I liked it well enough to get the Tap for the bedroom
We have an Echo (which we use quite a bit.... timers, alarms, news, weather, spelling, etc.) but for music.... the built-in speaker is low-fi and not satisfactory to me. So I bought an Echo Dot as soon as they came out, specifically because it had a line-out connection. That one, I use to listen to music here in my office (I have a very nice audio system in here), and I find the dot very satisfactory indeed in that role, although I do use the other features as well.
There do seem to be a lot of user-level haters; which leads me to believe there are a lot of people who've never actually used one. The claims that it has been a marketing failure are laughable; There is some approximate sales information, indications are that the product is doing quite well. Speaking as a user, I can understand why. We (my SO and I) find it very handy.
My objections to Echo / dot are about the developer ecosystem, the voice recognition implementation, and the secure server issues.
The "canned phrase" collection approach to command recognition is the very antithesis of any attempt to reach for "AI." It would have been wonderful if there was either a local interface so you could provide smarter processing, or if Amazon would actually provide smarter processing on their own. Between that, which is really a pretty crippling issue, and the requirement for an secure server with a +$ certificate for anything other than testing, Echo is not appealing to me as a development platform.
I've been watching MyCroft; that looks like it might have some potential.
Both presently suffer from online-only operation; the speech handling is dead if there is no connection. Hopefully that will be resolved in MyCroft's case, as it's actually an open system and they have mentioned that they're interested in pursuing local STT. My cheapo GPS ca. 2013 has reasonable general purpose offline speech recognition. However that was done, I would hope the underlying code would be better today, and I would love to see the capability in MyCroft, or Echo, or whatever. Being tethered to an active network is not a good thing.
I mute the system the moment a commercial begins. I check my email real quick on my phone (just a matter of seconds), maybe get a snack, turn my head to talk to my SO, etc.
Commercials don't bother me at all. Because I simply don't pay any attention to the content they present.
Hulu has a nice feature, a little timer icon at the top left. You can tell exactly how much time remains in the commercial. I use that to get the mute button off at just the right time, and no sooner.:) But if it goes away, it's no big deal. I still won't be listening, or otherwise paying any significant attention.
The legislature decides the law. Not the judges. The judges (or a jury) are empowered to decide guilt or innocence, for and against, under the law. The way they are supposed to do that is determine the facts of the case -- which is just another way to say "truth." When a jury is involved, the judge decides what they get to hear, and they decide the case, again, via the judge's auspices, under the law.
That's how it's supposed to work. The judge is not supposed to decide the law. The law was fixed before the case arrived in the courtroom.
Of course, that's ignoring bribery, influence peddling, the manifestly corrupt "plea bargaining" mechanisms, and the pay-for-justice quality of service lawyers provide, the usurpation of article V powers not mentioned in article III by SCOTUS, the outright absurdity of "case law" and so forth.
Often, they do a terrible job, one not based on truth.
That, however, in no way suggests that those given the opportunity to gain the privileges and benefits of the 4th estate should do an even WORSE job. But that's what they do. They shovel bullshit by the metric fuckton. I am thoroughly convinced we'd be better off if we didn't allow it.
"OJ did it" -- That's called soft news, by the way.
No, that's unsubstantiated opinion, worthy of rattling around in your head and nothing else. Gossip. Exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. Not news in any form or fashion. Entertainment? Sure. If you're a lowlife. Otherwise, no, just purest garbage.
So are you suggesting the government should decide which stories are true and which are false and potentially punish anyone publishing things it decides is false?
That's exactly what the courts do today. Decide the truth of matters. Do you suggest we should eliminate the court system, and leave the decisions of guilt, innocence, and punishment to private entities?
No doubt the courts are quite corrupt, however, there is some ability for oversight. This is considerably less true for private entities.
I, for one, would not mind if a news organization was required to only print factual matter, rather than speculation and opinion. I see no reason that the opinion of a newspaper editor or reporter has any more validity than that of my neighbor, and the circulation of the media ensures that said opinion has considerably more impact, which I consider both unfair and unjustified, and obviously so.
Facts, and nothing but the facts -- that'd be very nice indeed.
Particulate emissions aren't a significant problem in this context -- car pollution. So the article, true or not, provides no reason whatsoever to be concerned about electrics vs. IC.
