On top of that, the first few minutes of the video suggests it captures your neighbors' device and IP information.
I'm sure the ToS has some BS about you being required to inform any guests, but what if your TV is just recording your neighbors because they are close enough?
Just wait, I'm sure the "solution" will be that TVs start displaying reminders that you're being recorded...
Is our inability to innovate in technology really so bad that we have to just chase more and more spying? Consumers don't want these things. Why can't we innovate on things that consumers actually want? Remember, there was a time where we could build good technology, tech that people wanted, and make buckets of money doing it. That should be our goal, not some cyberpunk dystopia. Honestly it feels like anytime we try to innovate now some manager says "don't make things complicated" or some other dumb excuse, but maybe worse is that peers (other engineers) say "but what's the value" (they always stress that they mean monetary, not utility)? Feels like monkeys attacking each other for trying to get the banana...
Re. The last paragraph, that's what confuses me the most about all of this. LG has virtually held a monopoly of the entire OLED TV market for the past ~15 years, selling (arguably) one of the TVs on the market and being the only thing I've recommended people buy in about as long. They could have done literally nothing but update the hardware every other year with a newer SoC, HDMI version, etc. and done just fine. Now, I don't think I could see myself buying or even recommending any LG products going forward.
There *has* to be some complex math involved. It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.
> It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.
Seems pretty logical, no?
How do we sell more TVs? Be a cheaper and or better choice. If we're already doing well technically, sell customer data to discount the TV and appear more attractive.
If this is ethical / how much disclosure you'd need to give to customers so they can make this informed choice is a whole other discussion...
Not really, it's incredibly myopic. Would you really risk your brand, that took decades to build, by acting hostile to your customers? It only "makes sense" to do when you no longer care about your brand or you are only interested in the short term
My partner, who has a doctorate in economics, and I end up talking about this a lot because I agree that doing nothing, as a monopoly, is the winning move for consumers. Related I ask why we have an economy set up where you're rewarded for climbing to the top but are punished for being at the top [0].
Their explanations are typically around markets being myopic and that low competition fucks things up even more. But we do make small decisions and they add up. I think many of the problems in the world today come from the accumulation of many small decisions, which is why they're hard to address. Obviously some people have more power than others, and more frequently have high power, but we should still look for our opportunities and not abdicate when and where we do have power. It is important for us to push back when we can. The top always wants to convince us that we have no power and we try to convince ourselves that's true because we believe that if we have power that makes us culpable, but I don't think that's true.
[0] my goto example is AWS. It's easy to find articles about how Azure or GCloud are "doing better" but AWS still has more total customers. But AWS is being "punished" for being at the top because it is just harder to grow percentage wise when you have a larger base amount (note, it isn't a zero sum game)
>It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.
And it feels like an inflationary behavior: people need marketing because the product doesn't sell itself because it is neglected in favor of data collection and marketing that is needed because GOTO 1.
You seem to be making the assumption that this is all a zero sum game.
I have to point out the irony that this is a technology based site, focused on software. You know, a sector that isn't nearly as tied to physical resources as other sectors. It's the whole reason our industry exploded, because you can make software and ship it an infinite number of times, allowing you to scale like no other sector can.
But my point is that the economy is a positive sum game. There's always more money to be made through more innovation.
When you treat things as zero sum you make all these bad decisions and focus on the wrong type of growth. It makes you focus on capturing the existing market rather than push to create markets that previously never existed. (Of course there's a bad way to do the latter too. You can make markets against people's will, as we also see today...)
Even the graphs in the article suggest this. The low point for perceived corruption was 59% in 2006. So 20 years ago more than half of Americans already believed it. Even their OECD median graph's lowest point was 55%.
What I hate about the top comment is it is a thought terminating cliche. It sure as hell makes a difference when 90% of people believe the government is corrupt vs 60% of people. It treats the situation as binary. What also matters, and isn't shown in the graphs, is how corrupt people believe the government is. But we can also make some pretty good inferences here that more people think corruption is higher. There's a big difference between a leaky bucket with a few small holes and the bucket having such large holes that it's more accurate to call it a pipe.
> It’s to say that they’re all the same.
Exactly. It is the binarization of things. Extreminism is a lack of nuance. It is dehumanizing because we're all complex beings. It is a lie because the world and all of us have complexity to us. Extremism wins by making everything simple and easy to understand. "It's so simple, you just..." tune in and tune out. Don't think, just feel. Don't solve problems, just get angry. You get to feel high and mighty, because you're smarter than everyone else. If you were king for a day you could solve all the world's problems, because it is so simple.
This is great. One suggestion I have (for these types of projects in general) is to include a BoM and price estimates. Make those front and center. Even though prices shift they give people ballpark estimates for deciding "do I want to spend time on this" or not. It also shows a log of clearly supported hardware and even makes it easier to track tweaks for different hardware as people contribute to your projects.
I've worked with and written papers with enough people from top ranked CS schools (multiple from top 5 on csrankings) while I was at a top 100 and it is a very mixed bag. There were plenty of idiots in the top 5 and plenty of geniuses in the top 100s.
I'd agree that average shows a difference but I don't think it is nearly as big as people act. Even the intra-university variance isn't what people would think (top universities have a very narrow distribution while lower ranks have wider). The trend follows, but the variance of the variances is not that large.
That does not match my experience at all. I'm sure this did happen, but what I see from agents is obsessively checking `git status` before doing anything git related.
