Readit NewsThe premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table? How much would Charmin pay to know I have two rooms with tiled floors?
What iRobot actually suggested was more mundane: that there could hypothetically exist a protocol for smart devices to share a spatial understanding of the home, and that their existing robot was in a favorable position to provide the map. The CEO talking about it like a business opportunity rather than a feature invited the negative reception.
It didn't help that a few years later, photos collected by development units in paid testers' homes for ML training purposes were leaked by Scale AI annotators (akin to Mechanical Turk workers). This again became "Roomba is filming you in the bathroom" in the mind of the public.
The privacy risk seemed entirely hypothetical—there was no actual consumer harm, only vague speculation about what the harm could be, and to my knowledge the relevant features never even existed. And yet the fear of Alexa having a floorplan of your home could have been great enough to play a role in torpedoing the Amazon acquisition.
I've no idea about rug pile depth, but I'd have thought a simple link between square footage and location would be a reasonable proxy for that affluency.
Amazes me that the Russians always seem to have the capacity for this sort of, I can't think of a clean word, let's inadequately say gamesmanship. When I'd have thought they have enough on their plate in Ukraine.
I can also be helpful for non-English (or non-language of your choice) when you haven't had time to localize or don't have perfect localization. Let's assume the user has Japanese as their second language. It's much easier to find the option you want with icons than without
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7kXUbwngB4
Somewhere in there, I think he does have a point.
Lots of people using Brave's Tor or Opera's VPN in their browsers, and free VPNs like Proton (which seems like a negative security outcome for the country to me).
I'd have thought the intel agencies would be pissed at all that data going dark, but haven't heard a peep in the media.
"Engineers don't try" doesn’t refer to trying out AI in the article. It refers to trying to do something constructive and useful outside the usual corporate churn, but having given up on that because management is single-mindedly focused on AI.
One way to summarize the article is: The AI engineers are doing hype-driven AI stuff, and the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else, because AI is the only thing that gets attention and helps the career; and they hate it.
Worse, they've lost all funding for anything else.
But, to be honest, I do miss the "just after dotcom crash" period, there were lots and lots of interesting things people were working on back then, and the majority of it didn't involve making money. Maybe this is just nostalgia, because I first became a paid programmer in 2005, but that's how it feels 20+ years from that time.
I'd only once in 20 years been turned down for a job I'd applied for. Every other job I applied for I was offered. I've applied for over 600 roles in the past year and barely had a handful of interviews. That certainly feels different.
Yet one thing does seem different for anyone who just missed the dotcom crash, is that the roles available have fallen off a cliff while the numbers looking for roles seem to be up, at least in the UK. The UAE is even worse. I've spent 20 years hiding from recruiters and now they're all leaving me on read. Karma, maybe.