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The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

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Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#461

Post by bsenftner »

hartator wrote: post #338
bsenftner wrote: post #267

This event has been written on the walls of the USA since those smart speakers and cel phones first appeared. The average US citizen has been conditioned to believe the 'regulation' is 'evil government' and not protection from established abusive practices - that's how regulations get created: someone (usually a corporation) abuses a public resource or good so extremely that laws are written to prevent that. Of cours…

> that's how regulations get created: someone (usually a corporation) abuses a public resource or good so extremely that laws are written to prevent that. You forgot that it’s the usually that very same abusing company that will write these regulations for “ethics” and “protecting the customers”.

That's the more modern, more cynical manifestation. I remember what it was like before this overwhelming cynicism became normal.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#462

Post by HideousKojima »

dml2135 wrote: post #430
HideousKojima wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the comment I was replying to was wondering if there was any relationship between the GDP per capita of each location and the life expectancy?

To me your comment seems to be implying one of two things: 1) Black people are biologically hardwired to have a shorter life expectancy than white people 2) A shorter life expectancy among black people doesn't count -- it's only life expectancy among white people that matters Could you clarify further if you meant one of these, or if you meant something else that I was not able to pick up on?

Neither, simply that there appears to be little correlation between GDP per capita and life expectancy between Mississippi and the UK, and the lion's share of the difference is due to lower life expectancies amongst blacks (the reasons for their lower life expectancy being something I didn't get into at all).

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#464

Post by firefax »

everdrive wrote: post #186

People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy. But if they cared, they never would have purchased this product in the first place. There are bits of technology which violate privacy, but are extremely difficult to fully avoid: Social Media, (I know a lot of HN isn't on it, but how about most of your family and friends?) smart ph…

>People don't really care about privacy

Then why are they willing to pay a premium for Apple Products, which do as much locally as possible? (Without going into detail, I know this because a very skilled engineer I worked with was hired by them.)

Also, even if "people" don't care (I'd love to see a peer reviewed study on the # of folks who meet this criteria you claim), why should the preference of those people override those of us who DO want privacy? Why can't the few who don't care opt in to the panopticon?

We obsess over "AI" when things like "take an audio file and produce a written transcription" have been being done for quite some time. Where does the algorithm end and "AI" begin, and what is it about "AI" that necessitates throwing away years of existing work on privacy preserving queries?

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#465

Post by EGreg »

thih9 wrote: post #418
dingnuts wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if people really think Musk is a Nazi, this would be like literally putting mindless order-following gestapo right in your house. Surveillance? Shit they could just kill you the moment you were discovered to be some undesirable. We're talking about a humanoid-ish robot, after all. If it can help you with the laundry it can bash your head in, too.

To be fair, we don’t need a new product, a tesla can do the same[1]. With AIs becoming more powerful and expanding to new areas, it makes even more sense to avoid businesses that are consistently user hostile. I wonder if anti tesla protests and related bad pr will contribute to increased consumer awareness around the topic. [1]: e.g. it can crash into a will e coyote style wall on autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/…

If there’s one thing about AI, it’s that you cannot avoid it. The idea that individuals can just “opt out” of plastic, sugar, artificial ingredients, factory farms, social media and all the other negative extrnalities the corporations push on us is a fantasy that governments and industry push on individuals to keep us distracted: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

On HN, people hate on Web3 because of its limited upside. But really look at the downside dynamics of a technology! With Web3, you can only ever lose what you voluntarily put in (at great effort and slippage LOL). So that caps the downside. Millions of people who never got a crypto wallet and never sent their money to some shady exchange never lost a penny.

Now compare that to AI. No matter what you do, no matter how far you try to avoid it millions will lose their jobs, get denied loans, be surveiled, possibly arrested for precrime, micromanaged and controlled, practically enslaved in order to survive and reproduce etc.

