obviously what you vaguely describe has been around since 1945.
That home assistant devices are constantly listening and feeding back marketing data on every conversation is patent and disproven nonsense.
they have done packet sniffing investigations, they have disassembled the devices, they have run meters on the electrical charges… everything in every way you can imagine.
But even if you just think about it for a second - processing a live audio feed at a rate of 1 second per second indefinitely and correlating that data via voice recognition to your Google profile all to… make your ad personalizations… worse? more inaccurate?
like what the hell is the perceived benefit? That my wife says, “oh my dad found my old barbie house!” while at my neighbors house and my neighbor gets served barbie ads? Why would Google want that?
At some point ever you’re going to realize is that the real things you need to be afraid of are largely caused by the stuff made up by Facebook boomers.
what specifically? vaccines cause autism/monkeypox, the democrats drink baby blood, trump won the last/next election, Putin is good because he’s only killing Nazis in Ukraine, forest fires are caused by Jewish space lasers, LGBTQ+ folks are grooming children and Bill Gates wants to put microchips in your brain?
Like — what are you saying, some misinformation is good?
I’m saying people believe those things. Roughly half of all voters. And those beliefs cause damage, and it will affect you, whether you think it’s stupid or not. You can ignore it and insult it all you want, but it’s not going away. Perhaps you’ve noticed?
Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
They don’t spy on you without your permission. Comments like these devalue actual instances where companies genuinely steal and manipulate data. Take the tin foil hat off…
If you had any remote idea about the tech industry, you’d know what kind of reputation Amazon has. If Amazon were stealing data, you can bet your ass that one of its employees (probably one of the ~6% that gets fired every year) would happily rat them out.
Comments like these amaze me. Even cesspools like Reddit and Twitter wouldn’t be so out of touch and stupid.
They’re not completely wrong, though. If the devices are phoning home when the mic is disabled, then someone would have discovered it by now. There are people who do that shit for fun, and Amazon is a big target.
Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
If you’re high enough level at Amazon to know for sure, you’re also high enough level at Amazon to almost definitely lie to people about it and other things as part of your job.
So your theory as to why you haven’t seen evidence is that there’s a conspiracy of people withholding the evidence. I gotta ask, do you have evidence of that conspiracy?
That doesn’t make any sense. If I were “higher up”, do you think I would be actually doing any IC work? I’d be in management, and probably won’t even know where to look at any of the fucking source code.
Feel free not to take my word for it, but also feel free to ask anyone that has any experience with Alexa, or anyone that has monitored traffic leaving the device.
Is Lemmy just full of conspiracy nuts or something?
That’s not how it works, at all, at ANY tech company. I know, because Amazon has a shared GitFarm, with detailed documentation on how things work, and most importantly the better part of a decade where no one inside or outside of the company has found the device “listening”.
I said it elsewhere, but will repeat since you clearly have no idea about the tech industry. Amazon treats it’s corp employees like shit. If ANYONE was going to leak shit about their employer doing something shitty, it would be an Amazon employee, especially since their URA process is so widely known.
IF Amazon get caught spying, they get everything that they deserve. I’ve never worked in the Ring org, so whatever they do is on them, and if they get caught being shitty with customer data they should be punished severely. What I can say, which (again) is backed by a decade of people not calling out the really-fucking-easily-verified fact that Alexa isn’t phoning home outside of the utterances you say to it. Wakewords don’t leave the device, they’re an offline trigger to get the “actual” content.
I’ll repeat it again, this is an insane take that I haven’t experienced after a decade of posting on Reddit and Twitter. Why is the fediverse full of conspiracy theorists that don’t do basic research before making statements?
lol they are such stereotypical conspiracy theorists too, “of course you’d say it’s not true, that’s exactly what someone who was hiding the truth would say!”
Tell me you’re not a software developer without telling me you’re not a software developer.
If you’re working on the code the only thing that might change is not having access to the release/staging environments (production databases, cloud server, etc.) but you would need access to the code itself (and development database/services), so it wouldn’t be too difficult to check if the code is keeping voice recordings
(italicized is edited in for clarity)
Additionally, the higher up you are, the less code you usually write. With software development being higher up usually means more meetings, team management, planning, and higher level infrastructure talk.
