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This is hysterical. I never owned one until I worked on the product because I worried it was always recording/transmitting. Turns out it’s not. Promise. You do
by bryananderson 2y ago
This is hysterical. I never owned one until I worked on the product because I worried it was always recording/transmitting. Turns out it’s not. Promise.
You don’t need a shadowy government cabal to explain Alexa persisting too long in the strategy described in the article. Just a powerful chief executive with an attachment to the product, the sunk cost fallacy, a company with too much revenue to know what to do with, some gameable downstream impact metrics, the inertia of large institutions, and empire building.
It still could’ve become an incredible product if they’d gotten on the LLM chat/agent train early enough, but alas. I mostly use mine to set timers when my hands are full in the kitchen.
- ysacfanboi 2y agoTo be sure, it's not shadowy. You can track awarded contracts. You can track employment of persons from 3-5 letter agencies into private sector. You can look on Amazon Science page from 2019, where plans for "ambient intelligence" begin.
- bryananderson 2y agoIf you’re right, they did a stellar job of hiding it from the engineers working on the devices! Or maybe I’m one of the deep state cutouts. One never knows for sure.
- 3np 2y agoCrazy true story: ANOM. Engineers thought they were building a totally above-water secure corporate internal messaging app and service. Actual users and customers were mostly organized crime. Unbeknownst to anyone byut the founder and their lawyer, the whole thing was backdoored and all messages were forwarded in cleartext to the FBI (supposedly they started dark, got caught by the feds on something and struck a deal). They had an entire team of analysts with purpose-built tooling just to digest the material. Who knows what the same teams are working on today... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163389/joseph-cox-dark-wire-fbi-phone-startup-anom-criminals-secure-messaging-decoder-interview https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163389/joseph-cox-dark-... Put that next to the Snowden leaks and increasing global tensions - is the probability horizon widening?