I'm only suggesting preventing Meta from blocking adblockers. (And the world would likely be a better place if Meta's revenue were destroyed — but I expect they would do just fine without blocking ad-blockers — basically every other property on the web does.)

> Also - no ads on marketplace? I personally do like using marketplace vs the alternative (Craigslist), and personally I would prefer that stays available for me to use (and for free).

So maybe your jurisdiction has multiple online marketplaces and needs less regulation around them. Mine does not. It's akin to having a single consumer-hostile utility/telecom/railroad/etc. provider.

I've never had any use for the health tracking - I use my watch for notifications, emergency contacts, and displaying the time/sunset/sunrise/weather/UV index. Different people use their watches for different things.

Requiring FB to provide a paid ad-free option with a price commensurate with their cost of providing service would be one approach. Prohibiting them from actively breaking adblockers would be another. I wouldn't wholesale ban ads, but banning them on FB marketplace would be reasonable - either we get an ad-free marketplace, or FB abandons the product and we get alternatives.

I basically only use my phone if I need to do something that can't wait until I'm at a computer. I've got an LTE-enabled Pixel Watch that sometimes I'll wear without my phone.

If anyone messages me and I need to talk to them before I get home, I call them from my watch.

Some people do. Personally I've had a smartwatch for some years and have never been interested in sleep tracking.

I only put it on when I'm leaving the house, so it generally has plenty of time to charge.

Sure, but that relegates my old but perfectly functional macbook to the trash. There's literally no functional alternative to fb marketplace for getting used goods re-used at any kind of scale.

In a macro sense, the prerogative there is really up to the public. Companies only exist in the first place because the public has granted them the legal and social framework to exist, and the public can adjust that framework as they so choose.

In a more specific sense, the math there changes once a company makes itself indispensable to the public good. There are any number of analogies I could run with, but I'll go with the analogy of a landfill. Suppose all the landfills in your city have been privatized, have a habit of burning garbage, and employ armed thugs to prevent any visitors to the landfill from wearing masks. If you've got a truckload of garbage to dispose of, you can either ingest burning garbage fumes, or dump it on the side of the road somewhere. It's absolutely in the public's interest to regulate the landfills' behaviour to prevent them from both burning garbage and from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.

Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes.

Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.

You could argue about the language and the meaning of "algorithm", but for practical purposes I'd consider a manually-curated feed to be non-algorithmic.

I would ammend to this that if you have an operation that can't complete quickly, it's better to have some kind of animation, even if it's notably slower than the already-slow screen refresh so that the user can tell that there's something happening.

For banking in particular, I already bank with a half-dozen banks because they have different products/services that are optimal for some specific use cases (i.e. I min-max my bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts.) — however, customer support seems to be universally bad.

If you're curious about why I'm using that particular bank, I'm forced to use them for some investment accounts because my employer matching benefits uses them. For the credit card, they're one of the few banks that offer proper co-applicants (rather than just supplemental users) which really works best for the way my wife and I have our finances organized. And flights in my city are dominated by a single airline where the only way to avoid paying for baggage is to get the co-branded credit card from this bank.

So I mostly avoid commenting on or pontificating about the value or lack thereof of AI, but the problem I have with companies rolling out "AI for whatever" isn't that sometimes AI gets "whatever" wrong, it's that the companies simultaneous gut the processes around correcting these mistakes.

I'm currently dealing with a months-long banking error where the bank has incorrectly linked my credit card account to my wife's account and/or an account of mine in a different region, so it variously doesn't show up in my online account, shows the wrong number, shows the purchases from the wrong account, etc.

Every time I call in in a 5-minute rigamarole of:

"Please describe what you're calling about."

"Representative."

"In order to connect to a representative, please describe what you're calling about."

"There's an error with my account."

"Would you like to know your account balance?"

"No, my credit card account is not correctly configured and isn't showing up in my online banking account."

"I didn't understand. Please describe what you're calling about."

Eventually the bot reaches some failure state and then allows me to wait on hold for an hour to talk to an actual rep.

When I eventually get to talk to a rep, I get "Yes, I see that your account isn't correctly configured, I'll submit a back-end ticket and it should get fixed within 5-10 business days."

The next week I check my online banking, my credit card still isn't showing up, and I call and repeat the entire process.

So yes, it's not AI that's directly causing this Kafkaesque nightmare, but it's AI that's empowered the leaders at every utility/retailer/bank/insurer/etc. that I deal with turn their support systems into this slop.

Every 60 seconds or so I'd be teleported to a fresh location in the maze and given an instruction like "find the green door". I have no idea how I did compared to the other participants, but I found the maze/task to be both difficult and not at all fun.