7 ms·

Google is a bald-faced IoT liar and its Nest pants are on fire

53 points by tdrnd 7y ago

mikelyons 7y ago
Bold-faced* > Although many people seem to believe that “barefaced lie” is the source of both the “bald” and “bold” versions, it appears that “bold-faced lie” is by far the oldest, dating back to at least the early 1600s.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Bald-faced. https://mentalfloss.com/article/57985/it-bald-faced-or-bold-faced-lie https://mentalfloss.com/article/57985/it-bald-faced-or-bold-...
  - mikelyons 7y ago
    Bold-faced. https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/07/lie-detection.html https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/07/lie-detection.htm... Of the two, “bold-faced lie” is by far the more popular, with nearly 1.6 million hits on Google compared with only 39,000 for “bald-faced lie.” Although many people seem to believe that “barefaced lie” is the source of both the “bald” and “bold” versions, it appears that “bold-faced lie” is by far the oldest, dating back to at least the early 1600s. unfortunate dislikes from those who are ignorant.
    - happytoexplain 7y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if "bold-faced" was a common mistake that superseded the original, in the same way that "literal" now has a dictionary entry for its meaning as "figurative". As a theoretical example, we may see "pour over" come to be an acceptable alternative to "pore over", as the mistake is common and the meaning can be justified (I am "pouring" my attention over something). It follows in these cases that more educated people may be more likely to use the original term while the new version is more more likely to become more numerous in Google hits. It also follows that users of the original term may reasonably be unhappy with the evolution. What I don't think follows is justifiably calling the original meaning "wrong", and what I think is simply petty is calling people who use it "ignorant". Edit: When I say "bold-faced" may be a mistake, I mean that it may have mistakenly been used in place of "bald-faced" more and more - not that it never had its own separate, valid meaning.
      - mikelyons 7y ago
        Nah what I meant was that people are ignorant of the fact that "bold-faced" came first
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - slenk 7y ago
      > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. It might be because you are treating it like Twitter or facebook? One word and a quote that you don't source really isn't a good discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - Causality1 7y ago
      They're both in common use. Your original comment treated bold-faced as a correction to bald-faced, which it isn't. That's why the comment is bad.
    - kibibu 7y ago
      Hi. Not to diminish your source, but according to Google's ngram viewer, which searches published works indexed by Google books, *bald-faced lie" is significantly more popular than "bold-faced lie" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bald-faced+lie%2C+bold-faced+lie&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbald%20-%20faced%20lie%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbold%20-%20faced%20lie%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bald-faced+lie...
cameronbrown 7y ago
All IoT hardware should have completely open APIs and have the cloud involved only as a value-add. If you really must collect analytics data on my fans, fine.. ugh.. I guess. But don't leave me hanging if you decide you don't want to support my device anymore.
- gerdesj 7y ago
  That's the way I'm working. All my home IoT stuff should work without an internets and should have a manual override. It should also fail safe. However, I'm not your average consumer. This reporter is echoing some sentiments we see often in this space: utter bewilderment at the treatment of customers/users, the quality of the gear, interoperability weirdness and much much more. He is clearly not daft nor tech. naiive and has a pretty decent reason to be pissed off at Google for simply dropping "Works with Nest". When an organisation the size and pervasiveness of Google creates a compatibility program like Works with Nest, then surely they are waving something akin to a social contract out to consumers. That contract should be honoured and not simply dropped at a seeming whim. Often it is argued that Google is simply being a good capitalist and dropping money losers. This smacks of monopoly or an attempt to create one through a form of blackmail. Nice device you have there, shame if it stopped working. Ours are always going to be fine.
- m463 7y ago
  > If you really must collect analytics data on my fans ...ask, but don't make it a requirement for things to work
cbsks 7y ago
> IoT was supposed to bring about this wonderful new era of integrated devices in the smart home. Instead, we now have walled gardens of stuff running in their own isolated ecosystems Was that really the expected outcome of a smart home? I always assumed that there would be a few walled gardens, and you’d have to pick which garden you wanted your house to be in.
Causality1 7y ago
This should surprise absolutely no one. After the way Google utterly fucked its Revolv customers who'd sunk hundreds if not thousands of dollars into suddenly-useless hardware, you can rest assured Google will happily shut down any product or feature the very instant it stops making money. They have no legal obligation to not behave reprehensibly so that's just what they'll do.
lallysingh 7y ago
Looks like Google should've had a larger zdnet advertising budget...
devoply 7y ago
There will be plenty of a*holes in this space. And then someone will get wise and let everyone play on their network and they will win out.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
smitty1e 7y ago
> The end result of this? If I decide to accept Google's offer to migrate my Nest account to Google Assistant, the part of the Haiku app which integrates the fan and the Nest controls will stop working. The fans themselves will also stop communicating with the Works With Nest APIs and the Smart Cooling mode will cease functioning. Is this not precisely the sort of hogwash that prompted RMS to found the FSF? Capitalism is good, but it's predicated upon the concept if competition. As with paper ballots, we really need to awaken to the concept that there is more than one dimension--efficiency--to many of life's challenges.
solarkraft 7y ago
It is an education issue (that will hopefully solve itself) that people still buy hardware (or software) the functionality of which entirely depends on some uncontrollable (and often dubious) entity.

