Respect for the consumer has long been gone generally except for a few brands.

I am still wondering why consumer respecting brands are not emerging more and thriving.

The point is: which brands still respect user privacy? If I were to buy a new TV today, which brands-models should I prioritize? Also, are there brands-models that in which it is possible to sideload a different OS like with mobile phones (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc.)

Our Android TV (Sony) has an option to basically make it a dumb TV. Not sure whether that still exists. We use that + simply don't plug a network cable or set up WiFi. As long as they don't add cellular modems, this works.

I bought a projector in part because they are behind on this and only seem to have basic software

That's a great idea, thanks for sharing!

An Apple TV would be the best for privacy you can easily use but not perfect. Don't use streaming services. Torrenting with a VPN would share the least data but Nuvio/Stremio wouldn't share much with adtech. Can't use those on an Apple TV without sideloading :(

> which brands still respect user privacy?

does anyone know of a reputable site which rates companies by things such as trustworthiness?

are any companies at all trustworthy anymore? like literally any?

rtings is starting to cover some of this stuff now.

We're in a recession, in all but official numbers (which are decreasingly credible by the day). Big companies weather a recession and use it to ransack countries, becsuse smaller/mid-size companies are struggling to do the bare minimum, outright shut down, or cannot start up to begin with.

There's a lot of moving parts that makes it really hard for ethical newcomers to disrupt in these current times. And that's just one angle.

The bottom of the line TVs are basically commoditized and are sold at a loss. There's few tv manufacturers and they mostly compete on price, only the top of the line models have pricing power and only for 6-24 months for new models. A supermajority of consumers don't care if they're tracked all the time and a large fraction don't mind ads everywhere either (they're used to it).

A new display plant costs multiple billions.

> A new display plant costs multiple billions

To be fair, most TVs on the market are buying panels from the same few manufacturers. For example, Hisense sources panels from part of LG. I think Samsung is another manufacturer.

So a new company could theoretically access these panels to make a privacy friendly TV without as much capital.

But like you say, it wouldn’t be able to compete on price, because the ad tech lets other companies sell at a loss.

> only the top of the line models have pricing power

And they still do it anyway because why wouldn't they? My $4K+ TV still wants all sorts of "personalized viewing experience" access.

They would care if they understood it. They shouldn't have to care–they deserve consumer protection regardless.

Well you can say this about dozens of products. People basically only care about price and perceived status for some products. Repairability, privacy, sustainability ... are not important for 90% of people, when government tries to they get pissed annoyed having to pay more.

A consumer respecting brand sells products. A Consumer selling brand sells consumers so they can be profiled, analysed for weaknesses and exploited economically in the name of Surveillance Capitalism

I suspect because it's hard to differentiate between ones that actually respect the consumer vs ones that only say so, but are actually lying to your face.

That and not respecting the consumer is more profitable in the short term (only!), which means more marketing money, buying out other brands, lobbying to increase the barrier for entry, et cetera.

Machiavelli's flexibility: evil has more options to achieve its goals than good, and therefore it always wins. (The invisible hand of the market is a myth - people don't choose things on principles unless they have money to burn).

Because there's no incentive to do it. The consequences of being tracked are outta sight outta mind.

That is why politicians get rich.

But also, people do not generally hesitate in front of an all-you-can-eat bouffe

As an european I approve of the claim being "Its not this, its that", because for once its an actual good use of it, as many things claim to be european when in actuality they are american companies, hosting their stuff in an aws/azure european data region, so not really european at all.

I feel like they only exist so that google can claim that competition exists.

That's correct. Soon there will be Ladybird, hopefully in a few years a very good competitor to Chrome/Firefox.

The thing I'm worried about with Ladybird is it's core logic is being coded by AI. I don't mind AI in other regions of code but I think core logic should be carefully written. They're also not very organized. Deciding to rewrite the whole codebase from CPP to Swift, then the decision changes to Rust shows uncareful decision making.

Its sad that you gotta be a software engineer, to immediately get this joke, because its pretty good

It just feels hollow and cheap.

The FAQ technique is LLM/SEO crumbs because people usually search for questions, if you have the exact likely question text that maps to user's search you're more likely to rank. It's unfortunate but it works, like open mouth YouTube thumbnails.

It’s still hollow and cheap. I closed those sites immediately even before LLMs. You need to pay me to waste my time, not the other way around. Even if that’s using your then not-so-free app.

That’s not feedback, just a non-constructive opinion. As someone else wrote above, if you’re so precious about it then help out the devs of the project and submit design PRs.

Here is a constructive one then: delete it. It’s better for everyone. If I want to read AI slop about your open source code, I can ask LLMs directly. It’s cheaper for you, and everybody.

This is absurd. No one has an obligation to help anyone nor do they owe you any standard of help. Opinion on quality of output is constructive to the wise and an opportunity to scream "If you can do better than do it" for the small minded.

People do not want to talk to their devices because they are in the room with other people and they dont want to disturb them. I think their device is going to be a flop.

It's going to flop because everyone is already able to talk to Google Assistant to manage things, and outside of very specific circumstances (e.g. driving) everyone is still tapping screens instead

But a big part of software engineering is literally defining the requirements.

Chrome became popular in the time where firefox was already more popular than IE.

TLDR: We need agents that can read our minds.

I think we want two opposing things:

1. An agent that acts autonomously 2. An agent that acts like we would

The problem is that an agent can only act like we would if it would know our mind and all the bits and pieces we did not define but are obvious or clear to us.

The only real solution to get an agent to act like we would is to make it ask clarifying questions, breaking the first requirement we have. Until we have agents that can literally read our minds, we cannot have both.

Optimizing the harness/context is the best way to make it act like we would, but this of course isn't working perfectly.