chaircat
In a way, it looks even worse for a company that it was ahead in the fundamental research, and the corporate bureaucracy and management held it back so much that competitors took the difficult ideas invented there and turned them into products first. My intuition is that it’s easier to fix being behind on a research and technology level than it is to fix having bad corporate culture and complacent management focused only on protecting existing cash cows.
Thing is, neither the US nor Chinese company doing a home break-in is a realistic concern.
Realistic concerns are more along the lines of them sharing data that could rightly or wrongly get you on the radar of US law enforcement, or get you discriminated against in some way.
In terms of realistic concerns, your data being in US rather than foreign hands seems like significantly more of a problem.
Data is one of those things that you don’t know how it’s going to be used against you until it is. If somebody is going to have that data, I’d rather my own government have that data vs a foreign government… Harming one’s own citizens isn’t a great strategy to get your way, but harming another’s citizens is quite effective.
I don’t know what government actions you’ve been watching, if all of modern history is a guide, it’s a lot easier to make a profit by harming your own citizens rather than harming another country’s citizens.
From where I’ve been sitting, the normal pattern is a country’s rich and powerful exploit the commoners of their own country for profit and power. It’s much harder to gain from exploiting another country’s citizens, i.e. you can’t directly tax them, you can’t take away their things, you can’t sell their rights to your powerful friends, etc.
So her biggest issue is that the tablet wasn’t on the dock when it needed to be used. Because she took it and wanted to use it for herself. Having a smart home hub means you can’t take it away and use it to surf the web.
Is this to downplay the pain points she encountered? Because reading it another way it seems like a total indictment of the concept behind merging a tablet with a smart hub.
It blows my mind that half a year after the public launch of ChatGPT that Google Assistant seems to be getting dumber instead of smarter and Bard is a completely different silo’d product still.
My Google Assistant a while ago picked up a problem. I use it to set timers all the time. Suddenly, one day it wouldn’t understand “set a timer for 3:30” anymore and I’d have to say “3:30 pm”. Then its dementia progressed and it was setting timers for the next day unless I specified “today at 3:30 pm”. Then the day after that lucidity returned and it regained the ability to do the basic “set a timer for 3:30”. It doesn’t feel like it actually understands language at all. I appreciate that they’re making updates, but I wish they were updates for the better.
The first company that will sell me a smart speaker that works like ChatGPT/Bing/Bard/etc. and I throw my Nest speakers in the garbage and switch brands.
I mean, their message is a little weird, but so is the scaremongering that’s been going on against them ever since they changed ownership. From comments on the Reddit post, Branch is actually integrated into Google apps, Samsung Launcher, and a ton of other stuff and nobody really blinks an eye at that.
There literally is no evidence they do anything unseemly with peoples’ data, yet the scaremongering persists, including a lot right here in this thread. What exactly are they supposed to say other than to emphasize this fact? Anyone who would distrust them based on this post was already definitely inclined to distrust them.
Amazon is making over Alexa the same way Google is doing to Assistant.
This probably means a new lease on life for all of these types of products. Version 1.0 didn’t make money, but generative AI is the new hotness, so they’re getting a whole new chance to prove themselves.
