I think hoping for a locally hosted "smart" home is backwards. They have no other function than to invade your space. "Smart" objects are agents, and they don't work for you.

I understand you don't enjoy being told that your "little geek corner" is making the world worse, but you don't really have the moral high ground here.

You really think if I asked 200,000 people in my city, only one would have heard of Meta RayBans? when there are billboards, magazine ads, and window stickers in every glasses store? Couldn't tell you the real number but it's probably closer to 1 in 5.

Not uncommon, in comments like these, for there to be so many 9s that the population of Earth is exceeded.

Graphing Calculators are computers in every sense, it's hard to find one you can't at least program in a high level language like Basic or Python, and many accept assembly programs - even Texas Instruments models did, before their signing keys were brute forced.

Games consoles too almost invariably run third party code, although they tend not to be end user programmable - no different than an iPhone in that regard, really.

"Feature phones" - pre-smartphone phones with cameras and internet etc - usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer blessing, even though you couldn't touch the OS. You could SSH into servers from those!

I think a big problem is that the distinction between "general purpose computer" and "end user programmable general purpose computer" is functionally meaningless when you can't write programs, which is most people. Instead they understand it in a functional context - what is this device for? How does it compare to how such devices usually work? The general purpose CPU inside is an implementation detail, and just because you think of an iPhone as a computer doesn't mean everyone does. They think of it as a "phone".

But, again, you cannot consider flawed human perception to be the ground truth! Photonically, the red eye is the ground truth. If you were looking through the viewfinder, you should also have seen the red eye effect, if only for an instant. If you didn't, it's only because your eyes were too slow. Or perhaps you weren't looking through the viewfinder at all and therefore not in a position to see the retroreflection, in which case you might as well have been facing the other way for all that counts.

Or consider taking a photo from a moving vehicle. You can't resolve your blind spots with saccades because the scene moves. Your subjective impression is probably that only the thing you're tracking is crisp, and everything else is a vague, blurry mess. Is that what the camera should capture, irrespective of shutter speed?

I think it's clear that culturally we expect photographs to be an indexical trace of genuine photons, not a replication of subjective experience. That is the value they provide over an "artist's impression".

There is no dividing line between syntax and semantics - semantics is just syntax scaled. Godel proved it, LLMs exploit it.