If you’re thinking about asking the AI whether it’s a good time to hydrate, the answer is yes.

I’m conflicted on the projects like that one right now. It’s super clever to monitor the network traffic for specific dash buttons trying to reach out, but it also feels super janky and I don’t feel like I can justify putting the effort to set that up when it just feels so fragile. Especially with the caveat that if the amazon block you have to setup for it fails then the device just becomes a paperweight.

Genius idea, but I’m going to hold out for the unlikely possibility of someone figuring out a firmware level hack.

Amazon was effectively giving them away for free for a large portion of their lifespan. You’d have deals where you’d pay for them and then get a coupon for actually using them equal to the purchase price. I feel like I even remember a few times where the coupon you got worked out to slightly more than you paid for the button. Basically, saying that someone ‘bought’ one was usually only partially true.

They did have a few legitimately good uses. Had to have something that needed restocking sporadically but you also didn’t think about often and could wait 2-3 days to receive when you realized you were out. A lot of prerequisites there, I used the ones for trash bags and detergent often.

It’s mostly just a shame the amount of ewaste produced at this point. I still have a box full somewhere in hopes of finding a use case.

On the other hand, every person who has killed a United Healthcare CEO has played Among US, checkmate.

It sounds like you’re getting into the keeping it running phase.

First, going back to your previous comment, self-hosting email is difficult. It’s not hard for a small provider to end up blacklisted and you’re probably kind of just done at that point and it will feel very unfair. I get that it’s a fun set of technical challenges, but you couldn’t pay me enough to help someone self-host email.

Second, guessing, but it sounds like you may be trying to expose your services directly and doing a lot to make that work which goes against what most would recommend for hosting your own services. Big companies don’t expose their intranet like that, follow their example. Almost every guide or system is going to warn against that. If you’re going to host more than one thing, highly recommend focusing on minimizing entry points and looking into a VPN-like solution for accessing most if not all of your services. Still spend time on securing your intranet, but most of your risk is going to come from how hard it is for people to get past the front door (or doors).

We already have that, the first problem is we have like a dozen of them, a few are even well supported. The second problem is that usually the technical knowledge required to set up the systems are still lower than the technical knowledge required to keep it running.

Can you afford enough lawyers to prove it?

Planned obsolescence is built into googles processes.

They’ve created an environment where your primary method of advancing in your career is only creating new things and there’s little to no options when choosing to support existing things. Some things have survived by chance and/or something to keep employees busy, but it’s unintentional.

Did I miss a piece? I don’t see anywhere in the original statement where firefox is actively recommended, just mentioned as an example.

To be fair… I read the whole interview a few days ago, she was kind of pushed into this statement. The idea from the CEO was presented as a high-end luxury mouse that you’d treat like a fancy watch you could just repair and never need to replace. The closest we got to Logitech saying this was the interviewer asking if they could ever see a subscription being attached to the mouse and the CEO saying ‘possibly’ and then implying that it could be something like a maintenance/repair contract so that you would never have to worry about your mouse.

This whole ordeal was mostly just poor form in interviewing.

From what I’ve heard, the real primary reason is fire risk. This is obviously not 100% true, but landfills should be isolated from the surrounding environment especially when it comes to fluids/etc that could leak into groundwater. There are a lot of processes they should already be following to keep that from happening.

I kinda feel like voice search is just an inherently bad platform for shopping.

Supposedly… Home & Kitchen is the most popular category on Amazon, consumer choice comes into that so rapidly that it’s hard for it to make sense with just audio feedback or even a tiny screen like the show.

They definitely could, but most cybersecurity departments are paid too much to worry about minor items like that. If HR tells us to look into a specific user and gets the proper approvals so that everything is in compliance, we’ll definitely get someone on the team to do it, but otherwise if we happen to see evidence of unapproved usage, we’re mostly going to overlook it unless it could lead to something dangerous to your machine or the company as a whole.

EDRs like Crowdstrike can see very very nearly everything you do though, definitely everything you would care about.

Been awhile since we’ve POCed Crowdstrike, but I don’t think you can set the cadence on updates for Crowdstrike. I believe Crowdstrike enforces auto-updates, it was at least the default setting.

I see where your head is at here, but it sounds like you’re focusing on containerized items. A lot of people are going to look at you real weird if you think of scaling down a container as equivalent to shutting down a server. We can all see where your mind is going and there is logic there, but it’s more akin to closing chrome when you’re not using it than it is to shutting down the computer running chrome.

Have you looked into specialized AI chips/accelerators at all if you really want to mess with it?

Way lower end than what you’re working with, but they have AI accelerator kits for something as small as a Raspberry Pi.

I think you can get service if you are a government or large company.

You’re so optimistic. It depends on how you define service, they will talk to you if they’re large enough, but it’s still a nightmare getting them to talk to each other within google, getting support is still problematic.

You’re right that is a real loss. Really, an Alexa that didn’t require a personalized amazon account could still be huge if they could figure out how not to have to justify the costs of running the servers. I think that unwillingness to let Alexa be just a voice assistant is the key roadblock. In a similar vein, Alexa for business could have been a really big deal too if they could have worked it out a bit faster but now I think interest has mostly died out before it had a chance to be adopted.

I’m not a huge fan of the company and I think it’s a coin flip as to whether they would just completely screw it up, but I wonder what would have happened if someone like Crestron had taken a real interest instead of just half-assing an integration.

Alexa has a tendency to give you the ‘featured’ product no matter how precisely and specifically you ask her for something. Even if you don’t have to research and know exactly what you want, it’s almost always easier to just go find your phone.

The real game changer for Alexa was always having a voice assistant that you can integrate with just about whatever you want that isn’t tied to someone’s phone. The idea of going into someone’s house and just saying ‘Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights’ or ‘Alexa, is it cold outside?’ is where the Alexa magic lies, but Amazon never could figure out how to make that profitable on it’s own, just doesn’t contribute to the business case.

It’s consistently pretty good for writing items with low technical importance and minimal need for accuracy.

I’ll never write a job description myself again and my need for getting with communications for mass correspondence is almost gone.