• 1 Post
  • 50 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle







  • … he claims there is no point producing proof because they wouldn’t be believed.

    He also dismisses any evidence created by others as untrustworthy.

    What a load of shit. It’s up to the person making the claim to provide evidence. People have claimed the opposite, and backed it up with “low-quality” evidence. Refusing it would be pretty easy, if it were true; get someone independent to verify in a pre-funded, blind trial.

    The only reason not to do this is because they know their product reduces framerate frequently enough to be a problem.






  • I don’t think you’re understanding how trivial this is to detect:

    Set up an open WiFi network in an area without any other open WiFi networks. i.e. almost anywhere outside of dense urban areas. Then you don’t even need to inspect traffic, just look at connected devices in admin controls. No devices should be connected aside from your monitoring device.

    There’s no way the TV manufacturers are going to risk the legal quagmire that would come from this when there’s no plausible way to keep it remotely secret.


  • Super easy. Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up. I know next to nothing about networking and I could set it up in 10 minutes, 5 of which would be finding my old router in the basement.

    So I’m not going to give this a moment’s thought until someone brings receipts. It’s not hard to check if this is happening.



  • The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the “smart” features into the TV increases the price. It’s actually the opposite.

    By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.

    The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.




  • Err… That’s definitively AI.

    AI is just any computer algorithm that does a task that would be aimed to require human intelligence.

    Identifying text in an image is a non-trivial task, so OCR is a type of AI algorithm.

    That said, I assume “AI phones” are probably not using the term AI in the general sense; presumably they just mean that it uses MM-LLMs somehow.


  • The cynic in me is wondering if this is just Google trying to get around the movement to stop children from being given addiction machines* before they’re ready for them. (*Smart phones with infinite-content-stream “social-media” apps)

    There’s a push to ban smart phones for students below age 16 at schools (and educating parents to try to get them to just give their children dumb phones until age 16 outside of school hours, too.)

    But maybe that’s just me being cynical. This movement only started gaining steam after The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt was published earlier this year, afaik, and Google is hardly an agile company anymore…