(Obligatory disclaimer that I’m pretty new in software development, this is the experience in the company I work at and seems to be pretty standard among other companies as well)
You should probably edit your comment to clarify that they don’t listen to you.
“Spying” doesn’t really have a clear definition in this context. Amazon employees have been caught spying on customers through their cameras, and giving away clips to authorities without “owners’” consent, consult or notification.
True, that is more accurate. IMO, in those instances, Amazon get all the shit that they deserve…although for many instances these are in their terms of service. There has been no shortage of scandals where Amazon have used utterance data for training ML models, or where they’ve retained voice data for the same reasons, when these have been in the TOS from the beginning.
I see so many attempts to argue with people before the bootlicker insult comes out. At least I know it’s being used correctly and not as some kind of defense against thinking or engaging.
Well it depends. Open standards are created to hopefully catch on by multiple manufacturers and make the interoperability better to make it easier for both consumers and manufacturers.
Proprietary standards are just simply to lock you into their ecosystem.
I remember that being a feature in my 2002 BMW. Unfortunately, a Double DIN stereo was more important than the native controls. So I lost the ability to schedule the auto start time.
Edit: “Auxiliary heating” is apparently what it was called.
Whenever there’s a stupidity expensive version of a functional thing, Coleman makes a version that’s as good or better for half the price: www.coleman.com/coolers-drinkware/drinkware/.
The British have a perfectly logical system that results in us buying fuel by the litre, measuring speed in miles per hour, and measuring fuel economy in miles per gallon. We are doing just fine thank you very much.
There is a water jug & mug manufacturer named Stanley. Apparently these “Stanley” brand cups went viral on TikTok, and TikTok users proceeded to buy them all up in a craze. The meme shows homer sitting next to the championship trophy of the National Hockey League, which is called the Stanley cup (no relation whatsoever to the Stanley name brand).
Love the thoroughness of this. The only detail I could add is that the pink version pictured is a Starbucks exclusive version. And if an expensive cup wasn’t enough, there is a market for add-ons to the cup like phone holders and shoulder straps.
I bought a Sigg in 2009. I will never forget. It was the first aluminum reusable water bottle in existence AFAIK. It came from Switzerland and I didn’t have much money at all but it was so important to me that I have this and I ordered it through the mail. Am a hydrohomie and I used that thing until it died 💦
TikTok is probably the most effective marketing platform in decades. Probably this generation’s equivalent of G.I. Joe and Transformer commercials cartoons.
our local bus goes to grocery stores and that the most of it. if i lived near a retirement home, and worked at a grocery store or strip mall, i’d be set.
right, so maybe the ability to not drive should be a part of how you decide where to live? i certainly wouldn’t want to live somewhere where the only choice is driving
I don’t get it. Men go around for years carrying Yeti tumblers and no one bats an eye. Women start carrying a similar cup with a handle and everyone acts weird.
Because limited edition cups of the brand I used to buy at the Flying J truck stop for $12.99 now costs $150, and the resale value is $200. People are buying a half dozen or more to go with whatever they’re wearing. They’re Stanley mugs for heaven’s sake.
It’s absolutely stupid, and Yeti was just overpriced trendy stuff, not the equivalent of a Beanie Baby fad as a fashion accessory.
Can’t wait until these fools are stuck with piles of worthless mugs they wasted money on. You’ll find these mugs at yard sales or Goodwill in a few years. Good for Stanley makers, though. Hope they laugh all the way to the bank over this vapid trend.
Edit: TBC I think the overpriced Yeti gear is dumb, but I never thought of it as being “gendered”. Plenty of women had Yeti gear. The levels to which this Stanley thing is being taken is ridiculous, and it seems to be predominantly a female thing as a fashion accessory. It’s not dumb because women are the ones buying it up, it’s just dumb because it’s dumb. IDC who the suckers are.
I know the Harlem Shake was a fad many would like to forget, but these stills were from the first video version of it that I saw and I thought it was pretty cool the Norwegian Army had a pretty sweet sense of humor about it.
