How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?

The median per-capita U.S. state GDP is $78,649; the median per-capita European state GDP is $28,713.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

The EU ruled that the app store has to allow side-loading in the EU, but y'all still won't get a good browser because both Chrome and Mozilla have said making a side-loadable browser for iOS is only worth it if it can target the American market too, and the side-loading is region-locked.

So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.

If users don't consent, Amazon can't collect. If users exercise their rights to be forgotten, Amazon has to delete. If Amazon breaks the thing because users have not consented, then Amazon will be on the hook for breaching the contract.

"It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask.

I think it would be more correct to say that a nation is made up of its people (consumers) than its corporations. Correcting to the latter is at best pedantic and at worst just incorrect.

I'm not from the US, but everything I see from a distance smells like power trip on one level below. HOAs abuse home owners, service providers abuse their users, corporations abuse their employees, etc.

That doesn't happen in the European side. When Bending Spoons bought Evernote, I was so sure that it'll be liquidated into the other tools they have and shuttered. Instead, every month, they're adding so much things and polishing it so much that I feel kinda bad for migrating away.

There's another way to do things.

Edit: LOL at the downvotes. It's true. The US is basically mistreating its "undesirables". In the US if you're poor, f** you. Payday loans, food deserts, car dependency, etc, everything is meant to hit you while you're down.

If the US harms its population, it is harming itself, because -- like every state -- it's at least partially made of its people.

EU focuses more on quality of life of all individuals, free access to healthcare and education, one just doesn't have these potentially very risky or destroying aspects of life which can easily break them for good in US and send them into homeless spiral. And somebody has to pay for that. Also those protections data are mostly anti-business and pro-citizens hence its aligned as it is. Also we lack agility and are pretty ossified.

Everybody has their own preferences, which also change over time. When single I always took more risky work due to higher rewards (and other benefits). With small kids I am happy to have some safety nets and lower my net income, and I'd bet many US (not only) young parents would appreciate that rather than raw higher paycheck. Also I have 50 paid vacation days per year as a regular employed person (90% contract), something I believe unthinkable in US unless you have your own company.

Or let me be more flippant- sure I get 50 paid days off a year. I call it Sunday.

In a year or so when there's truly new stuff to complain about the ln the message becomes "you voted for them".

(when exactly is that anyway? I'm dimly aware of some drama with continuing resolutions)

I'm amazed there haven't been major class-action lawsuits raised against Tesla yet, both from consumers for not delivering what is promised (full self-driving), and from shareholders for not delivering what was announced years ago (semi, new roadster). And from shareholders for artificially inflating the stock value of Tesla to use as leverage to buy Tesla and / or fund SpaceX.

This is about removing a privacy feature.

The average consumer wants out of the box solutions that don't require a degree in Computer Science to use.

-installed waterproof exterior socket, remotely controllable -installed various interior sockets -installed smart thermometer to control our little plant propagator

So far it seems to be a case of checking that the thing you are going to buy has a working HA integration program (which seem to be added on a fairly frequent basis) and then just adding it to the network. The only vaguely difficult thing I had to do was log in to my router homepage and change the wifi mode to allow the exterior socket to connect.

I'd much rather just not use Amazon/Google/etc where possible, as I don't like the feeling of being used.

Zigbee devices require more initial setup, you have to buy a dongle, install the Zigbee2mqtt addon and the mqtt integration, but once this is done adding a devices is a really simple process : you put the devices into pair mode and allow pairing for 90s in the Zigbee2mqtt page and rename your device to something useful.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/green [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

If HA (which is a wonderful project) is your example of usable OSS software, then your bar is set lightyears away from what actual consumers need.

I need a timer, integration with smart home (turn things on and off), play songs and radio, I need to announce to my other devices. And the set up should not be a month long side project.

How much will it cost me to replace Alexa in at least 5 rooms...

Assuming you have a spare Raspberry Pi or some other compute you can dedicate to it, replacing Alexa in every aspect except the microphones is at most a couple hours of installing, configuring and testing stuff. I don't personally know how things are on the market with replacing the always-on microphones in every room, but ignoring that (let's assume for a moment you're fine with using either a phone or a smartwatch as voice I/O), you get:

- A better and more capable integration with smart home than anything on the market;

- A chance to pick whatever LLM you want to power your logic (just bring your own API key, ofc.), which instantly makes it much better than Google's Assistant, Siri and Alexa; this has been the case for around a year now, and the Big Companies are still playing catch-up with the simple "just feed it to GPT-4 / Claude along with some context and tools, and let it do what you want" approach.

- You can configure the activities whichever way you like, expose whichever smart devices you like, and you don't have to speak brands anymore. No more "Hey ${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to play ${brand 3} on ${brand 4}" - you can just say "Please play whatever in the living room" and it just works.

