dagblog - Comments for "Smart TV's are dumb"

Reminds me of the day I found

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 12 May 2019 03:58:34 +0000

In reply to I guess this is proof some of

Reminds me of the day I found a new Apple Lisa in the lab and tried to get it to work based on how an IBM PC worked... let's just say I'm glad there weren't any cameras, and a half hour/hour later I gave up, hoped I hadn't broken it.

I guess this is proof some of

artappraiser — Sun, 12 May 2019 02:30:25 +0000

In reply to Smart TV's are dumb

I guess this is proof some of the old ways were not exactly "user friendly"?

Teenagers trying to make phone call on ancient apparatus pic.twitter.com/sbOyK0JGhn
— Lukas Stefanko (@LukasStefanko) May 8, 2019

The Fight for the Right to

artappraiser — Thu, 02 May 2019 15:01:36 +0000

In reply to Smart TV's are dumb

The Fight for the Right to Drive

The Human Driving Association hopes to pass a constitutional amendment for the age of autonomous vehicles.

By M. R. O’Connor @ NewYorker.com April 30, 2019

[....] Last fall, the Philadelphia Navy Yard hosted Radwood, a car meet-up with a very different conception of the automotive future. The only cars allowed at Radwood are ones manufactured between 1980 and 2000. When I visited, early one morning, people had gathered around a red 1991 Volvo GL. The car was well worn from thousands of school drop-offs and soccer practices; its cracked leather driver’s seat still showed the gentle indent of its owner’s behind. Its most advanced technological feature was cruise control. Still, its hood was proudly propped open, in normcore glory. Speakers blasted the Talking Heads’ 1980 hit “Once in a Lifetime,” while, nearby, a man dressed in a nineties-style pink-and-blue windbreaker jumpsuit posed for a photo before a Volkswagen Westfalia. Other attendees cooed over a faded teal-green Ford Taurus, a twenty-year-old Mitsubishi Lancer, and a rusting Volkswagen Rabbit—the mundane cars that, in the previous millennium, had roamed the automotive landscape.

Radwood was first held in San Francisco, in 2017; this year, it’s being held in around a dozen cities, including Los Angeles and Sodegaura, Japan. With their molded-plastic exteriors, aerodynamic spoilers, and pop-up headlights, many of the cars at Radwood share an aesthetic. What really unites them, however, is their status as relics. They hail from an era when engine controls weren’t fully computerized, and when cars could be fixed using hand tools. They represent a relationship to technology that has now vanished—one that privileges user involvement over convenience. “The majority of people who are fans of cars in this era want to be able to work on their own cars,” Bradley Brownell, one of Radwood’s co-founders, told me. “When you buy cars like these, you’re getting something rawer. Half of these don’t even have A.B.S.”

In his book “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” from 2009, the political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew B. Crawford argues that manual competence—our ability to repair the machines and devices in our lives—is a kind of ethical practice. Knowing how to fix things ourselves creates opportunities for meaningful work and individual agency; it allows us to grasp more deeply the built world around us. The mass-market economy, Crawford writes, produces devices that are practically impenetrable. If we try to repair our microwaves or printers, we’ll quickly be discouraged by their complexity; many cars produced today lack even dipsticks to check their oil levels. Driving the Tesla Model 3 has been compared to using a giant iPhone: instead of controlling the car directly, one seems to pilot it by means of a user interface.

Many people, Crawford thinks, yearn to revolt against “the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines.” Some of them attend Radwood. One twenty-six-year-old salesperson for a popular automotive Web site told me that he didn’t “want to be a test dummy for Tesla.” He owns a few pre-2000 cars, and sees them as valuable investments. At Radwood, he said, he had become a member of the Human Driving Association, an organization aiming to protect people’s freedom of movement and right to drive their own cars. The H.D.A. imagines a future in which, for safety reasons, human driving is made illegal. To prevent this scenario from coming to pass, it advocates [....]

Yup. Sure it starts with

ocean-kat — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 14:00:39 +0000

In reply to Or to kill people, as shown

Yup. Sure it starts with training eagles to attack drones. Then to attack drone operators. But the inevitable end result is all out interspecies war.

Or to kill people, as shown

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 05:57:52 +0000

In reply to Sorry, should be egulls.

Or to kill people, as shown in Hitchcock's documentary. Never doubt the ability of people to take good things and turn them bad.

Sorry, should be egulls.

ocean-kat — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 05:50:52 +0000

In reply to He he - you misspelled eaguls

Sorry, should be egulls. Kinda like emails but you use them to send messages when you're on a beach without internet access.

He he - you misspelled eaguls

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 05:18:00 +0000

In reply to Eagels will save us!

He he - you misspelled eaguls - he he...

Btw they used eagles for recent Gatwick drone imbroglio

Eagels will save us!

artappraiser — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 02:25:32 +0000

In reply to Smart TV's are dumb

Eagles will save us!

The Dutch Police have trained eagles to take out drones. pic.twitter.com/zInvxOtCE6
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) March 31, 2019

There's a long tradition of

ocean-kat — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 02:41:58 +0000

In reply to "Shitty automation" gets a

There's a long tradition of these types of articles finger wagging at the terrible changes we see today. Exaggerating for effect and humor.

There are fewer better poster children for shitty automation than self-checkout. I have literally never, as in not one single time, successfully completed a checkout at a self-service station in a grocery store without having to call a human employee over.

I have often used self check out and rarely had to get help from the clerks in the area. They only seem to have trouble sometimes with loose vegetables. Everything prepackaged goes right through easily. There are too many clerks in the area with nothing to do that they bother me wanting to help. There's usually no or a very short line to use the self check out so it's much quicker.

"Shitty automation" gets a

artappraiser — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 01:22:07 +0000

In reply to Smart TV's are dumb

"Shitty automation" gets a shout out from @jamescham in his wonderful #stratadata @strataconf talk about why fears of AI and automation are overblown. https://t.co/ip4QLj8NLs
— Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) March 29, 2019