I didn't say he was a Democrat. I was indicating he is liberal. He's certainly the most liberal of the big three that remain. And I'm pretty sure he's never identified himself as a communist. His label for himself, which I'm inclined to think isn't too far off the mark, is "Democratic Socialist."
Me, I identify as a compassionate constitutionalist. I think we should be following the rules as originally intended by the authors, which I also think is pretty bloody obvious, but I think most of the rules suck. Everyone hates where I stand.:)
My observation: this election cycle, the news has pushed for Clinton pretty hard. She's pretty center, and right of it if anything. Very corporate, very pro-war, very pro-PATRIOT act, very pro drugwar, etc.
Sanders was subjected to constant downplay and neg-speak. Everything from the NYT to the Guardian. Sanders is, in my view, actually a fairly liberal candidate.
To find media support of him (not voter support, there's plenty of that), you have to hit places like Salon, Huffington post, etc.
Just saying... I don't see the MSM as liberal. Now Fox News... I don't see them so much as conservative as batshit crazy, but that's just me.:)
Echo is fun to use. But the developer process... it's pretty much a grade-A clusterfuck.
To get Echo to do anything, you have to provide canned speech fragments that define everything your service is going to do. There's no "smarts" at all behind the speech interpretation; it's straight-up text-to-text matching. That's quite aside from the secure server requirements and the complete lack of a reasonable local echo-to-computer-to-echo interface.
I have an Echo and an Echo dot. Love using them. Wish they were reasonable to develop for, have many things I'd like to do right here. Looks like Mycroft is where I have to place my hopes, though. Amazon's not showing any signs at all of giving Echo anything more than the boneheaded API it currently has. Of course, it's designed to support Amazon. Not the customer. Which illuminates their approach somewhat, I think.
It's a wonder to me why Siri can't accomplish these things like they intentionally dumbed it down for the masses.
Well, let's see. iOS devices:
o one crippled level of folders o no inter-app sharing of data o apps disappear when devs stop paying for app store o no memory cards - what, move data around? Are you NUTZ? o no general purpose pointer support o every iOS up(smash)grade breaks previously API-compliant apps o Mommy's little app store Protects Your Tender Sensibilities From Teh Horror of Teh SEXAGE!
...yeah, might not be wanting to look to Apple for non-dumbed-down iOS devices. That doesn't seem to be how they roll. Over their customers, that is.
Is it possible to do full untrained voice recognition on a platform as limited as a smartphone?
Yes, it is. This has had general speech recog since 2013 or earlier. Odds are the software that got that done is way better today than in 2013.
There couldn't be a reason people would want to tie you irretrievably to their could-based / online speech recognition services, could there? Bueller? Bueller?
My GPS has speech processing. Works decently. Has to understand place names; and it does. It was an under $100 GPS. It does this without a connection to anything. And while it contains a huge map database. And it's not a very new2 device; I bought it in 2013 (and no doubt the speech recog software was designed somewhat earlier than that.)
The reason that they're all using the cloud isn't because they have to. It's because they can turn you into a product more easily; "you" being the developer and the user.
Best direction here is to dig out from under the commercial models and see to it that the field is actually open. Take a look at where MyCroft is aiming. They're shipping prototypes last I heard. They're looking at on-board speech recog as well.
How do you want to teach children to handle private information responsibly
I don't want to teach other people's children anything. I've been done with teaching mine for years now. I think that it is first the parents job / responsibility, and second, that of the state.
Providing information to a citizen -- any age -- is one thing. The way I see it, it's difficult to do it wrong, if you do it truthfully. The state, unfortunately, has a very bad habit of being untruthful in service of various shabby (and worse) agendas.
Coercive law is something else entirely. Particularly when it gets into the areas of personal and consensual choice, how it defines "informed", and where parents choices WRT to their still-at-home children are concerned. Most law in this area is, to be kind, wrongheaded. IMHO.
Plebs are too busy drooling in front of the reports of the Kardashian's latest dysfunctions to concern themselves with things like where money comes from and why it is they have so very, very little of it.
Also, assuming someone does up and spend (at least) $5k to get some lesser amount back, the perpetrators know that nothing else will happen to them. There's no penalty for trying, so hey, why not try?
