Reverendender@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Aug 19:54
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Can I replace AppleHome with this stuff?
BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 01 Aug 20:18
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It’s fun and I recommend it, but I’m hesitant to say you can ‘replace’ your existing systems with it. You’ll probably mostly be able do what you want to do, but we’re still in the enthusiast stage and there’s going to be annoyances and frustrations. Home assistant is also one of the easier things to setup as far as self hosting goes, but you’re going to pick up some skills on the path to getting it working.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Aug 23:37
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Trust me, there’s annoyances and frustrations aplenty with Apple
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
on 01 Aug 21:55
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If you can find a hass replacement for the Echo Flex, I will name my firstborn after you.
How far away is the Home Assistant Voice Preview from what you’re looking for?
It doesn’t plug directly into the wall but instead uses a USB C cable (that you provide). Other than this, mine can answer questions, search the internet, turn things on and off, play music via Spotify, Jellyfin, etc. Tell me about the state of stuff in Home Assistant (temps in rooms, how the solar is doing, what’s on my shopping list and can add things, etc).
It requires you already have Home Assistant set up but it is a pretty good experience so long as you’re willing to do some amount of tinkering to make it your own.
Like other comments say it’s not general public ready but it’s pretty close and costs $69.
Yeah that’s why I called it out. It seemed like it was an important part.
There probably isn’t an actual reason why you couldn’t connect it to a wall plug in a way that replicates this setup even if a bit hacky. E.g. short cable then attach the unit to the top of the plug. It’s not that heavy and may attach fine without coming out of the wall.
billwashere@lemmy.world
on 03 Aug 15:26
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Yeah I understand the health issues for sure. First prostate cancer with a radical prostatectomy and then a year later Guillain-Barré Syndrome. I had lots of projects on hold for several years. This was like 5 years ago and I’m good now.
napkin2020@sh.itjust.works
on 04 Aug 01:08
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Oh that is fucking awesome. Hope you can finish it and share it one day!
It won’t be long until the LLMs are trained with for ad-RAG
While each conversation happens a second model will scan it, send the contents to a vector search, return as embedding and a score, then give those outputs silently to the conversing model.
You do need to train/fine tune the model to not mention that it received the ad and subtly push it.
Actually, now that I think about it, you don’t even need to tell the model about the ad, you just weight some of the input tokens with the ad embedding and it naturally biases towards talking about that brand.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 01 Aug 18:15
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Alexa already periodically makes “suggestions” that are annoying to disable if you misspeak.
Counting down until it starts demanding credit cards in order to function. Maybe as a form of “identity check”, as that’s been a popular excuse to collect payment information.
I bought a full size a few years ago but returned it cause I didn’t think it was worth the price. I got a mini as a gift last year and it works great. Even has built in temperature and humidity sensors
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Aug 12:35
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I wish I shared your experience with the mini. Mine is temperamental, glitchy, somehow obnoxious, and the sound is mediocre.
You’re still using Alexa? Unplugged our listening er pod device about a week after we got it.
takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 01 Aug 19:31
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Same, I got Alexa (the first one with a good speaker) when attended a sales event of another company. I set it up, but after seeing its network activity even when no one was home I shut it down and didn’t use it again.
I don’t understand why people don’t feel weirded out by having an always on listening device.
Yup, scares the heck out of me.
Guess other don’t agree. I am getting downvoted.
PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world
on 01 Aug 20:12
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Likely b/c your comment reads like you are stating OP is using it when you probably meant a more general public “you”? That’d be my guess. I think most, if not all, here would agree to not ever use alexa, that bitch.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Aug 19:10
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Duh. This is the AI wet dream. Ads won’t have discrete patterns that can be filtered. The LLM will deliver content specific garbage as if it were a genuine answer to a query. It will just bias towards ads and deliver the ad Ina different personalized manner each time. For as much as everyone likes to bitch about AI. This may be the golden age. It probably just gets worse from here.
Got 8 Google Minis around the house, mostly ceiling mount. First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I’m taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.
MyRobotShitsBolts@lemmy.world
on 01 Aug 21:10
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You sir, and I say this with no hyperbole; are a hero.
First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I’m taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.
“Further work from our user experience team has resulted in several recommendations, including revising the Google Mini for the North American market to add a Kevlar layer to the case and using data from the accelerometer to treat an abrupt, rapid acceleration with a threshold above a certain level as “undesirable behavior/behavior needs improvement” user feedback to Alexa+'s prior prompt response.”
Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
on 01 Aug 20:59
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Now I’m going to refuse to purchase one even harder!
Some of them are, but a few others feel like rehashing old themes without adding much. Still mostly worth watching imo
Mediocre_Bard@lemmy.world
on 02 Aug 06:01
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That one was hard to watch. It just kept getting worse and worse.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 01 Aug 21:29
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I’m sorry, people still have or use these things?
Who is this stupid or lazy?
Steve@startrek.website
on 01 Aug 21:45
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They already do…
BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
on 01 Aug 22:32
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Alexa has ads since the beginning and I can’t imagine that would change just because they are replacing the backend with AI. The first time Echo wasted my time trying to selling me something in my own home was also the last time. I don’t understand how anyone can be okay with that.
possumparty@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 02 Aug 05:46
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Fuck, the Echo Show series is basically just a glorified ad machine with a clock feature.
MisterMoo@lemmy.world
on 01 Aug 23:03
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Not this one. I’ve been a Prime member for many years out of convenience (and because I live in the rurals and need to ship a lot of things to the house). Amazon completely fucked it up for themselves with regard to my subscription this past year or two, I’m done.
Removed the ability to download and sideload Kindle books
Ads in Prime Video
Followed by even more ads in Prime Video
Now this, and I don’t even own an Alexa device
I’m done. Subscription is cancelled (has been for some time now, but unfortunately it was reupped annual). I’ve found alternative sources for several things I need to buy monthly/regularly that I previously would purchase on Amazon. Video was already trashed, but I barely used it. I’ve jailbroken my Kindles, converted all my books to EPUB, and installed KOReader on them. Wasn’t a hard transition since I’ve had a Boox device as my main reader for some years now anyway. I’ve started buying my books from Kobo and other sources.
Looking into other services for online purchases and shipping. It’ll be less convenient, and I’ll still buy from Amazon in the event I absolutely have to, but I’d like to minimize that now.
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca
on 02 Aug 02:16
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I have a prime subscription, simply for the delivery and grocery discounts, but the ads on their streaming service have convinced me to stop using it entirely and just pirate all their shows / movies.
I never found much worth watching on Prime, to be honest, even before the ads issue.
As for Prime, I still benefit from the Prime shipping, but a lot of stores on Amazon ship free now even without Prime, and given where I live, 2-day shipping is not a thing. It’s usually more like 4 to 7 days. I’m generally in no rush either way.
My main benefits were shipping and books, plus free games on Prime and GOG. But now the shipping is almost irrelevant, they’ve screwed the book thing, so all that’s left is the games, many of which I won’t even play.
Fredselfish@lemmy.world
on 02 Aug 05:55
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Depends on the model and firmware, but for most, Winterbreak is the current method.
Do note if your Kindle is updated to version 5.18.x currently it’s not possible to jailbreak. There is ongoing work on a new exploit though, and a new jailbreak method (or update to Winterbreak) is expected later this year.
Edit - actually, if you’re on firmware 5.18.0 the jailbreak may work. 5.18.1 and above it definitely doesn’t.
No, Amazon took away the “Download and transfer via USB” option when downloading your books. Making it more difficult to strip DRM, but also to conveniently add it to multiple devices. I prefer to keep my eReaders offline and manage them with Calibre.
Regarding sideloading EPUBs with Calibre, it’s not really doing that. Under normal circumstances Kindle can’t read EPUB format at all, so Calibre will convert it to a native format, either MOBI or AZW3 generally. But with a jailbroken Kindle and KOReader, you can actually read EPUBs natively. I’ve actually converted my entire collection to EPUB and deleted the AZW3 and KFX files.
It’s really just that only Amazon uses AZW3 and KFX. MOBI is deprecated, and nobody really uses it anymore, not even Amazon. KFX is DRMed to hell, and I’m not sure about it, but most AZW3 files are just DRM wrappers for EPUB anyway. This is why the KindleUnpack plugin for Calibre can strip out EPUBs from most AZW3 files and retain formatting without needing conversion.
Basically, AZW3 and KFX are for Kindle, and only for Kindle. EPUB is an open standard that literally every device that’s not a Kindle uses.
I already own a non-Amazon reader that’s my main reader, and I want to move away from Amazon’s ecosystem.
Maybe I didnt read it properly when Calibre was sending it to my reader.