One of the comments on the video is on point. I miss that era of the internet. It seemed so much more innocent, peaceful and heartwarming than it is now. 😞
It was a crazy time. I was pretty big into EDM, and so when I was in the field with the Marines and my company decides they’re going to do a Harlem Shake video with 150 dudes, needless to say it felt a little surreal. It was rare we got to act like goofballs, but for like one minute on the shores of Morocco we got to be absolute morons. And then we didn’t.
I’ve seen people make jokes about those. I thought the thing was the joke at first, it’s so uncomfortable and strange looking. I guess it was a popular Christmas gift for some reason.
Is this a trend or something? My grandma got a two pack for $5 and i thought it was just some generic grandma cup. The thing sucks, it isn’t anywhere near worth that much money. It’s shitty for traveling (too big and unwieldy) and it doesn’t even seal as well as an actual thermos or bottle.
I prefer the crappy plastic bottle i got from work years ago, i could strap that thing to my belt if i went anywhere. Or wore belts.
Does using a plastic bottle for your water carry any sort of effect? I’m sure all the things stack up but I find it hard to believe that using a plastic water bottle instead of metal one really matters.
I’m sure they do but I was just wondering if it’s amounts that matter and how big of a source a plastic water bottle is compared to other sources. Advice seems to be to avoid plastic water bottles. I found this recent article that was interesting edition.cnn.com/2024/01/08/health/…/index.html
Seems like there’s a lot the scientists don’t know yet but they advice to try and lower the amount of plastic. A breakdown of sources of that plastic would be handy in knowing what to eliminate.
One reason to use well known sites for such links at least for me is that I’m not familiar with the field and can’t for myself review how significant or well done the study is and can’t parse it that well. So I kinda have to outsource that and hope the more repubtable sites have some knowledge about what they’re reporting.
I know CNN isn’t great but it’s well known and at least somewhat reputable, which makes me think the study might have something going for it. With sites I haven’t heard of that’s more difficult for me to gauge.
That is for bottled sold water, not from water bottles that you refill.
I’m sure using plastic anywhere in any form contributes to microplastics absorbed into ones body, but there is probably a difference? It’s just important to be specific what a study says and not accidentally make assumptions.
Also though, I’m gunna keep using my refillable plastic bottle. Trying to manage intake of microplastics based on how much plastic I interact with seems tedious to the point of being impossible. Plastics are the kind of thing that need regulated. And while I might spare myself some microplastics hypothetically, it’s not like the water bottle won’t break down into microplastics in the dump if I replaced it with a metal bottle.
This is a guess but I would assume the bottling process in water bottling plants, and the manufacture of the disposable water bottles, contributes to the amount of microplastics more than passive decay of plastic. Really my main points/beliefs are:
We should be careful making claims based on scientific studies to make sure they are accurate to the study, especially when it comes to claims about how a solution for a problem may be reached. A slight misunderstandings can cause good motivations to make things worse (like people collectively throwing away all their reusable water bottles and buying NEW water bottles made with metal, effectively turning millions of usable waterbottles into trash and creating demand for more polluting industry).
Plastic pollution, microplastics, and everything related, is an overproduction industry problem, not an individual responsibility problem. While a concern for ones own health is individual, it’s also almost impossible to meaningfully avoid microplastics with the current situation. The responsibility doesn’t rest on the shoulder of consumers to collectively make good choices, but on governments to regulate and for owners of industry to be held accountable for the damage they have caused.
What sort of effect? From what I found they really didn’t say, they said it (the plastic in your body) might have some adverse effect but didn’t really know what. And more important than that, are the plastic water bottles how big of a source of the plastic compared to others.
There’s no way your grandma bought two Stanley brand cups for $5. I’ve been using a Stanley pint glass for years, and if I put ice water in at at night, there will still be ice in it in the morning. It’s vacuum insulated.
$45 for a 30 or 40 oz cup with a straw is too much because there are cheaper brands that do the same thing for half the price.
You will have to pull my 40 oz insulated cup out of my cold dead hands. Waking up in the middle of the night in the summer thirsty and being able to sip on water that’s still ice cold from 8 hours ago is so nice!
I agree for drinking at home, but for travel, get a ceramic-lined double-walled steel cup like a Fellow Carter or a Stanley Ceramivac. (I use the Carter and love it.)
