UK, so how do they fare? They have 100x fewer traffic stops, so I'll scale up the numbers accordingly. In particular, that means they have 2.5x officers injured just from vehicles being rammed during stops than the US has assaults on officers in total. That's suggestive of gun violence not being the entire story regarding traffic stop safety.
Mind you, that's not quite apples to apples. The UK has 5x fewer people and 2-3x fewer miles driven per person per year, suggesting we're missing another factor of 5-10 when trying to figure out why the US has more traffic stops, and my first guess would be that the UK police have a selection bias toward more serious offenses, so the higher safety rates of the US police are at least in part due to pulling over a higher share of less violent individuals.
Nevertheless, it's not just gun violence. Traffic stops are dangerous elsewhere too. (not to be interpreted as a comment on gun policy, rather that it's annoying to see important conversations like consequences of traffic stop safety derailed by irrelevant nationalistic swipes and jabs)
How much of the violence you list is because of warrant enforcement via 'traffic stop'?
Traffic stops should be used for traffic enforcement and treated as community policing, not as the main method of hoping to stumble on things the police should have resolved via actual police work and effort.
From here [0], extrapolating based on relative rates of traffic stops vs other police-initiated contact. An estimated 32k of those required hospitalization.
It seems like our federal system is an obstacle. I'm in Maryland and a huge fraction of our biggest habitual traffic violators somehow get Virginia license plates.
> Do other countries not enforce fines?
Where I live (Baltimore, MD) the 10 vehicles with the most unpaid speeding tickets owe $81,000 between them. So you can push 10k in unpaid fines and remain on the road somehow.
Pro subscriber here: available in the Gemini app, not available in AntiGravity.
I'm not going to 5.5x my subscription cost without being able to try it out first. To be fair though, I'm not going to 5.5x my subscription cost anyway, as my current usage would not warrant that! But that doesn't change the validity of my prior point.
I had it switched off:
"Hey Google, remind me at 7pm"
"OK, your reminder is set for 7pm"
Next day:
"Hey Google, why didn't you remind me at 7pm"
"I can't do anything with your phone unless you enable chat history."
WTAF!
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