(In my case, some of the most frequent commands are off-hand lines like "warm up the kids' room a bit, please", and "kill the ACs", or any variation that rolls off the tongue best. Claude knows what to do with zero config. Home Assistant alone cut the time to operate ACs from 2 minutes to 5 seconds (cold-start) relative to the vendor app; running things by voice from a watch is just a cherry on the cake.)

- If you're on Android, you can (and, again, could for around a year now) expose your phone to Home Assistant; setting the HA app as your assistant + coupling it with Tasker lets you also replicate the on-phone feature of commercial assistants, but better, because LLMs. It's smarter and sends less sensitive data to iffy cloud services (you control where STT and TTS happen).

- Timers and announcements and weather and such, you can obviously also handle through Home Assistant. The defaults should be enough for this (you might need to "add weather integration", "add timer integration", etc. - couple UI clicks in the UI, each). HA is simple by default, but you can also do more advanced stuff, at any complexity level between this and arbitrary code execution, through no-code, low-code (e.g. NodeRED) or yes-code means.

Going back to the topic of microphone arrays - I didn't look into it much; there are DIY solutions (with DIY quality of listening - which may be OK, depending on environment; almost 2 decades ago, I got a lot of mileage out of cheap microphone soldered to a 2M cable and glued to the side of the wardrobe, + Microsoft Speech API on the PC), I think I recall some people selling packaged microphone arrays, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could reuse Alexa hardware for the I/O part. But I honestly don't know. I'm fine with my phone and watch for I/O at the moment.

Is there a way to flash the Echo hardware to make it work with Home Assistant without pinging Amazon HQ?

Sometimes winning move is not to play. If there are no competitors to this, just do not use anything.

Who needs anti-coruption laws with a society like that? And who expects not to get fucked by coorporations when they have lost every incentive not to?

And the free market isn't the incentive you think it is when your're the monipolists that can crush or buy out the competition.

> Unless the website operator can show that a consumer has actual knowledge of the agreement, an enforceable contract will be found based on an inquiry notice theory only if: (1) the website provides reasonably conspicuous notice of the terms to which the consumer will be bound; and (2) the consumer takes some action, such as clicking a button or checking a box, that unambiguously manifests his or her assent to those terms.

Its part of why changes of terms generally require you to accept them, before you can continue using a service.

Unambiguous consent, and understanding of consent, are required, as ToS fall under contract law. Which does make most ToS... Unenforceable.

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-4_20-cv-07...

Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable.

The bit about changing terms of service probably gives them some leeway to deal with law changes and stuff. If they're purposely being misleading to play bait and switch, that sounds like it's breaking a law somewhere.

However the question is whether other laws have been broken in the first place.

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

The process is still complicated enough to be "enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory but it is getting better with every release. It will still be here in 10 years, nobody can take it away from us.

Does Home Assistant also have these features?

Music - yes, albeit a bit finicky to set up.

There's an addon called Music Assistant that controls the music, you can connect it to your provider of choice (local files, Spotify, etc), and you can let it connect to several types of sinks.

OOB the HA only knows a few commands (pause, next, etc) but there are some community driven effort to improve the support, such as "Play the album Dark side of the moon". [0].

[0] https://github.com/music-assistant/voice-support

They are cool little devices, but they have a while to go before they can replace the Alexa’s.

Without those features I can just replace Alexa with nothing because we do not use any other features.

As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!

Beyond that, I assume there's some confusion about what each can and can't do? I certainly can't remember which is which... But I don't actually own one.

But, despite the fact that it literally costs nothing, these have sold quite well, and if folks haven't got an echo they've got a Google Home, or a Siri, or something else. They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.

By your logic, we should not care about climate change either.

"People don't care about privacy" doesn't mean that regulators and the tech community should not lead a charge.

If I'm preparing to leave and wonder whether I should bring a jacket, yelling "what's the weather like?" is much more convenient than taking out my phone (or go pick it up from the other room), unlock it, go to the home screen, open the weather app, wait 2-3 seconds and then scroll to the full forecast.

I'm not saying that checking my phone is an annoyance - it's still much better than checking the newspaper. But being able to keep my uninterrupted focus in what I'm doing is the type of luxury one only notices once it's gone.

I like the sound quality of my Echo Dots, so I'd be fine to keep them in "dumb mode" (or even disconnecting their microphones physically), but setting a timer etc. is a useful feature too, when you are running around the house.

How good is the sound of the Home Assistant Speakers and can they be used like bluetooth speakers, too? How about multi room sound?

Any recommendations on a good solution that focusses on that music part and is not likely to be a victim of getting bricked by a software update?

Android Auto does not even understand the word "no".

I find it maddening that my google home, hasn't got a single bit better in the 8 years since it's release, and it's now missing some of my favourite features it had at launch. The whole market has been stagnate ever since they convinced me to put a microphone in my house, it's almost as if that was their end game.