Regarding formats: As expected (Insert XKCD comic about standards)
Bristlecone@lemmy.world
on 01 Aug 23:19
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I can’t even stand when my Google assistant says more than three words to respond 😂 if I start hearing ads out of that thing I will get rid of it faster than anything I’ve ever done
Well someone’s gotta pay for that small country’s worth of wasted electricity
stellargmite@lemmy.world
on 02 Aug 06:10
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I’m amazed it didn’t already as someone who has never used or heard one being used. What’s the business model? Just the data harvesting for purpose of their other businesses?
lustyargonian@lemmy.zip
on 02 Aug 06:54
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Like always, Black Mirror has an episode on this.
iglou@programming.dev
on 02 Aug 13:05
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Isn’t Black Mirror a manual at this point?
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Aug 13:15
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iveseenthat@reddthat.com
on 02 Aug 07:05
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So, South park?
Etterra@discuss.online
on 02 Aug 08:49
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As if I was ever stupid enough to use Alexa.
ThunderLegend@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Aug 12:31
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I bought an Alexa echo long before I actually cared about privacy and I regret it a lot. It’s been a pricey paper weight since then. I wish I could flash some kind of OS and use it as a sound bar or something. I can’t even use the Bluetooth without signing in with amazon account, which requires a lot of data including phone number.
Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca
on 02 Aug 13:05
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Do you have a shotgun? Makes a respectable flying target.
threaded - newest
Now introducing Alexa Luxe
Now introducing Alexa Luxe + Pro Max Premium
I’m pretty sure Amazon got this idea from Black Mirror’s latest season
Easy fix:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/aa67f53a-104c-4978-a50e-f1a63047ca69.png">
Follow-up fix: get home assistant and recreate this yourself with a $15 device
esphome.io/projects/index.html
Can I replace AppleHome with this stuff?
It’s fun and I recommend it, but I’m hesitant to say you can ‘replace’ your existing systems with it. You’ll probably mostly be able do what you want to do, but we’re still in the enthusiast stage and there’s going to be annoyances and frustrations. Home assistant is also one of the easier things to setup as far as self hosting goes, but you’re going to pick up some skills on the path to getting it working.
Trust me, there’s annoyances and frustrations aplenty with Apple
If you can find a hass replacement for the Echo Flex, I will name my firstborn after you.
How far away is the Home Assistant Voice Preview from what you’re looking for?
It doesn’t plug directly into the wall but instead uses a USB C cable (that you provide). Other than this, mine can answer questions, search the internet, turn things on and off, play music via Spotify, Jellyfin, etc. Tell me about the state of stuff in Home Assistant (temps in rooms, how the solar is doing, what’s on my shopping list and can add things, etc).
It requires you already have Home Assistant set up but it is a pretty good experience so long as you’re willing to do some amount of tinkering to make it your own.
Like other comments say it’s not general public ready but it’s pretty close and costs $69.
That’s a huge deal: it stays out of the way and it’s a complete unit.
Yeah that’s why I called it out. It seemed like it was an important part.
There probably isn’t an actual reason why you couldn’t connect it to a wall plug in a way that replicates this setup even if a bit hacky. E.g. short cable then attach the unit to the top of the plug. It’s not that heavy and may attach fine without coming out of the wall.
I started making my own several years ago but got sidelined by health issues and haven’t gone back to it. :(
My end goal is I have a lot of comic books. I want a voice assistant that can query a database and then turn on smart lights to show box locations.
I got the database done, I got the queries working, then had a heart attack and never got the voice input or smart light output working. :(
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7707738f-dd75-4b42-a35d-e60a6887c73d.jpeg">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fc8f35a2-5f58-43ac-a720-5010fff408c4.jpeg">
Damn. I hope you’re feeling better, my friend.
Working on it!
Yeah I understand the health issues for sure. First prostate cancer with a radical prostatectomy and then a year later Guillain-Barré Syndrome. I had lots of projects on hold for several years. This was like 5 years ago and I’m good now.
Oh that is fucking awesome. Hope you can finish it and share it one day!
It won’t be long until the LLMs are trained with for ad-RAG
While each conversation happens a second model will scan it, send the contents to a vector search, return as embedding and a score, then give those outputs silently to the conversing model.
You do need to train/fine tune the model to not mention that it received the ad and subtly push it.
Actually, now that I think about it, you don’t even need to tell the model about the ad, you just weight some of the input tokens with the ad embedding and it naturally biases towards talking about that brand.
Alexa already periodically makes “suggestions” that are annoying to disable if you misspeak.
