plif

Your last sentence nailed it: this is a society problem, not a university problem. It's insane how much emphasis is put on these measures by parents from a very young age.

School boards here, and I'm sure many other places, decided to nix grades from March onwards after the pandemic hit. The announcement wasn't made until closer to the end of the term. I remember some parents being furious claiming that their kids "wasted their time" on remote school if a grade wasn't being assigned.

I've had this discussion many times, and as a university drop out, my opinion has always been similar to yours. One thing I've learned is that debating the merits of the higher education system is right up there with religion and politics in terms of topics to avoid at a dinner party.

People take great pride in their educations (read: pieces of paper). They can take great offense to the institutions and systems that produced those pieces of paper being challenged. These values have been passed on and hardened through generations. This is the first thing that needs to change before there's meaningful reform, and it's going to take time.

I do. I think something like this could become a competitive differentiator (smoother collaboration when you need it) and recruiting tool.

I moved during the pandemic and went from an awful to pretty great home office setup.

It's much better, don't get me wrong, but I'm surprised at how much I still miss the office. It's all about the people for me. I had no idea how much energy I got from the team and being together in the same space, even as a fairly introverted technologist. Remote communication technology is nowhere close to being able to replicate that. It's one of those things you don't realize is missing until it's gone.

I'm hoping to be able to continue with some hybrid of WFH and in-office post pandemic. However, if I had to pick one, I'd choose in-office no doubt -- even with my fancy home office.

The email address itself is what's irreplaceable for me because it's tied into my identity at this point.

The other soft stuff is fairly trivially backed up and not locked in to any vendor. The devices would need to be replaced, which would be annoying mainly due to cost but would have no long term impact beyond that.

I get your point, but losing my email address would be orders of magnitude more painful for me than those other things.

This terrifies me. I recently signed up for Google One just to mitigate the lack of support if I were to lose access to my account. Perhaps the other thing to do is not comment using my account, which feels very wrong.

All of the other options have drawbacks too. With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp. Setting up your own involves a bunch of work and difficult to solve drawbacks like spam filtering. I'm also not sure that it's harder to compromise in the grand scheme of things. There are horror stories of people losing domains too.

I think this is a prime case of out of touch governments failing to keep up with regulations. My email is part of my identity at this point and more valuable than any of the plastic that has been assigned to me by the govt. I can't think of much in my life that would be more painful to lose than that email address. Yet, we are all so powerless...

How are you still receiving updates? We bought one ~3 yrs ago and recently got the message that support was ending. I assumed that was the case across the board.

Anyway, the sketchy part of this is that it's referring to time of (initial) release, not time of purchase. These things continue to be sold well after initial release. When that was is also not something most users are aware of or care about. Arbitrarily losing a few years of support because you unknowingly picked the wrong model stinks.

That is exactly the situation that we are in. Like your Chromebook, this one is still perfect for its purpose and would have continued to be for years if not for this crap.

I also have a work iPhone and a Pixel 2 personal phone. I haven't encountered the same thing as you in terms of performance, they seem to be aging pretty similarly to me.

Google's attitude to customer support and brand loyalty, on the other hand, is a different story...

My girlfriend's Pixel 4 screen cracked and was a huge PITA to fix even though we paid a ton for extra warranty. Trying to get that fixed was far more painful than any experience I've had with other brands.

Worse than that, there is a software bug that can / will irreversibly brick your Pixel 2 rear camera. You can find a ton of info on it by searching. It doesn't seem to affect everyone, but I was unlucky enough to hit it last week, presumably from a recent update. Google has been absolutely silent on this issue. Unethical at best, and probably worse.

There was a time where I would have scoffed at paying a premium for Apple or other brands that sell an experience more than just a device. That's completely changed now. I don't have the patience or energy in my life to deal with what I perceive to be Google's cold / impersonal / numbers oriented approach to customers. It's just not worth the stress. If anything, I'm willing to pay a pretty big premium for the opposite. If that means switching our household to Apple products, so be it and good riddance.

This happens to me all the time. My Gmail is first name and last initial. I'm not sure if the burden here is on Google or those sites that don't verify email address before sending stuff like this, though.

The most fun so far for me was when someone used my email to sign up for Ashley Madison (the affair dating site). Of course, they were compromised a few years later and someone built a tool allowing you to search their users by email. Guess who appeared to be having an affair then? Tough one to explain to someone non technical...

Yes, theoretically in the case you mentioned.

All responsible implementations of this won't actually log PII. It's pretty trivial to withhold certain inputs. All of the services mentioned in the article have easy ways to flag an input field as private / do not log. I'd wager a lot of money that these sites are interested in gathering UX data and not scraping for accidental form input.

I suppose there's a certain level of trust involved, but I don't think that's any different than when you make an online purchase. /shrug

I thought this was mainly used to improve first load speed. The site won't be very useful if you can't interact with it beyond that.

No. They only have access to anything inputted within their site's window.

I think this article is a bit sensationalist. These sites already have access to all of your data (stored in their databases!). There's nothing additional they are gaining from this aside from how you input that data. That is much less sensitive information and I can't think of another usage aside from improving their site's UX.