Earlier quoted context omitted.
Careful, you sound pretty individualist with all this "anti-groupthink" talk. You might lose your SV credibility.
SV?
Silicon Valley.
Amazon Echo Look
241–250 of 328 posts
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#242The HN reaction to this device is what I expected: we're somewhere between suspicious and terrified. I'll be really fascinated to know how the wider market reacts. I was one of those who believed consumers would look at the always-on living room microphone with suspicion. But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understandin…
It's completely not for us ("us" here being people not super into fashion, since this isn't really a fashion website), I wouldn't think, which is why we look at it cockeyed.
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just the first camera shot in that ad was already creepy as fuck.
Seriously, who thought the stalker sneaking around the door camera shot was a good idea?
My wife does this daily thing where she tries a pair of clothing, looks at herself in the mirror, sometimes ask my opinion, then change into complete different outfit, repeating the same process until she settles on what she would wear.
I swear, my wife would LOVE this product, unless I can scare her about the security implications.
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#244The HN reaction to this device is what I expected: we're somewhere between suspicious and terrified. I'll be really fascinated to know how the wider market reacts. I was one of those who believed consumers would look at the always-on living room microphone with suspicion. But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understandin…
Amazon says that my echo isn't recording me, and I just have to trust it. People have confirmed this to be true. Google says that my phone isn't recording me, and I just have to trust it. People have confirmed this to be true. I don't see a difference.
Google could hide proof of either statement by manipulating its search results.
I'm not suggesting this is actually happening. I'm pointing out that when you have a single distribution channel for information, users have no choice but to assume the channel hasn't been tampered with.
Of course you could have papers, conferences, and so on proving otherwise. But if they existed, you would only hear of them by word of mouth - which would rely on being in or around a professional network which took an interest in such things.
If Google decided to censor or manipulate the search results about a topic, it could become extremely hard to access reliable uncensored information.
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#245The HN reaction to this device is what I expected: we're somewhere between suspicious and terrified. I'll be really fascinated to know how the wider market reacts. I was one of those who believed consumers would look at the always-on living room microphone with suspicion. But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understandin…
Amazon says that my echo isn't recording me, and I just have to trust it. People have confirmed this to be true. Google says that my phone isn't recording me, and I just have to trust it. People have confirmed this to be true. I don't see a difference.
Hypothetically, if a bad guy hacks the echo, it could only blackmail people based on their voice recording.
If he hacks the Echo Look, it could blackmail people based on some naked pictures/videos of the victims.
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe building codes could spec that home automation devices must have local controls. The companies aren't going to do it without regulation.
Or maybe people stop building all this shit in the cloud?
Part of my argument there is that it isn't going to happen without regulation.
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#247ITT fashion illiterate techies doubting the success of a pretty genius product
(Almost) nobody cares about privacy. But (almost) everyone cares about how nice they look in public. And their Instagram. They are not like what I'm coming to realize the average HN user looks like or behaves. Use your imagination freely here...
The main problem I see with this is the quality of recommendations. Amazon only carries certain brands/looks/styles; will it try to suggest shitty fashion? Both the male and female models used on the product page were dressed awfully. Will Amazon just try to go for the lowest common denominator here?
The best way I see this working is for the device to categorize users into certain style categories and then recommend clothes out of that category. But I'm wondering if the ML is smart enough to recommend CDG pants and MMM knitwear for one user and then A&F for another.
Remember, your algorithm's quality is only as good as your training data and if they're training on outfits like they used on the product page...
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even trying to see this from an outsider perspective it seems like a stupid product. As someone else pointed out, they've replaced looking in the dang mirror with a multi-step process involving a few hundred dollars of tech at least. They made sure to throw in "cloud" and "machine learning", but the average consumer doesn't care about that.
I think you may be missing the brilliance of this product from a sales perspective. Even if this product isn't a massive success, the units they do move will have a huge potential impact to their retail clothing lines. Now, instead of suggesting clothing items in the store based on other items you've looked at, they can now suggest clothing items in their sales material based on what you already own and look good wea…
I'm not sure what's creepier - the privacy issues, or the fact that everyone seems to be assuming that machines can make better fashion choices than people.
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#249The HN reaction to this device is what I expected: we're somewhere between suspicious and terrified. I'll be really fascinated to know how the wider market reacts. I was one of those who believed consumers would look at the always-on living room microphone with suspicion. But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understandin…
> But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understanding of all the real implications and potential for exploit.)
Or perhaps more accurately, most of the people in question are members of the mainstream dominant culture and don't really have much if anything in their life that they worry about someone else finding out about.
Most people are average, by definition.
Re: Amazon Echo Look
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I mean, i love all these tools, i just don't want them to have any form of internet access. I've come to the realisation that the only way I will have a 'home of the future' is if I build it myself and keep it offline. I love lots of the IOT products and when they eventually come down in price they would be no brainers. But my privacy isn't worth the benefit they provide.
$199 device that sends data to some servers elsewhere and gets the job done in seconds $2000 device that takes up space and electricity to do the same thing, but in minutes I personally like the second option a lot better, I wish we had an open source version of all the google apps that did it's own ML on your own servers.
Except most of the IoT devices on market would do the same thing for about same price without the cloud. The only problem the clouds solves for users is not having to know how to set up a VPN so that their shitty app can view mostly meaningless pseudo-charts when the user is away from home. But in exchange for that, you give the vendors lots of data to resell, and the ability to brick your devices remotely.
SaaS model being ported to hardware is probably the single most user-hostile development I've seen in recent years in tech.