chaoticevilspacewitch

Erys

@chaoticevilspacewitch

old trans crazy cat woman doing nerd stuff
big on TTRPGs, sapphic SFF, politics, and kitties
Interact with me? Yes, I luv it

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posts from @chaoticevilspacewitch tagged #technology

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chaoticevilspacewitch
@chaoticevilspacewitch

Voice Assistants Headed for Failure

Not really a surprise. They're a novelty and a lightweight household helper for turning off lights with switches in inconvenient places. We've got a couple Alexas, and we only use it to turn off lights & appliances that we could do other ways with fractionally more effort, and to check our security cameras from our desks. Not once have we been tempted to spend additional money because of them.

Another failure of capitalism. "Useful gadget doesn't make money", so it gets killed. Although to be fair, the operating costs of the voice processing systems behind these things are tremendous. Maybe this isn't really a sustainable technology until computing reaches a point of being able to do that on-board?

chaoticevilspacewitch
@chaoticevilspacewitch

When Technology Started to Suck

A really interesting article by Cory Doctorow on the move from user enabling to user control.
I'm just old enough to remember the joy of figuring out how to make things do stuff they weren't supposed to do in order to work better for you. I'm not a coder, but I spent many a night reading guides off forums to figure out how to edit my registry or modify config files in order to break artificial constraints on software. And that just gets harder and harder to do now.
It definitely often feels like each new wave of gadgetry offers us a little bit of convenience in exchange for big concessions of control, and with tyrannical DRM and cloud-based systems you can't own or control for yourself, it's increasingly hard to use tools how you want to. The only option then is not to use them at all, and being on a socioeconomic fringe is a lot less romantic than cyberpunk said it was going to be.