Ring still partners with Axon [1] as part of the Community Requests feature [2]. Since terminating the partnership with Flock is solely a PR play, the answer to your question will likely depend on if consumers en masse use this opportunity to educate themselves on the gravity of the “loss of control (of your data) in exchange for convenience” paradox of cloud services and advocate for additional changes to be made to the Ring platform, or if Amazon’s PR capability will find a way to improve consumer sentiment towards Ring products and services without addressing privacy and surveillance concerns.
Isn’t this position predicated on the assumption that individuals without substantial capital “own” an AI?
When someone uses an AI they do not own, they are (maybe) receiving a benefit in exchange for improving that AI and associated intellectual property / competitive advantage of the person or entity that owns the AI—-and subsequently improving the final position of the AI’s owner.
The better an AI becomes, the more valuable it becomes, and the more likely that the owner of the AI would want to either restrict access to the AI and extract additional value from users (e.g. via paid subscription model) or leverage the AI to develop new or improve existing revenue streams—-even if doing so is to the detriment of AI users. After all… a sufficiently-trained “AGI” AI could (in theory) be capable of outsmarting anyone that uses it, know more about its users than its users consciously know about themselves, and could act faster than any human.
While I share in your hope, I think it is unfortunately far more likely that AIs will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots and will evolve into some of the most financially and intellectually oppressive technology ever used by humans (willingly or not).
HEOS-capable gear from Marantz and Denon cover a lot of the applications you referenced. I decided I would never buy another Sonos product after the S2 rollout, and I now have a mix of eleven Denon and Marantz receivers driving both built-in, freestanding, and outdoor speakers of my choice all over my house.
eCommerce is inherently cashless by design. Confined / captive environments (e.g. airplane cabins) are cashless. Concessions and merchandise counters at large events (sporting events, concerts, etc.) are cashless. Self-service kiosks for anything (or vending machines) are increasingly cashless. And if memory serves me correctly, I believe that using cash to purchase real estate via arms-length transaction is prohibited in the USA by law, even if the buyer and seller agree on the use of cash (and if it was logistically feasible to do so).
I would argue that cash is not an option in more cases than it is an option.
1) What is the point of posting this website on HN? I love vinyl, and have a collection with plenty of rarities in it (one out of five, one out of ten, test pressings, promo pressings, signed sleeves, etc.), but I am not sure if a discussion on HN about a vinyl marketplace is apropos. I am not trying to be contrarian; I am asking out of curiosity.
2) As a US-based collector, I find prices listed on the posted website of some LPs I would like to have in my collection much more (as in, double) than listings I can find on Discogs… not to mention Discogs’s excellent communication tools and release database. With the exception of one purchase I made where the seller was essentially acting as a drop shipper and had no idea what they were selling, every vinyl I have purchased through Discogs has been exactly what I thought I had purchased (variant, condition, other important characteristics). I typically communicate with sellers to make sure vinyls are packaged a certain way in depending on the purchase to make sure the new addition to my collection arrives in the best condition possible. Discogs community-centric tools make it very easy to determine or infer buyer and seller reputations / trustworthiness. All said: what is the value of this site over a site such as Discogs?
What distinguishes the offerings from Fabric8Labs from the offerings from long-established companies like Desktop Metal[1] that are capable of printing parts using a wide range of materials including carbon steel, stainless steel, titanium, and tungsten?
The tungsten capability really throws me for a loop. As someone who TIG welds in my spare time, I can’t imagine having a machine in my shop that could make electrodes. The amount of energy required must be … a lot.
I paid far less attention to weather forecasts 30 years ago than I do now, but I have numerous anecdotal examples of how weather forecasting models and information provided by publicly available weather services have trended towards uselessness.
There is no publicly accessible weather information service that can accurately forecast weather at my house. One of the first purchases I made when I moved in to the house was an Ambient Weather Station resulting from pure curiosity that has evolved into an interest in keeping a historical record of "actual weather". Daily hi/low temperatures generally have positive correlation with forecasted temperatures, but the spread between forecasted temperatures and actual temperatures is generally ten degrees less than forecasted.
Long term qualitative temperature trends ("above average for the winter" and similar) are positively correlated.
But ...
- Forecasted storm intensities are wildly inaccurate. Forecasted high-intensity rain storms end up being all-day drizzle events or on and off rain showers, and visa versa. A forecast of “a passing afternoon shower” ends up being an all-day wash-out.
- Precipitation forecasts are wildly inaccurate, without correlation. Actual precipitation can be far less than forecasted or far more than forecasted, even when compared to short term forecasts--to include same day and intrahour forecasts. Just this past weekend we had accumulating whiteout snow squalls on an off all day long on Sunday, yet there was never any mention of any possibility of snow by any local meteorologists or by any weather forecasting service I routinely check.
