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by WarOnPrivacy 332 days ago
I just finished a call with a friend who is a power user of Gemini, to great benefit. I delivered a PC with tensor cores for when he wants to do more locally. AI is a critically helpful and growing presence in his career.

Conversely, I spent an hour one day trying to prevent Gmail from puking text onto every new email I begin. It turned out to be a Chrome feature and scrapping Chrome is the only way to stop it. Past that is more time spent working out how to disable Gemini and remove it's elements, so it's unwanted presence isn't triggered into being a problem.

Every month I have to review the list of registry edits I use to keep copilot's unwanted advances out of my users' workspace. Notably, there isn't one for Win11 notepad and MS CP has to be disabled manually thru the UI.

Of these two preferences, major tech respects just one. The other one is continually acted on, leveraged and intruded upon - with tech corps showing no more understanding of consent than Harvey Weinstein did. If AI is on the table, what we want is just an obstacle for UI devs to overcome.

1 comments

Is Notepad++ an option?
It's not a good fit for most of the users I support. NP++'s array of options are things they'll never use; for them, that would be clutter to filter out.

Eventually I'll find a suitable replacement. I found one for paint if it can be trusted.