Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

Post by LorenPechtel » Mon, May 30, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

bodge5000 wrote: post #51

wirthjason wrote: post #13

I’m more shocked that the developer of a “skill” that says the holy Mary makes $2 a month and has 10,000 users. That’s a sweet return for work that on the scale of copy-pasting the Alexa getting started tutorial.

I remember downloading a digital clock widget for my ipad (for some reason the only native clock widget is analog), and then finding to use it they wanted £5 a month. iirc, it all started with DarkSky, which was very reasonable, something like £1 a year, which made subscriptions for more "basic" apps acceptable, and from there its just got worse.

Post by jamespo » Mon, May 30, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

jsjohnst wrote: post #53

ghaff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that matter, my measuring cups have both imperial and metric units and my digital scale handles both as well. Seems far more foolproof than doing a lot of unit conversions.

Yup. Like I don’t even get the conversion argument at all. “1 cup of flour weighs 125g”. Except when the recipe was using something other than all purpose flour. I’ve had Alexa incorrectly hear the specifics necessary to answer those type questions too many times to ever trust it, let alone to take the preposterous stance that Alexa is the only way to solve the problem.

Post by robonerd » Mon, May 30, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

CrazyStat wrote: post #76

robonerd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're simply trying to follow volumetric recipes, then volume-to-mass conversions are useless because you'd be trying to follow the recipe with more precision than the person who wrote the recipe in the first place. It's like converting "1 meter" to "1000 millimeters"; it's false precision from not being careful with significant figures. The recipe says "1 cup of flour" and the bot says that means 120 grams of fl…

I have hundreds of recipes in my file that I've never tried, requiring thousands of conversions. Even if each conversion is only done once it's absolutely worth automating.

Post by CrazyStat » Mon, May 30, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #81

jsjohnst wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but if you buy a brand new bag of flour at the store and scoop a cup off the top you may be getting as much as 200g, since it's densely packed. I’m not debating if the US method of measurement in recipes is terrible or not (it is!). But taking an imprecise unit of measurement and lossy converting it to another is better (edit for clarity what I meant…

Most baking recipes that use volumetric units actually use standardize mass units converted in a conventional way (based on material and form) to volumetric units, because the recipes are done by pros for the kind of newbs that disproportionately consume recipes. They aren't imprecise measures they are measures for people who are more comfortable with imprecise tools. If you prefer to work in mass, you reverse the co…

Post by zarriak » Mon, May 30, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #7

bsenftner wrote: post #2

Be smarter than a smart speaker by never purchasing one. Why put an always on snitch in your home? Such convivence is a trap.

Because the QOL from one is insane for me. While I’m cooking, I can set timers and look up conversions (one big country that produces a lot of internet content, including recipes, uses the most insane units). Everything else is a nice bonus, but those parts are major. That said, I want to replace Alexa with something fully local, but the supply chain issues are currently a hindrance.