I am arguing here in regards to personally owned hw.

I personally think that the arguments in recent years were very heavily skewed in support of this and I would like to propose here counterarguments that I don't feel are considered enough are when I see this come up in various places. Or at least not said enough.

First and foremost what forcibly pushing updates actually means is the developer being given blank check to change the functionality of your device in any way they please. In case of various locked down hw such as smart things, game consoles, tvs, ereaders or others there is often not even a choice to use different sw because it is artificially blocked. Only real check against negative effects of this is legislation and potential of enough public outrage to impact future sales. From the state of various mainstream sw products it can be seen how well it works.

It creates a culture where pushing anti features is significantly easier and tech literacy is significantly harder to attain if only as a secondary effect of less transparent, more obtuse and more complicated systems, frequently with no actual need for more complexity which is not rooted in desire to increase monetization.

It also means it is harder as a user to guard against faulty updates.

Normalization of this behavior also means that any can do this with no pushback because it is the fabled default, the one where fundamental flaws are brushed aside while alternatives are rejected over cosmetic problems.
There could be argument meant for critical parts of critical sw such as os or browser, but if so it should be made individually and not be implicit. There is usually no meaningful individual control over feature updates, not just security ones. I also don't think forced updates for games on Steam for example can be argued to be something that benefits security.

I don't think I've installed an update on my phone and felt like it was an improvement over the old version.

Samsung just pushed their new firmware onto my phone and added a whole bunch of annoying AI stuff that I don't want and additionally decided for me that I no longer want the bluetooth signal in the statusbar unless I open up the notification menu, with no way to reenable it. I turn off my headphones when I don't need them and it was really useful to see at a glance that if they were connected and I had forgotten to turn them off.

In my comment on this thread, I briefly explained my grievances with modern minecraft updates, and said that my long-term world was on version 1.1 from 2012. Since then, I reset my computer and accidentally nuked that world along with the rest of the data I didn't care about. After a long while of kicking myself over having no backup (a problem I have since remedied, thanks for the backblaze suggestion @greg!), it's time to suck it up and start a new world. The only problem is that I don't know what version of the game to start the world on.

Obviously, I can update it later if I really want to, but I found myself loving the simplicity of 1.1 (one wood type, small but epic worldgen, simple biomes, etc.) and missing the comforts of later versions (crafting shortcuts, detailed settings, controller support for my steam deck through the likes of midnightcontrols or controllable). With this in mind, if you're partial to a particular update and it's feature set, pitch it here! I know this sounds weird, but I want to hear about why you like the version of minecraft you play, maybe there's perks of newer versions that I haven't thought/heard of.

EDIT: for anyone returning to this thread, I landed on version 1.12.2 for a two main reasons:

• It has good server & client performance (compared to 1.13 and 1.14, which are notoriously poor), meaning I can run a singleplayer server for cheap (paper, ~$3/mo for 1gb ram, runs basically perfectly) and have parity between my steam deck and PC. Steam deck basically sips power while playing, which is nice.

• It's about the time that I stopped paying attention to updates. Anything past the aquatic update is a blur, so I can enjoy the simplicity while still getting some good qol features.

Section 9 of Google Workspace's Terms of Service has been updated. Here's how it was summarized in the notification:

Section 9, Publicity: We clarified that neither Google nor you may issue a press release or other similar public statement regarding your use of the services without the other party’s permission

The section itself makes clear that:

Neither party may use the other party’s Brand Features or issue, publish, or present a press release, blog post, speech, social media post, or investor relations call or announcement discussing Customer’s use of the Services or this Agreement without the prior written consent of the other party

Have you seen similar terms before? It seems very strange to me that they would contractually disallow customers from sharing how they use Google services or from discussing the TOS.