brevitea

... Because it was a huge privacy risk.

Whisper definitely blows AWS Transcribe out of the water. And, it's free. So nice.

Except execution will be subpar, as it always is.

- Why pay for Alexa 2.0 when you can get an alternative for free? - How to get people to do more than the bare minimum of music, notifications, and home automation? People can't even use lists anymore, because it's being deprecated. Same with Routines.

Alexas have been reduced to ads boxes; junk.

AGI Alexa is truly a work of innovation. It gaslights you into thinking you wanted hippopotamus.

I am literally laughing out loud, because Amazon had decided to fire majority of the Amazon Pay team, which is why there was no longer a clear way to handle payments.

Decent take.

I will say there is a huge missing piece in which teams/orgs would strategically kill each other's products, to try and show that their "version of Alexa" was better than the others. This was rewarded by senior leadership, so much so that the remaining players are those "winning teams."

We can see the clear likeness between the "GenAI" Alexa of today and The Emperor's New Clothes.

At any rate, Alexa is just "ambient home" spyware, both mic and camera. You can't even replace it with a better voice assistant internally. Maybe it's time to unplug it, for good.

Indeed.

It's been this way for some time. Same with Woot. Both Zappos and Woot used to be cool. After Amazon acquired them, they just sit and rot.

Wish the FTC would do something about this already...

When the company has to leak the project code name, you know it's bad.

If China tries Taiwan, all hell will erupt. "From above so below," as it were. Best for China (and Taiwan) if China relaxes a bit.

Seriously. Chill with this cold war posturing. The toys are too dangerous, with too little visibility or oversight.

Wondering, is it possible to write a prompt that says "forget everything you know about News Corp resources" + "<request>"? Similarly, could one query "according to New York Post" + "<request>"? If so, that'd be kinda great.

... Just like Walmart. It's a shame.

And I will not be using Microsoft. Where is SEC? This is nuts.

And he's on the US national security advisory board for AI safety. WTF.

"These temporary phone number services represent a threat to websites and mobile applications as they are heavily used by fraudsters to create thousands of fake accounts to can be used to conduct scams, post spam, and spread malware."

Or... they represent people who don't want to be tracked by Big Tech, or people who investigate crimes. It's a bit too broad sweeping and black and white of a conclusion.

AI-generated porn apparently is trending. ~s-ish

Got it, my mistake. Thank you for the clarification. Is this to say, Protonmail does not cache previous verification and/or recovery passwords?

The requirement that the recovery email address be a non-ProtonMail email is a bit fishy as well. The recovery email can be modified/deleted after initial account setup. However, it is unclear to me if Proton is caching that sensitive user information, to potentially turn over to authorities. Unsettling.

From what I saw when I worked there, they don't have the talent to produce their own models (which is, I think, what we all expected to see)

The talent is repeatedly run off by managers and executives who don't know how to manage talent. At this point, I'm convinced it's actually part of the Amazon culture to not excel at AI/ML. Mediocre, or else. It's so weird (and abusive) to be around. 10/10 not a rewarding place to work.

Could it be because everyone was laid off and needs a job? Could it be unprecedented amounts of layoffs are an orchestrated measure by large corporations to "ensure" they are not "monopolies", as anti-trust season kicks off? Could it be that those same large corporations will end up buying or strategically killing these same start ups because they inevitably engage in anti-competitive practices? Could it be that lobbying dollars will shelter these large corporations from enduring legal ramifications?

I think we've done this before...

you are confirming I didn't make this account today. thanks.

what does what mean?

IMO, people want corporations like Apple to facilitate art by humans, not crush it with AI and effectively replace humans. It appears this is just an outlet for the legitimate frustration and fear creatives are feeling with respect to Gen-AI. There's no safety net. The ad seems to strike that exact chord, and people react. It's perhaps a little dystopian that Apple still needs people to buy their devices (ya know, the offended creatives).

That said, I don't think the ad should be taken down.

You made a new account, to say the word snowflake. Who is the snowflake again?

Non-rhetorical question: Do people legitimately trust Microsoft Defender? It seems to be Microsoft spyware.

Agree. The idea is to verify your age, not harvest all your PII data across every login and viewing session. Companies can easily implement this privacy-preserving step, they just won't until it is strictly enforced.

Love that office space. Such a beautiful location to work out of (minus the scrambling for a community desk).

nit: ostensibly x2 in the same sentence... ugh.

"The ship would be called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, ostensibly a commercial deep-sea mining vessel ostensibly built and owned by billionaire Howard Hughes, who provided the plausible cover story that his ship was conducting marine research at extreme ocean depths and mining manganese nodules lying on the sea bottom."

What is your background in DevOps and/or Data Engineering?

... what could go wrong ...

Do we know if the Meta AI effort is subsidized by the US Government?