This is exciting. Reminds me of the "myomer" technology used in the Battletech universe that allowed for the creation of battlemechs. The future is now!!
I've had the opposite experience. I installed KDE on a new desktop I built for my mom, and outside of a handful of growing pains (mainly things Windoze had vendor locked), she's been happy as a lark with it. She hasn't gone very far off the beaten path and really doesn't have too much of a need to.
I’ve been doing this a long while, but I’m finding it harder as more devices share my WiFi credentials with each other without my permission/consent/or even knowledge.
I recently moved into a new home and decided to take the opportunity to replace everything; it’s been surprising how many things are just coming to life. TVs, vacuums, kitchen appliances, etc. Some of my new TVs won’t even let me use the microphone on the remote until I give it my WiFi password. It’s quite ridiculous the world we’re creating for ourselves.
Yeah - day -1 in new house, get internet. ATT modem, tech has me scan a QR code to login to this WiFi via my iPhone. (I have a mesh network but hadn’t moved belongings, this was just making sure service was working.)
Couple days later, we had moved belongings and setup an old dumb TV for my kid. I was a bit surprised when then Apple TV had the WiFi credentials but I was busy moving and just shrugged it off.
Couple days later, I replaced the old dumb TV with a new Samsung. It had connectivity too, without doing anything specific. This isn’t my first smart TV but I never give any TV my WiFi and instead always use the Apple TV devices. So was a little more shocked on this one but thought I’ll figure it out when I setup my mesh.
Over the next few days, the JennAir appliances showed signs of connectivity. I wasn’t sure how. Hadn’t intended on giving them any Internet access. Don’t really care about having a smart oven.
About 2 weeks later, I get around to setting up the mesh. Start going device by device and having it forget the ATT routers Wi-Fi. None of the devices know my mesh info, so set them up individually. I need to just disable the ATT routers Wi-Fi network, haven’t yet.
I’m not really a networking guru. I just never had this happen before. I think I either accidentally allowed my phone to share the information or it’s possible my wife did. I had never used QR to login, so maybe that exposed something.
I'm amazed this is so common. I don't think any of my household appliances require wifi access. Our PC, laptops, phones, tablets and printer do, of course. I do occasionally check which devices are connected to my wifi, and try to keep track of what's what, but there are always a few mysterious devices I don't recognise, so I block those just to see what stops working.
> but I’m finding it harder as more devices share my WiFi credentials with each other
Sorry, what? That's not a documented thing.
There are limited ways in which you can share credentials (like between iPhones), and there have been some weird things in the past related to sharing with friends' accounts (the controversial Windows 10 Wi-Fi Sense in 2015), but your consumer devices aren't just sharing Wi-Fi credentials with each other. There isn't even a protocol for that kind of automatic discovery.
As for the microphone on the remote, you need to enable Wi-Fi on the TV so it can perform voice recognition on remote servers. The TV doesn't have the chips/software to do voice recognition. So that makes complete sense.
I’m using an Apple TV that is connected. My prior setup, with a newish but unconnected Sony Bravo, the remote just passed mic audio data to the Apple TV as if I was using the Apple TV remote
Also, pretty sure it’s undocumented, but I’ve been on a handful of reddits and HN conversations in the past where people are all experiencing this. I think a simplified theory is that they broadcast the WiFi credentials over Bluetooth and other unconnected devices can then get online. I remember one discussion of this theory where the guy found out his TV had connected to his neighbors WiFi somehow and this was a theory in the thread. It’s foil hat type stuff but very believable if you’ve experienced having devices know your WiFi despite having never granting it.
Another theory is similar where the unconnected devices send the connected device data to relay. This would allow the unconnected device to remain stealth, as it wouldn’t appear in your WiFi logs. There’s even a deeper level theory on this one where devices (particularly cheap Chinese toys and gadgets) come preloaded to exploit common vulnerabilities in other devices to establish this relay. Imagine a smart oven or fridge where the manufacturer has no incentive to keep up the firmware for security purposes. So now you have a baby monitor sending data to China through your air fryer’s WiFi connection.
There's no protocol for that over Bluetooth. One could be created, but it hasn't been yet. Nor for relaying data. These don't exist. Like, there are limited relays like what iPhones do for AirTags, but not for a vacuum cleaner to transfer data via your fridge to your neighbor's open WiFi.
In every case where someone's TV has mysteriously connected to a neighbor's WiFi, it's kids or the babysitter or someone else who actively tried to connect to watch a show.
I think you’re probably right but I just wouldn’t say it as confidently as you do. There doesn’t need to be a specific protocol if the manufacturers are in cahoots (and there’s plenty of reason for them to be) they make their own and obfuscate it amongst all the other things these devices do.
So maybe it's not BT, that was only an example theory. It also doesn't need to be always running, so could be harder to track. What if it turns out it's just some high pitch inaudible sound using morse code... I could go on but I'm not trying to crack the case - my point is that things like this that you assert don't exist, often do to turn out to exist on a long enough timescale. I remember reading a lot of tin foil hat theories on various things that some people asserted were illegal or simply impossible; then a decade later Snowden proved the theories right. It seems like these things happen regularly these days.
Lesson learnt: Best thing to do for a smart device is not connect them to internet from day one. Though it beats the purpose to some extend, we don’t have an option of buying dump devices anymore.
Well, one of the big upside of the modern smart vacuums is you can see the map it built, set up rooms or zones, do a virtual cleaning, etc... This (1) definitely requires some connectivity, and (2) has to go via central server if the phone is not on same subnet.
Sadly, because of (2), most (all?) companies don't bother with local connectivity at all. Much easier to debug one codepath (via remote server) rather than two (remote server and direct connection).