Slashdot Mirror
We have an Echo (which we use quite a bit.... timers, alarms, news, weather, spelling, etc.) but for music.... the built-in speaker is low-fi and not satisfactory to me. So I bought an Echo Dot as soon as they came out, specifically because it had a line-out connection. That one, I use to listen to music here in my office (I have a very nice audio system in here), and I find the dot very satisfactory indeed in that role, although I do use the other features as well.
There do seem to be a lot of user-level haters; which leads me to believe there are a lot of people who've never actually used one. The claims that it has been a marketing failure are laughable; There is some approximate sales information, indications are that the product is doing quite well. Speaking as a user, I can understand why. We (my SO and I) find it very handy.
My objections to Echo / dot are about the developer ecosystem, the voice recognition implementation, and the secure server issues.
The "canned phrase" collection approach to command recognition is the very antithesis of any attempt to reach for "AI." It would have been wonderful if there was either a local interface so you could provide smarter processing, or if Amazon would actually provide smarter processing on their own. Between that, which is really a pretty crippling issue, and the requirement for an secure server with a +$ certificate for anything other than testing, Echo is not appealing to me as a development platform.
I've been watching MyCroft; that looks like it might have some potential.
Both presently suffer from online-only operation; the speech handling is dead if there is no connection. Hopefully that will be resolved in MyCroft's case, as it's actually an open system and they have mentioned that they're interested in pursuing local STT. My cheapo GPS ca. 2013 has reasonable general purpose offline speech recognition. However that was done, I would hope the underlying code would be better today, and I would love to see the capability in MyCroft, or Echo, or whatever. Being tethered to an active network is not a good thing.
He's in first grayed, you insensitive clod
I mute the system the moment a commercial begins. I check my email real quick on my phone (just a matter of seconds), maybe get a snack, turn my head to talk to my SO, etc.
Commercials don't bother me at all. Because I simply don't pay any attention to the content they present.
Hulu has a nice feature, a little timer icon at the top left. You can tell exactly how much time remains in the commercial. I use that to get the mute button off at just the right time, and no sooner. :) But if it goes away, it's no big deal. I still won't be listening, or otherwise paying any significant attention.
The legislature decides the law. Not the judges. The judges (or a jury) are empowered to decide guilt or innocence, for and against, under the law. The way they are supposed to do that is determine the facts of the case -- which is just another way to say "truth." When a jury is involved, the judge decides what they get to hear, and they decide the case, again, via the judge's auspices, under the law.
That's how it's supposed to work. The judge is not supposed to decide the law. The law was fixed before the case arrived in the courtroom.
Of course, that's ignoring bribery, influence peddling, the manifestly corrupt "plea bargaining" mechanisms, and the pay-for-justice quality of service lawyers provide, the usurpation of article V powers not mentioned in article III by SCOTUS, the outright absurdity of "case law" and so forth.
That's why I said they are "quite corrupt"
Often, they do a terrible job, one not based on truth.
That, however, in no way suggests that those given the opportunity to gain the privileges and benefits of the 4th estate should do an even WORSE job. But that's what they do. They shovel bullshit by the metric fuckton. I am thoroughly convinced we'd be better off if we didn't allow it.
No, that's unsubstantiated opinion, worthy of rattling around in your head and nothing else. Gossip. Exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. Not news in any form or fashion. Entertainment? Sure. If you're a lowlife. Otherwise, no, just purest garbage.
That's exactly what the courts do today. Decide the truth of matters. Do you suggest we should eliminate the court system, and leave the decisions of guilt, innocence, and punishment to private entities?
No doubt the courts are quite corrupt, however, there is some ability for oversight. This is considerably less true for private entities.
I, for one, would not mind if a news organization was required to only print factual matter, rather than speculation and opinion. I see no reason that the opinion of a newspaper editor or reporter has any more validity than that of my neighbor, and the circulation of the media ensures that said opinion has considerably more impact, which I consider both unfair and unjustified, and obviously so.
Facts, and nothing but the facts -- that'd be very nice indeed.
Particulate emissions aren't a significant problem in this context -- car pollution. So the article, true or not, provides no reason whatsoever to be concerned about electrics vs. IC.
That's the bottom line.
slashdot moderation, lol.
As I said: center.
I didn't say he was a Democrat. I was indicating he is liberal. He's certainly the most liberal of the big three that remain. And I'm pretty sure he's never identified himself as a communist. His label for himself, which I'm inclined to think isn't too far off the mark, is "Democratic Socialist."
