These "Silicon Valley royalty" will crash and burn as soon as they realize whiz bang naming and useless technology don't solve the legal and political problems that keep self-driving cars "doing it wrong". From the looks of TFA's photo, they also haven't managed to account for passengers or cargo. Sure, there is probably a subset of car users who have no passengers or cargo and desperately need to avoid backing out of parking spots. But since that subset can also use any other car, there isn't much of a market for this product.
Furious Amazon customers are threatening to cancel their Prime membership after the retailer's heavily hyped shopping holiday, Prime Day, got off to a rocky start.
The Internet mob in full cry. I'd be keen on buying Amazon stock if they came out and replied "OK, please do. If this is your trigger, we are better off without you. We'll focus on improving service for the rest of our customers rather than waste time trying to please a small number of crybabies." Or at least something to that effect.
That's true. But I believe first line advertisers are not really the problem. The implications of large scale data aggregation on individuals goes far beyond "he looked at a dishwasher so let's sell him another dishwasher". What happens when they know where and when you work, who all your friends are, when you leave home, when you get back, where and when you shop, where you go on vacation, etc.? Put that information in the hands of a stalker, criminal, or any government agent (domestic or foreign) and you start to see the problem. And you can't get rid of it. Sure, they can pass a 'forget me' law, but that only applies to people you know have the data. The fifty other organizations who copied the data, legally or otherwise, all still have their copies.
Facebook responded that users can discern the use of third-party data if they know where to look. Each time an ad appears using such data, Facebook says, users can click a button on the ad revealing that fact.
Not to mention, now their profile on you records that you are the type of person who clicks on buttons for more information about ads.
Some localities get real value from alerts, such as citywide tornado warnings. But those are local value only. There is no value at all in large scale alerting, as you say. What sort of alert would have any value at non-local scale? North Korean invasion? How would anyone's behavior change as a consequence of the alert? For instance, if there were wide scale evacuation due to flooding or weather, by the time they get around to saying 'use route 5 to get out of the area' route 5 will already be at a standstill.
There is a case to be made that anonymity online is not desirable. I don't necessarily agree, but things like this point out the drawbacks of allowing anonymity. Usually opponents of anonymity say something like 'we don't allow people to anonymously drive cars, so..'
hahah I like it. Makes me think of all the countries around China that would send a gift and a "yes you are our emperor" letter, and then go on about their business. But the dynasty would add them to the map and claim this was the extent of their empire.
I say, rather than torture the animals, let us get rid of these government regulations and let the people who want these stupid products test them out.
I'm not sure I agree that sticking with working systems and a known set of shortcomings is necessarily worse than trying to implement newer systems that don't have any measurable quality advantage and introduce a unknown set of shortcomings that you get to find out the hard way.
From my observation, these 'smart speakers' are not very good yet for Chinese. There are so many different dialects and accents. Standard Mandarin is mostly spoken everywhere, but to varying degrees and certain sounds vary quite a bit from region to region. I know a couple people who tried them, with poor results.
Facebook, sure, OK. But so typical of humanity. We will charge at the red cape, and think we have achieved something. The real threat to us is companies like this which no one ever heard about and thus will never get called to testify to Congress.
The idea of using humans was also a big part of the plot in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky". They used drugs to hyper-focus experts on their tasks since some property of space/time prevented them from using AI
I am surprised anyone would find this a surprise. I thought it was clearly established that people in crowded urban areas become less overtly friendly as a reaction to the crowded conditions. Sort of like keeping a mental distance since you cannot keep a physical distance. Meanwhile people in rural and less crowded areas are more openly friendly since there is plenty of physical space.
The Google apps, which are on almost every Android phone, do it by default. Not even getting into anything else the carrier may have added, or all the other apps which do it. The story here is how the users are unaware of he price they pay for cheaper devices/access. But that is true anywhere, it's not an artifact of poor/unregulated like this article implies.
sends the owner's location and unique-device details to a mobile-advertising firm
This is the same thing that happens on every other non-Apple smartphone. Yet the journalist goes to great lengths to imply this abuse has something to do with the poverty and supposedly less regulated environs of the customers.
Given how browsers have become the primary application for so much sensitive information, I advise people to treat extensions the way they (should) treat any other unknown application. And disable automatic updates. But truth be told most people won't do that because it is a pain.
Judging by how many people give five star reviews to mediocrity, it is apparently pretty hard. Ideally one would only give five stars to a handful of best-liked things, instead people work on the "default 5 stars" model unless it really sucked.
If the site was so important, why didn't they plan for an outage? Sounds like they just assumed it would always be up. Why didn't they ask Google about the conditions and possible sources of outages, and plan accordingly? My employer has done multiple cloud deployments, and this is always part of the planning. What do we do if cloud provider goes down or experiences and error? What are their operational norms around infrastructure changes and the like? What is our downtime tolerance? Is the cost worth the risks (i.e. not that important) or do we invest in multiple sites? Perhaps not the whole story is here, but it sure sounds like they didn't do much due diligence before throwing all in on "cloud"
It's the lawyers. I hate every process at work that involves them since it will absolutely take twenty times as long as it needs to while they argue over minutiae.
In theory, not a bad idea. But the devil is in the details. I get satisfaction surveys for tech support encounters all the time. They are carefully constructed to only deal with the specific support engineer, not the whole experience. Most of the time there is no option for 'the tech was fine but the organization has its head up its ass.' I will bet a lot of these restaurant surveys are the same, where the customer is trying to complain about something the server has no control over.
