What was the data actually sent out? It was vague enough to sound like it could be tracking data (eg. Location) or it could be something like automatic updates.
It’s practically everything, IMHO. Last time I set up an Android device, I had to agree to at least 9 different Terms of Service before being allowed to use the phone.
Stepping back quite a bit, the US constitution divides up responsibilities between the Legislator (Congress), the Executive (President), and the courts (Supreme Court).
The Legislator is given rights over declaring war, applying tariffs and levying taxes, federal budget, approving international treaties, and of course writing laws. Over the past 250 years, the legislative branch has slowly given the executive branch more discretion. In times of emergency, the legislative branch moves too slowly, so the executive branch is better suited to make snap decisions.
Trump, as soon as he's taken office, immediately used these powers to declare an emergency at the border (https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-pr...) and redirected the military to intervene. It's an abuse of the power, as the situation has been relatively stable (enough so that congress should have had time to meet and decide on next steps), but it's something he did in his last term as well (https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/pr...) so was expected. What wasn't expected was the repurposing of Guantanamo Bay (a military prison with a dark history outside the jurisdiction of most US courts) now being used for migrants (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0p1ykxyzjo). It's a worrying trend of moving undesirables somewhere out of sight of the general public. In his last term, there were detention centers inside of the US (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tornillo-texas-tent-camp-hou...) with poor conditions -- most notably, Trump pardoned one such sheriff (https://www.npr.org/2017/08/25/545282459/president-trump-par...) who was remarkably cruel and called the tent cities personal concentration camps. This shift to move migrants to more restricted areas is seen as a way to avoid oversight.
Trump likewise invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to levy tariffs against Canada (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/prog...), Mexico (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...), and China (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...). Again, these powers are usually invoked in response to war, so it's considered an abuse of power. Canada and Mexico are also close allies and a part of USMCA, which is a treaty promoting free trade between the three countries; Trump negotiated & signed the USMCA treaty when he was last in office, and has since called it a bad deal and these tariffs directly conflict with it. It's put the US in a situation where allies are being alienated. Trump has also threatened tariffs against the EU and Taiwan, both of which currently count on US military intervention in case of war, which is straining those relationships as well.
In Trump's previous term, he appointed several Supreme Court justices. The court is idealistically an unbiased and independent branch, and are given lifetime appointments as such, but the political leanings of the court have shifted with these new appointments. Abortion, a controversial topic in the US, was recently made illegal in several states after the court re-ruled, on party lines, a 50-year standing (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf). More recently, and relevantly, though, the supreme court ruled again on party lines that the president cannot be taken to court over illegal acts while in office (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf) and that only congress's power of impeachment can be used. With a republican majority in both houses of congress (and impeachment requiring 2/3rds approval to convict), there seem to be little to no recourse to anything Trump has done or plans to do regardless of legality. It's democratic in a sense -- the US population voted for a majority in the house and senate and so we're getting what we voted for -- but there's 2 years until the next election, so there's a prevailing sense of helplessness.
Getting into powers of the purse, as mentioned before, the executive branch is expected to dutifully carry out the budget and laws set by the legislative branch. This includes the creation and running of departments, as well as getting senate approval for department heads. Notably, Elon Musk is not a senate-approved department head, but he's been given dangerous amounts of access to the treasury (https://www.wired.com/story/treasury-department-doge-marko-e...) and other departments. This is without going through the normal vetting process (although, as President, Trump does have the power to bypass such requirements. It's simply against norms, and raises concerns about the possibility of blackmail, espionage, and hacking). Elon has also declared several departments as 'criminal organizations' (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/03/nx-s1-5285539/doge-musk-usaid...), Trump has fired anyone who has pushed back against Elon's requests, and funding for most departments has been paused pending review. Trump has also offered almost federal employees a Voluntary Exit Program (VEP) (https://www.opm.gov/fork/), although the legality of such a VEP is debated since past court cases (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1989/88-1943) have ruled that congressional approval is necessary. If that's the case, anyone who resigns may not end up being paid. This is seen as a wider purge (eg. https://apnews.com/article/trump-fbi-firing-a7b19a5f414ce82c..., https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-federal-inspectors-genera...) of the government to replace federal employees with loyalists to the president (instead of to the constitution).
