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Products I Wish Existed

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Re: Products I Wish Existed

#81

Post by joejerryronnie »

joncrane wrote: post #21

While only a footnote, I like the nod to nuclear energy. I remember in the 1950s, there was a Popular Mechanics cover touting nuclear as a coming technology to power homes and even cars. Imagine the next Tesla-like company offering to install a small nuclear reactor in houses. Like solar, you can sell electricity back to the grid, charge your electric car with it, literally use it to heat your water.... Also might be…

I’m pretty sure my HOA has a clause against installing a personal nuclear reactor in our home :)

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#82

Post by eropple »

secabeen wrote: post #80
jakelazaroff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "SaaS-ification" of security cameras should also worry us. Ring — not its customers — controls the videos taken with their cameras, creating a video surveillance network that the police can access without needing a warrant. They've partnered with 400 police forces to give them access to that data [1]. Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand…

> Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video over to police if they deem the request "reasonable". Defining what is a "reasonable government request" is a valid question, but it's really just not that high of a bar to get a records subpoena/search warrant for video like this. Courts sign off on those routinely, so I don't think you can really…

> Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices.

Are you sure?

How can we as citizens verify it?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#83

Post by [deleted] »

soneca wrote: post #55

About new social networks, I am building one that I am calling "a quiet social network" . Copy/pasting from my landing what it means: A personal journal and a social network that will provide a quiet space to reflect about yourself and also to nurture your long term relationships with the people that you care about. Why “quiet”? Because this social network won't have the frenetic rhythm of news and updates of all oth…

[deleted]

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#84

Post by mynegation »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69
criddell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with subscriptions? If you are getting an ongoing service (like Spotify, or HBO, or magazine delivery, etc...) it seems that an ongoing fee makes sense.

Products turning into services, that's what wrong. You stop paying, the devices stop working. Or, they decide they're bored with providing the service, and pivot or get acquihired (or just decide to prod you into upgrading), the devices stop working. Plus, it seems that the new breed of service companies isn't satisfied with just providing a service in exchange of money. They also use the opportunity to exfiltrate as…

That is fine. I am happily paying for Spotify as they provide me with tremendous value day over day. I spend much less on music than in the days of buying CDs and Have access to a huge catalogue, instantly.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#85

Post by nradov »

Plyphon_ wrote: post #31
rtkwe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (an…

I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs, etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents as you typed. So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and drop it into the message. It worked fr…

Google still offers an enterprise intranet search product which will index anything you let it access.

https://cloud.google.com/products/search/

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#86

Post by secabeen »

eropple wrote: post #82
secabeen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video over to police if they deem the request "reasonable". Defining what is a "reasonable government request" is a valid question, but it's really just not that high of a bar to get a records subpoena/search warrant for video like this. Courts sign off on those routinely, so I don't think you can really…

> Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices. Are you sure? How can we as citizens verify it?

> Are you sure?

I'm not. Do I think it's likely that they are? No.

> How can we as citizens verify it?

The same way we verify that Google isn't producing broad-scale AI systems looking for specific subsets of people across the GMail data. Investigative reporting, whistle-blowers, regulation/lawmaking, and looking closely at the evidence presented when the government acts. This is why parallel construction is pernicious, as it prevents meaningful oversight of government malfeasance.

End-to-end encryption, and user ownership/encryption of data is also great, but it's not widely available, and many use cases don't work when the service provider can't see the data they're storing. Even when the data is encrypted, you can get a lot of valuable intelligence from metadata.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#87

Post by cgriswald »

Scoundreller wrote: post #76
cgriswald wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also social cues and the lack of an ever present mob. A lot of people who are political activists online are not actually that confident in their views and absent the audience and ready defenders, won't express their views because they know they can't back it up in a one-on-one conversation. Our city did a traffic survey of a local street that is the primary route for everyone going from surrounding neighbo…

Heh, a road to my parents’ used to be riddled with potholes and uneven sewer grates (Canadian winters + drainage issues probably). The city spent months ripping it up and paving it nice and smooth. Then a couple months later they put up speed bumps. We spent a lot of money to get back to the speeds people already drove.

People on the next street over (it's a grid) are on Nextdoor complaining about all the traffic coming down their street now. And I'm sure it's the worst of the traffic that's going over there to avoid the features. I'm not sure how the city will fob off spending money on that street after spending the money on this one.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#88

Post by sjg007 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #54
runjake wrote: post #8

#4 is a no-go in my book. Things like Ring, Nextdoor, and Facebook already exist. Nextdoor and Facebook are riddled with inanity, from political rants to dumb jokes to hoaxes to common scams to law enforcement rants. I don't want more information from my neighbors -- 99% of it is garbage. I want highly-filtered information. Basically, a neighborhood watch but with an aggressive spam filter. Right now I glance at the…

The "SaaS-ification" of security cameras should also worry us. Ring — not its customers — controls the videos taken with their cameras, creating a video surveillance network that the police can access without needing a warrant. They've partnered with 400 police forces to give them access to that data [1]. Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand…

My ring is basically useless for surveillance, at night especially. It can't see across the street and barely gets beyond my front stoop. This is even with the lights on and a street light nearby. Likewise for my Arlos, useless at night. During the day they are a bit better but the resolution isn't anything special and it'd be impossible to catch a license plate. Make, model and color but that's about it.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#89

Post by benglish11 »

siffland wrote: post #57
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I signed up to our Nextdoor (uk). There seems to be four things on here: - an avon lady over agressively spamming her stuff (blocked) - people asking for small job recommendations (who should I get to fix my garden gate, babysitter, tv ariel fitting) - some notices about local events (when / where fireworks, Remembrence, carolling) - group commiseration that one time some group was speeding all over town at midnight…

I went to sign up for Nextdoor and it wanted full access to all my contacts in my phone. I looked on their site and that is so they can invite friends from my contacts. I didn't sign up, maybe i will later, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/About-android-app-permis...

I have the iphone app and it didn't require this permission or maybe it asked and I denied it. Is that not possible in android?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#90

Post by ghaff »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #66
jagged-chisel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external SaaS can be on-premises. > Sally in accounting refuses to change The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't need to adapt to the tool. That said, if there are obvious efficiency gains (e.g. you can stop typing "COMPLETED" three hundred times a day and just click a button that fills the field for you; even better, the process marks it…

>>SaaS can be on-premises. True; the distinction between SaaS and COTS becomes moot in practical terms then, and all of my comment still applies. >>The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't need to adapt to the tool. Again, that's: - True for an IT project whose goal is to support whatever the user is currently doing (and what many of us are trained to do / think in current IT paradigm). - Not True for…

Quite a few years ago, I was at a very small company and we made the decision to move from hosting our own Microsoft Exchange to Gmail--partly for cost reasons and partly because we had had a couple of serious mail outages.

A couple of people at the time were really unhappy about the change because there were some differences, at least at the time, in the ability to create nested folders/labels like they were accustomed to doing in Exchange. Basically, Gmail messed up the organizational scheme they were accustomed to for client and contracts.

They were basically told to deal with it but the point is that even when going to some standard SaaS makes sense, people are very resistant to making changes in their standard tools.

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