Counting down until it starts demanding credit cards in order to function. Maybe as a form of “identity check”, as that’s been a popular excuse to collect payment information.
Pretty much why we unplugged all of ours. I just need to set a timer, don’t tell me extra shit!
To disable suggestions:
“Alexa, stop By The Way”
*Amazon testing public backlash before shoving ads into your conversations with Alexa
FTFY
Calling out Companies is not beneficial to the "Journalists"
“brought to you by Carls Jr.”
Fuck you! I’m eating!!
They’re already making suggestions. Got one this morning telling me I can ask it for updates on Amazon packages.
Speaking of which, anyone have any suggestions for better smart speakers?
I’m not really a smart speaker kind of guy but HomePods are nice, sound quality is pretty good
Mine isn’t. Do you use the full size, or the mini?
I bought a full size a few years ago but returned it cause I didn’t think it was worth the price. I got a mini as a gift last year and it works great. Even has built in temperature and humidity sensors
I wish I shared your experience with the mini. Mine is temperamental, glitchy, somehow obnoxious, and the sound is mediocre.
You’re still using Alexa? Unplugged our listening er pod device about a week after we got it.
Same, I got Alexa (the first one with a good speaker) when attended a sales event of another company. I set it up, but after seeing its network activity even when no one was home I shut it down and didn’t use it again.
I don’t understand why people don’t feel weirded out by having an always on listening device.
Yup, scares the heck out of me. Guess other don’t agree. I am getting downvoted.
Likely b/c your comment reads like you are stating OP is using it when you probably meant a more general public “you”? That’d be my guess. I think most, if not all, here would agree to not ever use alexa, that bitch.
That’s a them problem. I did not say it was OP. Ass/u/me.
Based on the your still “insert whatever here”.
Just the messenger, dude.
Duh. This is the AI wet dream. Ads won’t have discrete patterns that can be filtered. The LLM will deliver content specific garbage as if it were a genuine answer to a query. It will just bias towards ads and deliver the ad Ina different personalized manner each time. For as much as everyone likes to bitch about AI. This may be the golden age. It probably just gets worse from here.
Musk on the other hand already experiments on adding ideology and use such bots (makes as regular users) on social media.
Good, make it as terrible as possible.
All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of mount Nicaragua !
Got 8 Google Minis around the house, mostly ceiling mount. First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I’m taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.
You sir, and I say this with no hyperbole; are a hero.
🎵I got a shotgun, and here’s the plot,
Takin’ Minis out with a flurry of buck shot,
Boom, boom, boom! Yeah, I was gunnin’,
And then you look, all you see is Googles runnin’,
And fallin’ and yellin’ and pushin’ and screamin’,
And cussin’, I stepped back and I kept bustin’🎶
Dude stop. There only so awesome I can think you are. Fucking legend.
Im sure they'll try to get you to order ammo as they explode.
<pump-action sound>
“How’s your supply of shells? Winchester is having a blowout sale on 00-buck. To learn more…”
“Further work from our user experience team has resulted in several recommendations, including revising the Google Mini for the North American market to add a Kevlar layer to the case and using data from the accelerometer to treat an abrupt, rapid acceleration with a threshold above a certain level as “undesirable behavior/behavior needs improvement” user feedback to Alexa+'s prior prompt response.”
Now I’m going to refuse to purchase one even harder!
I was saving up for one. Nvm lol
I honestly forgot people even buy these
Not only that, I wouldn’t even use one if they paid me. How did they convince people to pay to be spied on and advertised to?
And yet people will buy it, like they did with Nintendo switch 2! See you when it really happens.
Anyone see the newest Black Mirror season?
en.wikipedia.org/…/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Fuck I was just thinking about “common people” when I saw this. Definitely the best episode of that season
I didn’t realize they were still producing episodes. Are they as good as S1-3?
Some of them are, but a few others feel like rehashing old themes without adding much. Still mostly worth watching imo
That one was hard to watch. It just kept getting worse and worse.
I’m sorry, people still have or use these things?
Who is this stupid or lazy?
They already do…
Alexa has ads since the beginning and I can’t imagine that would change just because they are replacing the backend with AI. The first time Echo wasted my time trying to selling me something in my own home was also the last time. I don’t understand how anyone can be okay with that.
Fuck, the Echo Show series is basically just a glorified ad machine with a clock feature.
Their users will accept this.
