So they use power 24/7, do they also listen to what happen in the room? because those brands sure like to spy on what users are watching (even the HDMI in on some of them)
Presumably they don’t secretly listen in to the user because it would be very inefficient, easily detectable (that’s huuuge network traffic and battery drain), and awful PR.
I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity
Yeah of course they do the looped listening to pick up their wake sound. But extrapolating that to “constantly recording and sending that data to Amazon” without evidence is silly. Again, you’d be very easily able to see this just from network usage
But tons of devices do listen. Go read the ToS for any modern hearing aid. They tell you directly that they do constant environment analysis and ship that data home.
If a hearing aid was genuinely sending everything it recorded back then it would run out of battery insanely fast. It would also have insanely high network usage
I do not believe it ships direct audio recording. It is analysis of the audio it processes (at least that is how I read it). Just because it sends lossy compressed data home (analysis output) instead of direct recordings does not mean it isn't listening.
It just seems really far fetched that thousands of Amazon employees are conspiring to commit an insanely obvious and illegal breach of privacy for data that isn’t even all that useful (hard to analyse, computationally expensive, low signal to noise ratio). And that no one has ever noticed this even when security researchers test these devices
Come on, the Alexa devices are designed to do what? They wake up on a keyword, perform some local analysis of the following data, and phone home on an encrypted channel on a regular basis.
You quite literally can't tell by watching one what it is doing. You certainly cannot verify that all Alexas are not doing something.
I don’t think Amazon have a vast conspiracy (that no one has whistleblown on!) of secretly & illegally recording audio for advertising. It would be difficult, require huge amounts of processing, probably not help very much, and be incredibly illegal. It wouldn’t give them much value and would be incredibly risky
How would you even tell? - Even if you're some hardcore techie, all you'll see is that the TV periodically sends encrypted packets to some AWS IP address.'
Also 99% of people don't even know how to do this, and of those that do, 99% won't bother.
Actually, I haven't used JetBrains, didn't know they did something similar until now!
This came from a different angle I read about how the human brain operates on ~20 watts yet processes information incredibly efficiently. That got me thinking about how developers naturally encode semantics into folder structures without realizing it.
The "cognitive" framing is because we're already doing the work of organizing code meaningfully Mantic.sh just searches that existing structure instead of recreating it as embeddings. Turns out path-based search is just efficient pattern matching, which explains why it's so fast.
Interesting to hear JetBrains converged on a similar approach from the IDE side though!
They do. The problem isn’t understanding the numbers, they gave me last year, it’s making sure I am doing things correctly for both my US taxes and Norwegian taxes, including following the specifics of the US/Norway tax treaty.
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