Hacker News: brevitea

New comment by brevitea in "How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system"

brevitea — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 07:26:17 +0000

... Because it was a huge privacy risk.

New comment by brevitea in "How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system"

brevitea — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 07:25:38 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system"

brevitea — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 07:21:48 +0000

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.

New comment by brevitea in "How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system"

brevitea — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:06:27 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system"

brevitea — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:03:59 +0000

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.

New comment by brevitea in "Alexa dropped the LLM ball on being the top conversational system on the planet"

brevitea — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 05:23:38 +0000

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.

New comment by brevitea in "Amazon accessed private home videos without telling customers"

brevitea — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 02:56:53 +0000

Indeed.

New comment by brevitea in "HN: Is Zappos just Amazon inventory now?"

brevitea — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 02:55:13 +0000

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...

New comment by brevitea in "Amazon's Project PI AI looks for product defects before they ship"

brevitea — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 02:53:25 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "China starts military drills around Taiwan as 'harsh punishment'"

brevitea — Thu, 23 May 2024 03:38:54 +0000

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.

New comment by brevitea in "Partnership with News Corp"

brevitea — Wed, 22 May 2024 20:57:44 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid"

brevitea — Wed, 22 May 2024 18:25:01 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "Recall is Microsoft's key to unlocking the future of PCs"

brevitea — Tue, 21 May 2024 04:13:09 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "Scarlett Johansson has just issued this statement on OpenAI and Sky"

brevitea — Mon, 20 May 2024 23:50:53 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "A study of applications targeted by temporary phone numbers"

brevitea — Sun, 19 May 2024 20:18:57 +0000

> "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.

New comment by brevitea in "Any ideas for websites that will make passive income?"

brevitea — Wed, 15 May 2024 19:16:13 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "Proton Mail fails activists, again–is it time to ditch the app for good?"

brevitea — Wed, 15 May 2024 19:14:16 +0000

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

New comment by brevitea in "Proton Mail fails activists, again–is it time to ditch the app for good?"

brevitea — Tue, 14 May 2024 18:40:17 +0000

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.

New comment by brevitea in "AWS CEO to Step Down"

brevitea — Tue, 14 May 2024 16:24:26 +0000

> 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.

New comment by brevitea in "America is in the midst of an extraordinary startup boom"

brevitea — Sun, 12 May 2024 13:59:54 +0000

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...