It won’t even work to retreat into gated communities or grandfathered human-verified accounts because defectors will run bots in their accounts and their neuralink cyborg hookups and meta glasses, to gain an advantage and approach at least some of the advantages of the bots. Not to mention of course that the economic power and efficiency of botless communities will be laughably uncompetitive.

You won’t even be able to move away anywhere to escape it. You can see an early preview of that with the story of Ted Kazinsky — the unabomber (google it). While the guy was clearly a disturbed maniac who sent explosives to people, as a mathematician following things to its logical conclusion he did sort of predict what will happen to everyone when technology reaches a certain point. AI just makes it so that you can’t escape.

If HN cared about AI unlimited downsides like it cared about Web’s lack of large upsides, the sentiment here would be very different. But the time has not come yet. Set an alarm to check back on this comment in exactly 7 years.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#466

Post by wongarsu »

solardev wrote: post #415
dingnuts wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if people really think Musk is a Nazi, this would be like literally putting mindless order-following gestapo right in your house. Surveillance? Shit they could just kill you the moment you were discovered to be some undesirable. We're talking about a humanoid-ish robot, after all. If it can help you with the laundry it can bash your head in, too.

On the bright side, at least I'll die with a clean shirt on.

It might even clean up the blood stains. Letting the blood dry would ruin the carpet and furniture

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#467

Post by ethbr1 »

swayvil wrote: post #409
Aurornis wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why anyone in tech believes the myth that their devices are streaming everything. It’s trivial to inspect traffic from a device. You can see that your devices aren’t constantly streaming data somewhere. You can see a burst of activity after a command. Beyond that, it would require a massive conspiracy for everyone who ever worked on these programs to never leak details about always-on surveillance record…

So record everything and upload it along with the legit uploading. Just hide it in there. Seems trivial. You could even convert to text first to make the packet super tiny.

The more scalable way would be to have reconfigurable wake word hardware, then push target words, then send back analytics instead of audio.

Especially since Amazon already has advertising profiles on users, so could generate monetizable target word lists per-user.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#468

Post by pavel_lishin »

HideousKojima wrote: post #366
letier wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how it interacts with life expectancy. There is a huge difference between Mississippi and the UK: 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females in the UK in 2020 to 2022. 68.6 years for males and 75.2 years for females in Mississippi in 2020 and 67.7 years for makes and 74.3 years for females in Mississippi in 2021. Might go up a bit if you have 2022 numbers, but the difference is huge.

Life expectancy differences in Mississippi vs. the UK is largely due to race. Mississippi is about 36% black, and blacks in the US have a 5+ year shorter life expectancy than whites.

How do Black people fare in the UK?

Because if there's no discrepancy, or a smaller one, it seems to suggest that maybe GDP and square-footage-of-your-house is actually not all that important.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#469

Post by poincaredisk »

bko wrote: post #436
jpalawaga wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do those same people also care about quality of education, availability and utility of public transit, etc? Or is the size of your home the only factor in what makes somewhere livable?

I don't think anyone really cares about "public transit". I think people care how convenient their life is. Why should I care if I take a bus to work or drive? I prefer whatever is best for me. I would look at cost + time. For instance, if it costs me an extra $2k per year for a car but it saves me 30 minutes round trip, and my time is worth more than $20 an hour (assume work 200 days per year), then car is better. A…

I explicitly care about "public transport". I strongly dislike cars, like trains and bike lanes, mostly commute by bus. I can't imagine living in a place without a good public transport. I strongly prefer cities and places without too many cars everywhere.

>Add the convenience of not having to manage bus schedules and, you know, owning a car, its a no-brainer.

I assume you live in a place where cars are the default, or the only, mode of transportation? It's not like this everywhere.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#470

Post by yifanl »

phito wrote: post #103

I will never understand why anyone would ever want to use voice assistants (other than for accessibility reasons). It is so gimmicky and awkward to use. Android Auto does not even understand the word "no".

The point is to raise a generation on them, and then they'll look at us weird for not wanting to send data back to the Amazon mothership so we can write down milk on the grocery list, a task that would be impossible without phoning Amazon.
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