Nah, the brits have it even worse, I don’t think even they know what system they use. Like the US just uses the imperial system but brits use like every system randomly plus some stuff that no one else uses, like boulders or some caveman shit like that.
Also brits got like nothing left to make fun of at this point: They fucked their healthcare system bad enough they may as well be in the US, they got 2 viable parties that are even more the same than the US and they left the one thing that kept the country economically relevant to name a few things.
With metric and imperial though, you’re damned right.
We use both systems pretty randomly… personally, I far prefer the metric system, but I have a much better idea of how far a mile is compared to a kilometre. Which makes little sense, as a metres and kilometres are so much more logical than miles and fucking yards!
There is an argument to made that very few people care about the actual distance anything is from themselves anymore. What they are about is “how long will it take to get there”.
You very probably have little to no clue what the actual distance from your front steps to your favorite grocery or pub. But you DO know how long it takes to get there.
I use the metric system for both, and I’m from the UK. I don’t even know my weight in stone anymore, but a stone is just 14 pounds, like how 16 ounces fit into a pound. It has about as much to do with a real stone as a foot in distance has to do with the foot on your leg. Or a metre with a parking meter.
Within the US government it’s still all metric measures, has been since Carter, but Reagan made a social cause and used it against the Dems (along with a secret “guns for hostages” negotiation) to win the presidency. And it’s been downhill ever since.
People don’t get that part. The US was one of the early adopters of the metric system. Mostly thanks to the French supplying Charleville muskets for the fledgling US army during the revolutionary war. And we kept making French pattern muskets, (in metric measurements), for about the next 40 years I think.
Depends what you mean by fucked up. Long waits for some NHS treatments, but if I get any kind of serious injury like cuts or broken bones, it’ll be seen in A&E (Accident & Emergency) at the hospital, they obviously treat the more serious injuries first, but I’ve never waited longer than 4 hours - and that was on a Saturday night about ten years ago, with a minor cut than only needed 5 stitches or so…
As a kid, my broken arm and the few times I needed stitches, it was sorted pretty much straight away or with an hour or two wait. That’s probably doubled or tripled nowadays.
Mental health turnaround is not great, as that’s through my doctor (the NHS). Although I got treatment for depression a couple of years back, meds (Sertaline) and referral to therapy, after a week or so waiting for an appointment and answering a few waves of questionnaires. A couple of months later, after a lengthy conversation with a medical health triage nurse (which was just a random follow up call - that lasted an hour!), I went on an 18 month waiting list for the ADHD test, and about the same for ASD(Autism Spectrum Disorder) as well.
Not great, but they’re understandably swamped with the spike of mental illness, or people becoming aware of it anyway, after covid and the lockdowns.
Still waiting on the NHS for the ASD diagnosis, but I actually ended up going private for my ADHD, that was ~£800, was seen in a week, and the meds for that was £100 a month for Elvanse(Vyvanse in the US). I was able to transfer back to my GP after a few months though, so it’s just the standard prescription price of £9.65 / month, which is much better.
Other than that last paragraph, everything else was entirely free… so, nah, I don’t reckon our health care system is as fucked as yours and we certainly don’t have it “even worse”!
I’m from Estonia so my healthcare is fine. Mental health waiting times are on the longer side (longest I saw was 6 months) in less populated areas here but private option for that is like 20 euros per session and meds are still free.
Didn’t you guys have like a day of waiting time for ambulances at some point? I remember seeing that in the foreign news.
I’m in a similar boat to you regarding mental healthcare. The reason we don’t complain as much as we ought to is because we don’t have much to compare. Our system looks equitable next to America but that one really is the worst. Our healthcare is orders of magnitude worse than our European neighbours, in almost every metric. In Slovakia you don’t need to beg them to see a psychiatrist and wait months or years while the NHS gaslights you. You say, I feel bad and I want to speak to a specialist. That’s it. You get your treatment.
British society is breaking down. We would rather wave flags for an ultra privileged royal family or invade sovereign nations or build aircraft carriers, than take care of our own health. These people are bigoted and hypocritical morons who chose to leave the EU, even though this is the only institution that is safeguarding their rights.
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