Not this one. I’ve been a Prime member for many years out of convenience (and because I live in the rurals and need to ship a lot of things to the house). Amazon completely fucked it up for themselves with regard to my subscription this past year or two, I’m done.
I’m done. Subscription is cancelled (has been for some time now, but unfortunately it was reupped annual). I’ve found alternative sources for several things I need to buy monthly/regularly that I previously would purchase on Amazon. Video was already trashed, but I barely used it. I’ve jailbroken my Kindles, converted all my books to EPUB, and installed KOReader on them. Wasn’t a hard transition since I’ve had a Boox device as my main reader for some years now anyway. I’ve started buying my books from Kobo and other sources.
Looking into other services for online purchases and shipping. It’ll be less convenient, and I’ll still buy from Amazon in the event I absolutely have to, but I’d like to minimize that now.
I have a prime subscription, simply for the delivery and grocery discounts, but the ads on their streaming service have convinced me to stop using it entirely and just pirate all their shows / movies.
I never found much worth watching on Prime, to be honest, even before the ads issue.
As for Prime, I still benefit from the Prime shipping, but a lot of stores on Amazon ship free now even without Prime, and given where I live, 2-day shipping is not a thing. It’s usually more like 4 to 7 days. I’m generally in no rush either way.
My main benefits were shipping and books, plus free games on Prime and GOG. But now the shipping is almost irrelevant, they’ve screwed the book thing, so all that’s left is the games, many of which I won’t even play.
How do you jailbreak your Kindle?
Depends on the model and firmware, but for most, Winterbreak is the current method.
Do note if your Kindle is updated to version 5.18.x currently it’s not possible to jailbreak. There is ongoing work on a new exploit though, and a new jailbreak method (or update to Winterbreak) is expected later this year.
Edit - actually, if you’re on firmware 5.18.0 the jailbreak may work. 5.18.1 and above it definitely doesn’t.
Never had issues sideloading epubs with Calibre on my PW.
No, Amazon took away the “Download and transfer via USB” option when downloading your books. Making it more difficult to strip DRM, but also to conveniently add it to multiple devices. I prefer to keep my eReaders offline and manage them with Calibre.
Regarding sideloading EPUBs with Calibre, it’s not really doing that. Under normal circumstances Kindle can’t read EPUB format at all, so Calibre will convert it to a native format, either MOBI or AZW3 generally. But with a jailbroken Kindle and KOReader, you can actually read EPUBs natively. I’ve actually converted my entire collection to EPUB and deleted the AZW3 and KFX files.
Oh my bad.
Any reason why those formats are worse than epub?
It’s really just that only Amazon uses AZW3 and KFX. MOBI is deprecated, and nobody really uses it anymore, not even Amazon. KFX is DRMed to hell, and I’m not sure about it, but most AZW3 files are just DRM wrappers for EPUB anyway. This is why the KindleUnpack plugin for Calibre can strip out EPUBs from most AZW3 files and retain formatting without needing conversion.
Basically, AZW3 and KFX are for Kindle, and only for Kindle. EPUB is an open standard that literally every device that’s not a Kindle uses.
I already own a non-Amazon reader that’s my main reader, and I want to move away from Amazon’s ecosystem.
Maybe I didnt read it properly when Calibre was sending it to my reader.
Regarding formats: As expected (Insert XKCD comic about standards)
I can’t even stand when my Google assistant says more than three words to respond 😂 if I start hearing ads out of that thing I will get rid of it faster than anything I’ve ever done
What the fuck is Alexa+ 🤣🤣🤣
After AI became a thing, Amazon decided you needed to pay a subscribtion to use Alexa with an LLM instead of the basic keyword recognition model
Sounds like another case of Amazon trying to out-Amazon itself
Well someone’s gotta pay for that small country’s worth of wasted electricity
I’m amazed it didn’t already as someone who has never used or heard one being used. What’s the business model? Just the data harvesting for purpose of their other businesses?
Like always, Black Mirror has an episode on this.
Isn’t Black Mirror a manual at this point?
Or a documentary.
Alt history
S## and E##?
So, South park?
As if I was ever stupid enough to use Alexa.
I bought an Alexa echo long before I actually cared about privacy and I regret it a lot. It’s been a pricey paper weight since then. I wish I could flash some kind of OS and use it as a sound bar or something. I can’t even use the Bluetooth without signing in with amazon account, which requires a lot of data including phone number.
Do you have a shotgun? Makes a respectable flying target.
Once….which is probably the point.
Make the bad even worse. Is there a word for this?
Enshitification