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Sometimes projects grow until they have little to do with the original spec.
by daveFNbuck 6y ago
Sometimes projects grow until they have little to do with the original spec.
- ignoramous 6y agoI bet Echo's spec was "man pages" but in my living room.
- loxias 6y agoActually, "echo" started off as a semi-holodeck. It was supposed to be kindle/tv/radio/everything replacement, for your living room. Bezos wanted "kindle, without the hardware". Like, read off of your outstretched hand, or a piece of paper, or the wall. Interact with hand gestures and voice controls, and it could track your location in a room through sound using a microphone array and loads of math. (my contribution) But it turned out that despite getting it to "kinda" work, the 20KW power requirement for the huge computers, motors, and projector, and low resolution made it seem like >20 years out from a real product, not ~3 years out. At the time, I jokingly proposed scrapping everything but the audio subsystem, and cram it into a tiny box, but then quickly added that such a product would be doomed to fail. You can't fit the necessary compute in a tiny box, so for it to work it'd have to transmit the audio to the cloud for processing. No one in their right mind would willingly buy a small device for the home with a microphone array always listening, tracking their location, always processing and transmitting data to the amazon server farm, consumers aren't that stupid, right? I still get pissy whenever I see one of those things.