I'm not at all surprised. Far, far too often, the hype of the tech, and the "oooh, new shiny!" excitement wears off and you figure out that your "new, exciting

I'm not at all surprised. Far, far too often, the hype of the tech, and the "oooh, new shiny!" excitement wears off and you figure out that your "new, exciting, expensive labor saving device" is, in fact, more trouble than it's worth, the "smart" bits are better described as "dumb as rocks, but in a very un-rock-like way," that there's a sucker in the transaction who paid a lot of something valuable (money, time, attention, whatever) for the device, and that you're that sucker. I grew up watching Star Trek (TNG), and even many years later, talking to computers just feels somewhere between "wrong" and "the Primary Processor Cortex is infected with Clamanthian Neurovirans!" - it's gotten dumb and they've got until the end of the episode to somehow fix it. It probably involves tachyons and the main deflector dish. The more they try to sound like actual humans (and voice synthesis has been improving vastly over the past 20 years, I still recall thinking Dr. Sbaitso was impressive), the more jarring it is when they... don't respond remotely like an actual human would. Someone else in this thread shared a story of Alexa doing the same thing it had done many other times, wrong, and setting a microwave going with a metal oven rack in it. If I've told someone how to bake a pizza 30 times, it's fairly unlikely that they'll screw it up the 31st. That's not true talking to a computer, it seems to have the same low probability of screwing it up every time you do it. That's all before you get into the fact that they're an absolute privacy and security nightmare, that plugging your whole house of "smart" devices in pretty much guarantees that you're broadcasting your every action to data aggregators (I consider actions taken in my home to be my and my family's business, not the property of whoever has the strongest clause in their EULA), that the devices will fail to function long before a simple mechanical device would have (resulting in huge piles of ewaste), and are just generally human-toxic trash. I work in the low weeds of tech, and a comparison I saw some years back is entirely apt (paraphrased, sorry, I don't know the original source): - Technophile: Has all the smart devices connected to his phone, can control his shower from across the planet, argues online over which hue of RGB light goes best for each programmed situation, and nothing in his house ever quite seems to work right. - Firmware/CPU Engineer: The smartest thing in the house is his printer, and he keeps a loaded 12 gauge leaned up against it in case it makes an unexpected noise. It's very true. Most of the people I know in the deep weeds have a deep, abiding mistrust for more and more of "consumer tech," and a deep hatred of "things" lately.