Problem that too few people see with this "smart tech" is it's designed to make you dumber, the smoother the brain the easier it is to manipulate, "you don't have to think and worry let our AI take over that burden", so on and so forth till we reach Idiocracy.

I actually saw a tech segment that had an item I would consider a gadget. no smartphone or smartphone accessory or smartphone integration and no ai garbage. It was a sonic knife. I have felt for years gadget segments have just been about smartphones and more recently ai (and web enabled before that).

It's like all the 'smart' technology that is mostly just annoying shit that makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.

Not caring about AI is the best thing to do, "oh it has great AI features" pass! "the AI in this product will make your life easier" nah! "with AI you can achieve more" i'm fine with less!

I like single player rpgs.

I very much care, i would love good npc ai.

Havent we been making jokes about dumb ai in games for literal decades before llms came along?

The thing is i want my npcs to be a curated combination of things: environmental awareness, be aware of the dragon in the room, still have scripted interactions but triggered by detecting more complex environmental changes.

More dynamic dialogue options like tone of voice changing depending on wether earlier dialogue made them angry.

Reacting to the player fighting in a sensible way.

Still all coded and developed with human passion but to appropriately incorporate ai into more complex detecting/reacting/interacting mechanics.

Instead what nvidia (who dictates the game industry now) cares about is a “chatbot module” that they can sell to game engines (like unreal) so lazy developers can turn digital objects into a character ai persona.

Somehow the moment llms became able to impress we stopped caring about all the other 99% that is ai that isn’t a conversation simulator.

Surprised Pikachu Face

That's the point of the feature though. POP3 moves emails, it's really a transfer protocol rather than an access protocol.

I assume Google is killing it since they assume they're effectively in-charge of email outside of things like company Outlook accounts. They've got no need to worry about people migrating to gmail, since everybody starts out on it now.

If the nanny-est nanny state in the English-speaking developed world (i.e., not US) purges Palantir I’d be gobsmacked.

That is still an edge case, and doesn't really address why Pop would be required.

Happens to the best of us. 🤗

That's why I deleted my comment. Foolishly I posted before reading.

nextcloud uses IMAP and SMTP, not POP3

You are right. I seem to recall viewing these settings about 100 years ago.

Yes just like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, telnet and all the other pre-TLS protocols that we now run over TLS for exactly this reason.

Google, just like every other modern mail client, supports connecting to POP3 servers over SSL:

I used to do it back when gmail first started, I connected it to my previous email account so anything addressed to my old account would get transferred to my new one.

I could probably count the number of emails it ever retrieved on one hand.

Not sure what op meant, but according to TFA, "POP3 requires sending passwords in plaintext."

That's not what the article is about.

Google are an advertisement company. Their business model is data mining. It should be an inconvenience for them to build a profile on you. Running your third party email via them is the opposite of that.

IIRC, POP3 downloaded all emails to local device. If you have more than one device, the first one gets it all and the second or more see nothing.

IMAP kept the messages on the server so there was one source of truth and multiple devices could access the same emails.

Most email clients support both. There are probably some people still running old POP3 clients, or they set it up one way and never bothered to change.

Not sure why gmail would care. Code's been working for decades. Unless there are security considerations not worth mitigating.

It sounds remarkably janky, and a bit of an unusual edge case. Why would someone need this specific pattern?

Eventually this is the sort of thing that isn't worth supporting.

It’s probably someone going for promo by removing this feature. Doubt it affects the bottom line much, just reduces complexity.

No one in their right mind should be doing this anyway

Why not?

To be fair, they're only talking about being able to fetch other (third party) mail accounts via Gmail. No one in their right mind should be doing this anyway. And only via POP3, IMAP is still supported.

I think they calculate what they can change that loses less users than it gains in advertising revenue. Just slowly turning the screws more and more.