Dark Sky was the best app I ever used for weather forecasting. Its short and long term forecasts were more than sufficient for planning purposes, but where the app to this day has had no equal was in its intrahour local forecasts and precipitation forecasts. If Dark Sky alerted me that there was going to be tornado in my area within the next 15 minutes, I saw a funnel cloud 15 minutes later. If Dark Sky alerted me that it was going to stop snowing in 15 minutes, the snow stopped 15 minutes later. Sadly, Apple lobotomized the service when they claimed to have integrated Dark Sky functionality in to Apple Weather. Even though I fairly regularly report weather accuracy issues to Apple via the Weather app, the reporting and forecasting provided by Apple Weather has never improved.
- Seasonal precipitation forecasts are wildly inaccurate without correlation. Modeling (from NOAA, local meteorologists, etc.) suggested we were to have "above average snowfall" this winter, with the official average winter snowfall being 48 inches. We have received 20 inches so far this winter. Either winter will go out with a bang in the next few weeks (which would be nice, IMO), or modeling will have predicted more than 140% of the actual snowfall. This is an altogether unfair comparison, but why not: if the executives of a publicly traded company forecasted 140% more revenue to shareholders than the company they preside over realized, they would all be immediately fired, sued, jailed, etc.
If society collectively will not tolerate 140% inaccuracy in financial matters (stock price manipulation, value destruction, and so forth), should we be content with weather forecasting and modeling that is just as inaccurate? After all, weather is treated as (only) a financial matter by insurance companies. On an individual level, viewing weather's impact through financial optics still makes sense--from lost days of work and lost wages, to insurance premiums, to food prices, to transportation costs, to taxes, to paying for the ability to get your money back for a concert ticket you bought months ago if the weather is too bad.
Climate change is certainly wreaking havoc on weather modeling, but it has been doing so for a significant period of time and the models do not appear (to me) to be getting better at adequately accounting for the effects of climate change. If current weather forecasting models cannot be adapted to accurately account for the effects of climate change, it may be time to either fundamentally change the way weather modeling and forecasting is done, or not do it at all. Taking out my broad brush and bucket of paint: are there any companies relying on AI to develop a more accurate weather forecasting service?
And if anyone has a weather service to recommend that will not “Night at the Roxbury” me with ads and that has accurate 3-day-or-less weather forecasts, I am all ears. Please post them here.
All electronics fail, and all systems reliant on electronics fail. Not all worm gears fail.
As someone who has worked in tech my whole life, and who currently runs a technology-centric company, I generally detest the state of technology these days. I have reached a point in my life where I consciously limit my use of technology, and make it a point to steer clear of purchasing and making use of devices and services with "superfluous technology" unless their are no alternatives.
Many (if not most) modern technology systems are far too complex to be properly tested, especially when taking into account integrations (via "standard" interfaces) with third party technology systems. As technology systems have become more complex, their reliability as tools to accomplish an intended goal has drastically decreased while the telemetry capabilities of the systems have been drastically improved (without me knowingly realizing any benefits thereof). As such, I have learned to rely on technology less and less as I have aged.
There are surely many reasons for the inverse relationship between complexity and reliability of technology systems, but a cursory list of suggested root causes that come to mind include:
- use of (necessary, in modern software development) automated test tools;
- use of programming languages too-abstracted from technologies employed within the system;
- a likely growing percentage of developers lacking a working domain knowledge of the systems they are developing;
- the corporate / financial pressure to needlessly upgrade or evolve technology systems--even in the absence of flaws or demand for the upgrade--in the name of maintaining / increasing shareholder value (see also: planned obsolescence, etc.)
Two immediate examples of "too much technology" that come to mind, because I have experienced them within the past few days:
1) Bluetooth is soon to be 26 years old, yet my model year 2022 smartphone cannot reliably communicate with my model year 2022 vehicle's head unit via Bluetooth to play music or relay audio during phone calls. I cannot tell you how many point releases of smartphone software (or vehicle head unit software) have been released since I have owned both the phone and the via Bluetooth, but Bluetooth has never worked correctly on any of them. Why?
2) On some recent releases of macOS Sonoma, the OS can read FAT* formatted USB media without issue, while other releases (to include 14.3.1) cannot read FAT* formatted USB media. Regarding 14.3.1: on 14.3, I could read and write to FAT* USB drives just fine, but I could not type an email longer than a couple of lines without the UI overlaying text on top of other text in the email, making the entire text of the email illegible. When 14.3.1 (with the text overlaying issue fixed) was available, I applied the update right away. Now I can write emails without issue, but I cannot read FAT* formatted USB drives. Why?
[1]:https://www.axon.com
[2]:https://ring.com/support/articles/uds27/Community-request