And for Elon specifically, during Trump's inauguration he did his infamous "My heart goes out to you" salute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw) which is seen as a poor attempt to signal to the far right and neo-nazi parties, that typically have supported the republican party, that they are welcome and in positions of power now. Elon also spoke at far-right rallies in Germany (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/elon-musk-appears-video...) championing lines of nationalist empowerment. At face value, it's innocent enough, but these terms are also seen as a dogwhistle for neo-nazis and so it's seen together as another vocalization of support for them.
Trump also pardoned everyone involved in the insurrection on January 6th, who had invaded the capital and attempted to abduct the congressmen and vice president to stop them from ratifying the peaceful transfer of power in 2020. This is seen as a nod from Trump that if you support him, you will have immunity for your actions.
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The US populace voted for this, so if it's a coup it's a bloodless one. But everything Trump has done in the few weeks he's been in office is very extreme by the standards of the US. The transfer is power is usually peaceful, and builds upon the work of past presidents. This is a very abrupt departure from that, and no concern is given to impressions of corruption and nepotism.
> The US populace voted for this, so if it's a coup it's a bloodless one.
The role of Trump's normalization of political violence cannot be understated. It's well known that going against Trump results in death threat and spawns acts of stochastic terrorism.
Oh, hey, I was working on that back in 2014 for one of the big TV manufacturers. The project was ultimately cancelled.
It was nice for things like switching HDMI inputs; you could dynamically update the name and icon, making it more intuitive for someone who had never used the TV before and didn't know what was plugged into which port. You could also adjust settings more easily without everyone have to watch together with you on the big screen as you dug to find the obscure setting to tweak.
But your complaints were equally valid, and were a concern at the time.
I would have liked to see it ship, if just to see if customers liked it. A traditional remote still worked too. But oh well.
When I press the "input" button on my remote, the TV displays a list of HDMI ports and what is plugged into them. Why would I want to be looking at my remote for that information? I'm already remote-controlling the best display device I own.
They have very few buttons, which you can't tell apart in the dark (unless you remember the layout) and everything must be done through the UI which tries to upsell you some streaming service everywhere.
What TVs should be adding, though, is Wiimote functionality. Build the IR array into the bezel and let me point the remote to select something with a cursor, with arrow keys as a fallback if I'm lazy.
Was it LG? I bought a lot of their discontinued Android-powered “smart” remotes for a project a few years ago. They unfortunately had their uses for other applications limited by a battery life of less than 30 minutes - I assume they were meant to live on the included Qi-powered stand.
Yeah, the Logitech Harmony remotes that combined real buttons with a touch screen, particulary the Harmony One, were amazing. You had buttons for all of the common stuff, like volume, play, pause, numbers, and so on, but then you also had a touch screen so you could directly trigger actions that can't have physical buttons because they're different between individual setups.
It seems like it'd be possible to, instead of typing multiple exclamation points, have one trigger-character (eg. ). And then replace that character visually with an entire paragraph of text, assuming there aren't limits to the width of a character in fonts. I suppose the cursor and text wrapping would go wonky, though.
You could also use this to make animated fonts. An excuse to hook up a diffusion model next?
Well they definitely commercialised it. Before the Lisa, no one thought consumers would be interested in a GUI computer. Bringing it to market is an important part of disrupting industries.
The iPhone was similar where the tech just existed out there (touch screen smart phones were definitely a thing), but it was Apple’s specific implementation that helped in the disruption. After both the Lisa and the iPhone launched, you can see computers and mobile phones coalescing around Apple’s vision in the long-run.
And yet it shows, yet again, the same about companies (and management). Steve Jobs was lucky, right time, right idea, right people, massive interest in the right things in the market, right location, right hardware available, right access to market and stores, production capacity available (for reasons entirely unrelated to what Apple did) ...
Yes they worked, but they rolled a hard 6 not once, but 20 times.
In other words: what about Apple makes them able to repeat this in another market? Nothing. Not even Steve Jobs (and yes I know he's ... which is yet another reason ...)
Google, internally, is pretty up front that there's a forced distribution (or quota) for performance ratings and promotions. It's for budgetary reasons, and it's not strictly enforced, but it's published and often referred to. Past a certain level, a business justification is also needed in addition to merit.
The quota the manager was referring to was very likely that.