Slashdot Mirror
These "Silicon Valley royalty" will crash and burn as soon as they realize whiz bang naming and useless technology don't solve the legal and political problems that keep self-driving cars "doing it wrong". From the looks of TFA's photo, they also haven't managed to account for passengers or cargo. Sure, there is probably a subset of car users who have no passengers or cargo and desperately need to avoid backing out of parking spots. But since that subset can also use any other car, there isn't much of a market for this product.
Furious Amazon customers are threatening to cancel their Prime membership after the retailer's heavily hyped shopping holiday, Prime Day, got off to a rocky start.
The Internet mob in full cry. I'd be keen on buying Amazon stock if they came out and replied "OK, please do. If this is your trigger, we are better off without you. We'll focus on improving service for the rest of our customers rather than waste time trying to please a small number of crybabies." Or at least something to that effect.
That's true. But I believe first line advertisers are not really the problem. The implications of large scale data aggregation on individuals goes far beyond "he looked at a dishwasher so let's sell him another dishwasher". What happens when they know where and when you work, who all your friends are, when you leave home, when you get back, where and when you shop, where you go on vacation, etc.? Put that information in the hands of a stalker, criminal, or any government agent (domestic or foreign) and you start to see the problem. And you can't get rid of it. Sure, they can pass a 'forget me' law, but that only applies to people you know have the data. The fifty other organizations who copied the data, legally or otherwise, all still have their copies.
Facebook responded that users can discern the use of third-party data if they know where to look. Each time an ad appears using such data, Facebook says, users can click a button on the ad revealing that fact.
Not to mention, now their profile on you records that you are the type of person who clicks on buttons for more information about ads.
Some localities get real value from alerts, such as citywide tornado warnings. But those are local value only. There is no value at all in large scale alerting, as you say. What sort of alert would have any value at non-local scale? North Korean invasion? How would anyone's behavior change as a consequence of the alert? For instance, if there were wide scale evacuation due to flooding or weather, by the time they get around to saying 'use route 5 to get out of the area' route 5 will already be at a standstill.
There is a case to be made that anonymity online is not desirable. I don't necessarily agree, but things like this point out the drawbacks of allowing anonymity. Usually opponents of anonymity say something like 'we don't allow people to anonymously drive cars, so..'
hahah I like it. Makes me think of all the countries around China that would send a gift and a "yes you are our emperor" letter, and then go on about their business. But the dynasty would add them to the map and claim this was the extent of their empire.
"intelligent state" is an oxymoron
I say, rather than torture the animals, let us get rid of these government regulations and let the people who want these stupid products test them out.
I'm not sure I agree that sticking with working systems and a known set of shortcomings is necessarily worse than trying to implement newer systems that don't have any measurable quality advantage and introduce a unknown set of shortcomings that you get to find out the hard way.
From my observation, these 'smart speakers' are not very good yet for Chinese. There are so many different dialects and accents. Standard Mandarin is mostly spoken everywhere, but to varying degrees and certain sounds vary quite a bit from region to region. I know a couple people who tried them, with poor results.
Also note how few upvotes the post got despite being extraordinarily relevant, interesting, and informative. :)
Facebook, sure, OK. But so typical of humanity. We will charge at the red cape, and think we have achieved something. The real threat to us is companies like this which no one ever heard about and thus will never get called to testify to Congress.
The idea of using humans was also a big part of the plot in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky". They used drugs to hyper-focus experts on their tasks since some property of space/time prevented them from using AI
I am surprised anyone would find this a surprise. I thought it was clearly established that people in crowded urban areas become less overtly friendly as a reaction to the crowded conditions. Sort of like keeping a mental distance since you cannot keep a physical distance. Meanwhile people in rural and less crowded areas are more openly friendly since there is plenty of physical space.
The Google apps, which are on almost every Android phone, do it by default. Not even getting into anything else the carrier may have added, or all the other apps which do it. The story here is how the users are unaware of he price they pay for cheaper devices/access. But that is true anywhere, it's not an artifact of poor/unregulated like this article implies.
up to one movie in U.S. theaters per day
They are still making money on the people who see only half a movie per day.
sends the owner's location and unique-device details to a mobile-advertising firm
This is the same thing that happens on every other non-Apple smartphone. Yet the journalist goes to great lengths to imply this abuse has something to do with the poverty and supposedly less regulated environs of the customers.
Given how browsers have become the primary application for so much sensitive information, I advise people to treat extensions the way they (should) treat any other unknown application. And disable automatic updates. But truth be told most people won't do that because it is a pain.
Judging by how many people give five star reviews to mediocrity, it is apparently pretty hard. Ideally one would only give five stars to a handful of best-liked things, instead people work on the "default 5 stars" model unless it really sucked.
They did this already for the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical ranges that the various 802.11 standards use.
If the site was so important, why didn't they plan for an outage? Sounds like they just assumed it would always be up. Why didn't they ask Google about the conditions and possible sources of outages, and plan accordingly? My employer has done multiple cloud deployments, and this is always part of the planning. What do we do if cloud provider goes down or experiences and error? What are their operational norms around infrastructure changes and the like? What is our downtime tolerance? Is the cost worth the risks (i.e. not that important) or do we invest in multiple sites? Perhaps not the whole story is here, but it sure sounds like they didn't do much due diligence before throwing all in on "cloud"
It's the lawyers. I hate every process at work that involves them since it will absolutely take twenty times as long as it needs to while they argue over minutiae.
In theory, not a bad idea. But the devil is in the details. I get satisfaction surveys for tech support encounters all the time. They are carefully constructed to only deal with the specific support engineer, not the whole experience. Most of the time there is no option for 'the tech was fine but the organization has its head up its ass.' I will bet a lot of these restaurant surveys are the same, where the customer is trying to complain about something the server has no control over.
The person knew he was in violation and could have resigned at the time of the relationship, instead of nobly resigning after some one ratted him out.