Me, I identify as a compassionate constitutionalist. I think we should be following the rules as originally intended by the authors, which I also think is pretty bloody obvious, but I think most of the rules suck. Everyone hates where I stand. :)
Precisely.
My observation: this election cycle, the news has pushed for Clinton pretty hard. She's pretty center, and right of it if anything. Very corporate, very pro-war, very pro-PATRIOT act, very pro drugwar, etc.
Sanders was subjected to constant downplay and neg-speak. Everything from the NYT to the Guardian. Sanders is, in my view, actually a fairly liberal candidate.
To find media support of him (not voter support, there's plenty of that), you have to hit places like Salon, Huffington post, etc.
Just saying... I don't see the MSM as liberal. Now Fox News... I don't see them so much as conservative as batshit crazy, but that's just me. :)
Echo is fun to use. But the developer process... it's pretty much a grade-A clusterfuck.
To get Echo to do anything, you have to provide canned speech fragments that define everything your service is going to do. There's no "smarts" at all behind the speech interpretation; it's straight-up text-to-text matching. That's quite aside from the secure server requirements and the complete lack of a reasonable local echo-to-computer-to-echo interface.
I have an Echo and an Echo dot. Love using them. Wish they were reasonable to develop for, have many things I'd like to do right here. Looks like Mycroft is where I have to place my hopes, though. Amazon's not showing any signs at all of giving Echo anything more than the boneheaded API it currently has. Of course, it's designed to support Amazon. Not the customer. Which illuminates their approach somewhat, I think.
Well, let's see. iOS devices:
o one crippled level of folders
o no inter-app sharing of data
o apps disappear when devs stop paying for app store
o no memory cards - what, move data around? Are you NUTZ?
o no general purpose pointer support
o every iOS up(smash)grade breaks previously API-compliant apps
o Mommy's little app store Protects Your Tender Sensibilities From Teh Horror of Teh SEXAGE!
Yes, it is. This has had general speech recog since 2013 or earlier. Odds are the software that got that done is way better today than in 2013.
There couldn't be a reason people would want to tie you irretrievably to their could-based / online speech recognition services, could there? Bueller? Bueller?
My GPS has speech processing. Works decently. Has to understand place names; and it does. It was an under $100 GPS. It does this without a connection to anything. And while it contains a huge map database. And it's not a very new2 device; I bought it in 2013 (and no doubt the speech recog software was designed somewhat earlier than that.)
The reason that they're all using the cloud isn't because they have to. It's because they can turn you into a product more easily; "you" being the developer and the user.
Best direction here is to dig out from under the commercial models and see to it that the field is actually open. Take a look at where MyCroft is aiming. They're shipping prototypes last I heard. They're looking at on-board speech recog as well.
I don't want to teach other people's children anything. I've been done with teaching mine for years now. I think that it is first the parents job / responsibility, and second, that of the state.
Providing information to a citizen -- any age -- is one thing. The way I see it, it's difficult to do it wrong, if you do it truthfully. The state, unfortunately, has a very bad habit of being untruthful in service of various shabby (and worse) agendas.
Coercive law is something else entirely. Particularly when it gets into the areas of personal and consensual choice, how it defines "informed", and where parents choices WRT to their still-at-home children are concerned. Most law in this area is, to be kind, wrongheaded. IMHO.
I was referring to the US in a manner intended to say "but we're leading the way here"
I tend to be a bit too concise sometimes. Sorry.
Really? One wonders how a child would give permission in any manner that meant anything in a legal sense.
Perhaps the summary isn't presenting this clearly (what? WHAT?) but yes, it does seem pretty absurd.
Then again, the US certainly hasn't been slacking in stepping into the role of parental choice / decision-making.
Plebs are too busy drooling in front of the reports of the Kardashian's latest dysfunctions to concern themselves with things like where money comes from and why it is they have so very, very little of it.
Ergo,no revolution for you.
Would you like fries with your subservience?
Even better. I have jumpable sharks.
Do Not Look Into 3D Printer With Remaining Eye
But, damn, those are small fingers.
Also, assuming someone does up and spend (at least) $5k to get some lesser amount back, the perpetrators know that nothing else will happen to them. There's no penalty for trying, so hey, why not try?
Informative graph: Civil forfeiture in the United States amounts to billions of dollars every year.