> That's something people should run themselves. I run Adguard Home on my router.
I'll second this. People should really be flashing their routers. OpenWRT is simple enough that if you're on HN I think you'll easily be able to do it. And like most routers, you set it up and forget it.
But you'll also get a bunch more benefits from OpenWRT, to make it worth your while.
- I was able to buy a router for <$100 that was WiFi 7 capable (W1700K[0]) and had better hardware than most consumer routers. You can find plenty of cheaper routers that are flashable and more capable.
- Adguard Home
- Split tunneling/VLANs: Since we're talking Mullvad, you can put devices behind Mullvad on a VLAN. So activate Mullvad by changing SSIDs.
- Trivial to put IOT devices on a VLAN (can make one directional too so you can access from your main network but they can't reach back. I throttle everything IOT)
- Tailscale
- QoS (Control the speed and prioritization of different connections)
- It's a fucking computer, you can even run shell scripts
[0] You don't need something like this unless you're getting >1Gbps from your ISP. Big thing I wanted is the 2 10G ports.
There's also Orion browser, but I found it to be a bit more glitchy, especially around sites like YouTube (fuck the app, I'm not watching videos there): https://orionbrowser.com/
Yes, I use Firefox on Android with ublock origin, it works great. But using adblocking DNS on your phone will also block most in-app ads which is a big quality of life improvement.
I could also use a VPN to keep my phone always on my home network and thus behind my own ad blocking DNS but Mullvad's adblocking DNS was really nice and convenient.
Really? I never found it effective unless I messed with certs on my phone.
For example, DNS blocking isn't going to block YouTube ads if you're using the app since they don't need to respect your DNS, but it will if you're in browser because they can't control that.
Ads from providers like Google AdMob and AppLovin are blocked. Apps could bundle their own DNS or DoH resolver or use hardcoded static IP addresses but in my experience most do not.
Youtube ads do not get blocked by DNS adblock because Youtube ads are served from the same domains as the content and thus DNS blocking would be counterproductive. I don't think it has anything to do with respecting DNS.
I don't have the Youtube app installed to test but the Internet suggests that at least in 2023 it was very possible to block the Youtube android app (content and all) via DNS, which hints it does not bypass system DNS. [1]
Are you explaining my comment or rebuting it? I really can't tell what the intent is. Maybe the internet has trained me poorly in thinking most replys are generally rebuttals. But it really does seems like you're just explaining my comment.
Mostly a clarification of what I find DNS ad blocking works for on Android, which seems to be somewhat different from your experience (probably we use different apps).
A weak rebuttal of the reason why DNS adblock doesn't work for Youtube and the Youtube app.
I've been using NextDNS [0] for a long time. It's worth the price because you can set up all kinds of different blocking profiles and have different ones on different devices, allows you to have overrides for local network items (or internals like on a Tailnet, Pangolin, Wireguard, etc) and a lot more. The ad blocking ends up working so well a lot not only are ads blocked on web pages but it works with some streaming audio ads as well as VoD that has ads injected. Highly recommend.
I'll third this. A few years ago I set up both a website (cloudflare) and started using Firefox Relay (proxy email addresses, with a mozmail domain).
I did it to make gmail less sticky and control spam[0]. Then last year I switched to fastmail and it was so easy because I just had to point somewhere else.
Even if you keep Gmail I highly suggest people do this as it's helped with spam and gives me more control. Because I have catchall emails I can even make up an email on the spot, with pen and paper only.
[0] every website gets a unique email and a unique password. Think something like hn@foo.mozmail.com or hn@godelski.com (I don't own those domains, don't try to reach me there). Bitwarden even supports FF Relay!
My favorite is when you watch 1 minute of a 30 minute video and then your feed is just fucked for the next month. Like did I not clearly express my disinterest?
Give me the dislike. Give me the "I don't like this". Give me the "never ever show me this garbage again you piece of shit".
While I'm a big fan of Approval Voting I'm an even bigger fan of Score and STAR. I can't for the life of me figure out why:
- we created a score system where if you didn't do bullet voting you messed things up
- we saw the above problem and said "might as well do 321, since that's what everyone effectively does" (up/no vote/down)
- we decided that we should just switch to approval
- the whole industry seems to have this psychotic belief that data is objective, with only a singular interpretation
- we've had the ability to do semantic interpretation with AI for over a decade and decided ham fisting chatbots into everything was a better usage than differentiating types of engagement (people commenting because they like a video vs commenting because they hate a video), and treat it all as "engagement"
Everyone already understood the Score system in places like Netflix (0-5 stars). The reason people weren't using it to its full power is because they were black box probing the algorithms and figured out the algorithms didn't give a shit about nuance
I'm sure the ToS has some BS about you being required to inform any guests, but what if your TV is just recording your neighbors because they are close enough?
Just wait, I'm sure the "solution" will be that TVs start displaying reminders that you're being recorded...
Is our inability to innovate in technology really so bad that we have to just chase more and more spying? Consumers don't want these things. Why can't we innovate on things that consumers actually want? Remember, there was a time where we could build good technology, tech that people wanted, and make buckets of money doing it. That should be our goal, not some cyberpunk dystopia. Honestly it feels like anytime we try to innovate now some manager says "don't make things complicated" or some other dumb excuse, but maybe worse is that peers (other engineers) say "but what's the value" (they always stress that they mean monetary, not utility)? Feels like monkeys attacking each other for trying to get the banana...
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