So yeah, if you are worried about device being remote controlled by its manufacturer, don't buy devices which say "Can be remote controlled" right on the box. But of course then you are back to ancient tech, setting physical virtual wall devices or bounding the clean area with overturned chairs.
This is when you only want to clean only left half of the room, for example. In the old robotics vacuums, your choices were either enough physical "virtual wall" units (those little stubby boxes you place on the floor) or physically fencing it, with overturned chairs or boxes or something.
With the smart vacuums, you get the nifty map and you can draw the lines/boxes around the area you want cleaned. Very convenient, but naturally requires some sort of device with a screen (to show map) and position input (to draw the boundaries), like a phone.
They could, but it'd still be two codepaths to debug and test - via central server and via bluetooth. So the difference would be even greater, with the benefits unclear - the amount of people who genuinely care about fully offline vacuum is pretty low.
That was my one condition when an air fryer entered the house. No connecting it. When they’re putting WiFi on the cheapest models you know it’s a profit center in spite of you not paying for it.
> After that date, users are encouraged to enroll their devices in the Extended Security Updates program for free, which will grant them twelve more months of security updates and plenty of time to plan an upgrade to something supported.
They've been deleting pushback and criticism on a lot of their posts for a couple years now. The "new UI" forced update generated a whole lot of negative feedback, which they deleted and proudly announced that some impossible number of people chose the new UI and that it was exclusively an opt-in feature (which is a blatant lie).
They've become extremely shitty in recent years. I canceled my ten year old subscription to their whole product line because I'm not going to pay to be lied to.
They’ve said elsewhere in this thread that for people that it’s opt-out for they will get promoted on app launch and have the option to opt-out _before_ any data collection. That seems fair to me.
While gaming is indeed a concern, I think a bigger one is that the power behind reviews is derived from just that, the reviewers.
Human beings, playing the part of reviewers, are from my perspective becoming rapidly dumber due to a number of factors that are discussed ad nauseam here on HN. Or they are at least desensitized to the things that would prompt a negative review due to the sheer amount of shitty things they are exposed to that would prompt said review. If you shovel enough shit, the smell begins to not bother you any more.
I took it to mean that the way LLM's use natural language causes the typical observer to feel as if they can perform far more than what they actually can. Akin to the analogy of humanoid robots.
It plays off of the "if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck" idiom, which of course isn't foolproof and gives avenue to the kind of spectacular advertising that is fueling this hype.
My mom was lamenting car insurance quotes, so I told her to ask AI. She did, then had it do a Monte Carlo simulation for all the insurances she the AI felt she was qualified for.
It happily replied that it did 1 million monte carlo simulations and here was the result.
To this day I don't think she fundamentally groks that LLMs cannot calculate.
For me, it was a friend that was wildly impressed by ChatGPT (before it could search the web) had "analyzed recent market news and stock price graphs" to give him stock recommendations.
I used Gemini to take "0.3 grams of KNO3 will raise the nitrate level of 10 gallons of water 4.84 ppm" and generate tables of how many grams of dry fertilizer for 1ppm, 5ppm, 10ppm for my planted aquariums of 144 and 3000 liters. It calculated them perfectly.
ChatGPT can easily do Monte Carlo simulation in its "thinking" step, and has done many times for me. e.g. I asked it to compare savings interest between regular banks and median returns from premium bonds. It's not difficult at all for it to do, you can see the code it's generated to do it + the output, easy to inspect
Although I'm not optimistic, there's a small chance this might shake up the sorry state of EA Sports. The incessant focus on microtransactions and features that are essentially just sports themed slot machines over actual solid gameplay has kept me far away from those games for a long time.
EDIT: I think I might have worded that poorly. I do NOT think a change is going to happen, at least not one for the better, especially considering the actors involved in the buyout. I think it's optimistic to think that it will.
Correct: “the transaction will be funded by a combination of cash from each of PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners as well as roll-over of PIF’s existing stake in EA, constituting an equity investment of approximately $36 billion, and $20 billion of debt financing.”
EA currently carries about $2.6bn in non-current liabilities of which $1.5bn is long-term debt. So an order of magnitude more debt.
I think the odds of an acquisition by private equity resulting in fewer microtransactions and slot machine mechanics are indistinguishable from zero. You should probably instead be preparing for them to be amped up five- or ten-fold.
As someone who grew up loving sports games and has been turned away from any modern sports games because of the desire to flood them with all the stuff i see as just legalized gambling for children...
i like this potential optimism. Even if its not likely, its fun to imagine this being a turning point where EA is suddenly just doing things to make games better, rather than chase numbers, and because of that, the competition is forced to match that better gameplay.
I just would love to see where sports games could ACTUALLY be at if a high percentage of the team wasn't focused on horrible predatory in game purchases/questionable card games that just skirt by the legal system for underage gambling.
I don't think they are. Quite a lot of EA franchises seem to be struggling to appeal even to their core base lately. The Sims has gone through similar issues with trying to push paid content over quality, with a recent update to allow selectively disabling packs with new content apparently just corrupting the installation and making it impossible to actually run a lot of the time. From what I've read about the most recent Dragon Age game, meddling from EA also caused a lot of late changes in the game's development that ended up influencing the lackluster reception, which in turn was used as rationale for shuttering future development of Dragon Age games.
Things really do seem bad enough that clearly something drastic is needed if anything is going to change, For an unhappy fan of one of the many EA franchises, I don't have any trouble imagining that even a major change that's unlikely to produce good still offers more hope than the status quo. If there's a 1% chance that taking EA private will improve things, it still probably is more likely than things improving with the current management.
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