Driving, working (mute, tell it to do something, unmute -> you've done something without getting up on camera), dirty hands, too comfy to get up and switch the lights off, etc.

It's also probably great for old people. I keep checking for language support since I can definitely imagine an older person being able to learn voice prompts where they're often absolutely lost on a phone. It'd also let them call someone if they've fallen somewhere around the house and can't get up.

When I'm driving and want to switch ANC mode, it's convenient as well.

If I'm coding and realize I didn't turn on the heating in the living room I have three choices: I can break my flow and walk there and back, I can be cold during dinner, or I can yell "turn on the heating in the living room" and have it out of my mind.

If it sounds like a luxury that's because it is. But like all luxuries it crept up on me and I only noticed once it was gone.

Of course, getting your sweet voice for future training also helps!

There is a setting to disable having your voice saved along with options to automatically delete it after a number of months.

Do we trust them, to:

a) do it and not just lie about it totally or partially, and we find out later on when somebody does eventually report it/find out/investigate, if ever happens.

b) even if they intend to really do it, that they do it properly.

If it doesn't reach them, you are 100% sure the data is not there and not at risk (from their end of course). Otherwise is just let's hope for the big corporation with optimizing for most profitability for their stackholders as main objective to do "their best at protecting it's consumers data and privacy".

Which sure... hurting consumers and getting fines aint' great, but not always ends up in less profitability than doing the right thing from the beginning.

Of course... this is not a big deal compared with other stuff, there are alternatives and it's not something you really depend on day to day. Compared with other stuff that is for sure.

I have an Echo Dot 2nd Gen which I used for around two months, until it once failed at a command of playing back a radio station but instead started to continuously stream my audio to Amazon, for hours until I noticed it (bandwidth monitoring with InfluxDB and Grafana).

Now none of my devices (phones and tablets) listen for hotwords, but at this point there's no guarantee that my Pixel phone isn't listening in all the time. That feature where your phone listens to water or an alarm is what I found too sketchy, as if they have been playing around with on-device constant sound recognition for too long and then come up with some silly reason to make you enable it.

https://www.apple.com/jo/newsroom/2025/01/our-longstanding-p...

Never give any data to anyone based on their current policy, because as demonstrated here, it may change. And then you're fucked.

> "When a user talks or types to Siri, their request is processed on device whenever possible."

Eg: I can't find any link about the home button scandal anymore.

People will forget about all the wrong doing and the PR will enventually win.

The main difference is that apple didn't allow its users to have such a setting in the first place, so amazon used to be better. Until now, when they're equally bad in this respect.

The article you're referring to on page 52 has provisions regarding confusion and/or impersonation, following the previously mentioned positive affirmation.

You need the full context of the T&C's, don't cherry pick.

But people will put up with anything. You could literally send a note that any Alexa will be equipped with 2kg of Semtex, to be triggered in case of wrongthink in your own home. People would still use Alexa and rationalize the feature.

A class action here would be a massive hit.

What about just not using voice assistants period? Do we really need third party cameras and microphones in every part of our homes?

But that is of no problem, users seem to enjoy being abused, repeatedly, so they continue giving their money to the organization to come up with further marketing startegy (smaless bullshit lies) to introduce the next one never asked for abuse in the next company output that solves very marginal or no problem of their life.

For a lot of people, voice commands are easier than figuring out a device.

I watched a breakdown of that model of Echo where it looked like the mute was indeed at the hardware level. My EE knowledge is limited but good enough I could follow along. Amazon probably could hide some hidden way to get around the hardware switch if they wanted but the risk for them seems higher than the risk to me, which never really was more than they'd hear me belch while cooking.

There's only so much sympathy and support and standing up for others that I can fit into any given day and I'd rather give it to people who weren't warned about the dangers beforehand.

We can still say "I told you so" and have sympathy. But we shouldn't throw the sympathy away in contempt. Another reason is that over our life at least once we will be the suckers, and will look on those who said "i told you so" and see contempt in their eyes. Is that what we want?

As opposed to a dismissive "I don't care", "I have nothing to hide", or "You're being paranoid" of the other 99%. Those people either don't need sympathy because they don't feel wronged, or don't deserve it because they shot the messenger.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43365424

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367536

It a business decision to use an LLM.

It's a business decision not to beef up the Alexa hardware to support an LLM.

These decisions are weighted against reputational damage by Amazon with the outcome discussed here.

I doubt they have ever ran machine learning model on those speakers. Mostly just some simple one like "hey alexa"

But I get your point that e.g. whisper is also very good and can run fast locally on edge devices. We also have recently phi4-multimodal LLM that is 5.6B params and is good enough to do inference locally on beefy smartphones. Problem is probably those smart speakers have really low CPU/GPU. Also LLM with audio input probably can be better re WER and take your mood/emotion into account when doing inference.

But my point is not just about the ease of running whisper, it's that the device is already doing transcription. Even if it's not optimal, it works.