541–550 of 696 posts
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Seems kinda paranoid. I've yet to meet anyone, who's met anyone, who's been harmed by not turning that setting off, or been harmed by any assistant listening.
What about political oppression? It's hard to argue, at this point, that the US federal government and others wouldn't obtain and use the data. Would Jeff Bezos stand up to them?
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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 upsi…
Nitpick: That's not considering how it it has turbocharged and even commodified certain types of crime, such as ransomware.
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Population density Mississipi: 24.5/km2 UK: 279/km2 Maybe, only maybe, that has an effect on house sizes?
New Jersey population density: 488/km2 New Jersey median home square footage: 1,740 Doesn't look like it?
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the descent into authoritarianism is a result of the failure of neo-liberals to represent the working class. unfortunately the wealthy are going to concede more wealth and power or it will continue.
To finish the story here, a look back: https://bsalert.com/news/2596/Who_Are_You_Better_Than.html People in this country perennially choose wanting to be "better than" over wanting to be happy.
I recently realized that people should understand they have more in common with (and must have solidarity with) the next people down on the socio-economic rung instead of trying to climb the ladder in hopes of joining those on the next rung up.
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We have to ask ourselves what we want. Because it's not GDP, you can't eat GDP or sleep under it, you can't even withdraw it from the bank. So more directly, how does it influence our life? (Of course GDP influences our life to some extent.)
You also have to ask yourself why so many europeans try to move to the US for a better life (especially talented ones) and why almost no american does it the other way around. (The number is ridiculously low in comparison) People move east to west across the pond, because they want the life offered by the US economy.
I can guarantee you that number is now not growing so much.
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> Did you even notice that you only spoke of the significance of having kids in terms of what it means for "you" It was a direct response to your "point", which was even quoted. > You speak as if they are extensions of your being, and not actual completely new individuals. In my book, such lack of theory of mind towards even those who are closest to you, is exactly "total psycho" behavior. Wow. One of us is definitel…
>wow >definitely psycho >word salad >reference from the movie >owned me >need a break I'm terribly sorry that your culture has imposed such low thresholds of permissible cognitive density! I definitely believe that it would be morally horrendous to pass that down to one's offspring. >I will say only that I have kids, they are lovely, they definitely changed me and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Luckily we weren…
Related, here's a comment from 2019 from at the time of writing from someone claiming to be a principal engineer at Amazon, talking about how "I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization." The comment further talks about the mute button on the orig…
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…
It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government. The person who is in a position to protect the interests of the customer, whether or not the customer 'cares', has a moral obligation to take care.
When the supplier chooses not to protect the interests of their customers, regulation steps in to create a consequence for that bad behavior.
I know people who hate this reality because they feel it is up to the customer to "decide" whether the risk is worth it, but those same people are not moving to Somalia to live in a land with zero effective government and regulation either. It generally comes down to a discussion that "some regulation" is good except for the regulation that is interfering with "their" plans. A very self centered point of view but all too common in my experience.
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>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 overr…
Yeah, people care about privacy, and a lot of other things, but generally lack the organization and resources to do much. Privacy is also one of those things that is much easier to care about if the lack of privacy is highly visible (e.g. someone standing in your window), but tech companies are pretty good about keeping their snooping in the background.
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it both is and isn't secret bullshit. there's no evidence that there's a list of secret keywords Lord Bezos is listening for, but there's plenty of evidence that these devices active unintentionally all the time and that those unintentional activations lead to you being recorded and that recording being sent off into the cloud https://moniotrlab.khoury.northeastern.edu/publications/smar...
I don't think it's any secret that the device can unintentionally activate in certain circumstances (and whether or not that's due to it thinking it heard its name is another debate)... but my problem with OP's statement is that they seem to frame it as if it's intentionally and maliciously listening more often than it should, and I just don't see any evidence to support that claim.
1) not fix the bug
2) quietly remove the option to opt out of remote processing
and then all of a sudden you've got a situation where of course no one is actively spying because We Would Never(tm)(c)(r) but there's a really reliable pipeline by which recordings of me talking to me family in my home end up on a remote server somewhere where they're used to train AI and maybe even automatically scanned for certain keywords that might indicate that I'm some sort of troublemaker and need flagged for additional "attention". It's a plausibly-deniable panopticon. In fact having it activate by purposefully unremediated mistake rather than by keyword makes it a better spy. You can discover a list of keywords and avoid them but ambient noise causing the device to randomly sample and exfiltrate recordings means you can never know when you're being recorded and thus have no choice but to always act like you're being recorded, just in case.