53 points by tdrnd 7y ago

Bold-faced* > Although many people seem to believe that “barefaced lie” is the source of both the “bald” and “bold” versions, it appears that “bold-faced lie” is by far the oldest, dating back to at least the early 1600s.

egypturnash 7y ago
Bald-faced. https://mentalfloss.com/article/57985/it-bald-faced-or-bold-faced-lie https://mentalfloss.com/article/57985/it-bald-faced-or-bold-...
- mikelyons 7y ago
  Bold-faced. https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/07/lie-detection.html https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/07/lie-detection.htm... Of the two, “bold-faced lie” is by far the more popular, with nearly 1.6 million hits on Google compared with only 39,000 for “bald-faced lie.” Although many people seem to believe that “barefaced lie” is the source of both the “bald” and “bold” versions, it appears that “bold-faced lie” is by far the oldest, dating back to at least the early 1600s. unfortunate dislikes from those who are ignorant.
  - happytoexplain 7y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if "bold-faced" was a common mistake that superseded the original, in the same way that "literal" now has a dictionary entry for its meaning as "figurative". As a theoretical example, we may see "pour over" come to be an acceptable alternative to "pore over", as the mistake is common and the meaning can be justified (I am "pouring" my attention over something). It follows in these cases that more educated people may be more likely to use the original term while the new version is more more likely to become more numerous in Google hits. It also follows that users of the original term may reasonably be unhappy with the evolution. What I don't think follows is justifiably calling the original meaning "wrong", and what I think is simply petty is calling people who use it "ignorant". Edit: When I say "bold-faced" may be a mistake, I mean that it may have mistakenly been used in place of "bald-faced" more and more - not that it never had its own separate, valid meaning.
    - mikelyons 7y ago
      Nah what I meant was that people are ignorant of the fact that "bold-faced" came first
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - slenk 7y ago
    > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. It might be because you are treating it like Twitter or facebook? One word and a quote that you don't source really isn't a good discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Causality1 7y ago
    They're both in common use. Your original comment treated bold-faced as a correction to bald-faced, which it isn't. That's why the comment is bad.
  - kibibu 7y ago
    Hi. Not to diminish your source, but according to Google's ngram viewer, which searches published works indexed by Google books, *bald-faced lie" is significantly more popular than "bold-faced lie" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bald-faced+lie%2C+bold-faced+lie&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbald%20-%20faced%20lie%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbold%20-%20faced%20lie%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bald-faced+lie...

cameronbrown 7y ago

All IoT hardware should have completely open APIs and have the cloud involved only as a value-add. If you really must collect analytics data on my fans, fine.. ugh.. I guess. But don't leave me hanging if you decide you don't want to support my device anymore.

gerdesj 7y ago
That's the way I'm working. All my home IoT stuff should work without an internets and should have a manual override. It should also fail safe. However, I'm not your average consumer. This reporter is echoing some sentiments we see often in this space: utter bewilderment at the treatment of customers/users, the quality of the gear, interoperability weirdness and much much more. He is clearly not daft nor tech. naiive and has a pretty decent reason to be pissed off at Google for simply dropping "Works with Nest". When an organisation the size and pervasiveness of Google creates a compatibility program like Works with Nest, then surely they are waving something akin to a social contract out to consumers. That contract should be honoured and not simply dropped at a seeming whim. Often it is argued that Google is simply being a good capitalist and dropping money losers. This smacks of monopoly or an attempt to create one through a form of blackmail. Nice device you have there, shame if it stopped working. Ours are always going to be fine.
m463 7y ago
> If you really must collect analytics data on my fans ...ask, but don't make it a requirement for things to work

cbsks 7y ago

> IoT was supposed to bring about this wonderful new era of integrated devices in the smart home. Instead, we now have walled gardens of stuff running in their own isolated ecosystems Was that really the expected outcome of a smart home? I always assumed that there would be a few walled gardens, and you’d have to pick which garden you wanted your house to be in.

Causality1 7y ago

This should surprise absolutely no one. After the way Google utterly fucked its Revolv customers who'd sunk hundreds if not thousands of dollars into suddenly-useless hardware, you can rest assured Google will happily shut down any product or feature the very instant it stops making money. They have no legal obligation to not behave reprehensibly so that's just what they'll do.

lallysingh 7y ago

Looks like Google should've had a larger zdnet advertising budget...

devoply 7y ago

There will be plenty of a*holes in this space. And then someone will get wise and let everyone play on their network and they will win out.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

smitty1e 7y ago

> The end result of this? If I decide to accept Google's offer to migrate my Nest account to Google Assistant, the part of the Haiku app which integrates the fan and the Nest controls will stop working. The fans themselves will also stop communicating with the Works With Nest APIs and the Smart Cooling mode will cease functioning. Is this not precisely the sort of hogwash that prompted RMS to found the FSF? Capitalism is good, but it's predicated upon the concept if competition. As with paper ballots, we really need to awaken to the concept that there is more than one dimension--efficiency--to many of life's challenges.

solarkraft 7y ago

It is an education issue (that will hopefully solve itself) that people still buy hardware (or software) the functionality of which entirely depends on some uncontrollable (and often dubious) entity.