merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 7 hours ago:
Thou must use the cloud so that thine company hast a recurring revenue stream.
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 7 hours ago:
I can completely understand it, if you ignore all the privacy issues and potential hacks.
For example, a smart fridge. Imagine a fridge that tracks the expiry date of everything inside and warns you before something goes bad – or detects when something goes bad based on the off-gassing that it produces. Imagine it gets to know your purchase patterns and suggests items for your grocery list when you’re running low. Or, if you fully trust it, it could even order those things for you.
Or, smart lights. Imagine lights that are nice and bright in the winter when you don’t get enough sunlight. Then imagine those lights are smart enough to start dimming and getting “warmer” at a certain point in the evening on your personal schedule, making your body more prepared for sleep. Add motion / presence sensors so that the lights turn on when you go into a room, and turn off when everybody leaves the room. Most of the time a light switch isn’t a burden, but if you’re carrying things it can be a bit annoying, and we all know kids are pretty bad about turning things off when they leave a room.
In a world where you didn’t have to worry about the privacy issues, the bugs had all been worked out, and so-on, smart appliances could be great. But, we’re on v0.1 and so I’m extremely cautious in every “smart” device I use.
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 7 hours ago:
“Smart” toilets are a privacy nightmare.
Having said that, in the distant future, if we don’t drown the world, or kill ourselves in some other way, smart toilets are actually a smart idea.
Look how often a medical check-up requires either a stool sample or a urine sample. It makes sense. It’s the waste products our body produces, so there’s going to be a lot of data there. Now, imagine if you could get a basic medical check-up every time you used the toilet. You could catch so many problems early. It would be an entirely non-invasive medical check-up and if done right you wouldn’t even need to change your routine. You’d just use the toilet as normal and if the toilet detected anything that required a more detailed check, it could give you a packet of data you could give to your doctor.
At the very least, imagine if instead of trying to pee into a cup at the doctor’s office – or worse, trying to collect a stool sample, you could just use the “Medical Toilet” the way you use any other toilet and it would collect the sample for you.
But, of course, the wealth of medical information it could provide is exactly why it would be a privacy nightmare in the current world. I don’t know why Kohler is jumping into this now. Even if they see it as some way to generate revenue, they have to know it’s going to generate lawsuits too, and when inevitably there’s a privacy breach it’s going to put their good name in the toilet.
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 7 hours ago:
The nurse knew that the power management system required an Internet connection? That’s one geeky nurse.
Still, I have hope with things like solar panels. I think these are likely to be teething pains there. Being off-grid on a solar panel is probably a pretty common situation, so they’re probably going to eventually work out the kinks. As long as there isn’t a monopoly on power management systems, or regulatory capture by the companies that make them, probably the ability to work disconnected from both the power and Internet grids will eventually happen. But, with Internet-of-Things stuff, there’s often a commercial incentive to mine people’s data and lock them into a subscription service model. So, that’s really going to require regulation to fix.
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 8 hours ago:
Smart products are part of the issue, and smart products that fail in dumb ways are a really big part of the issue.
Any smart product, pretty much by definition, has to have a computer in it. Anything with a computer in it can be hacked. There’s really no good reason that your bed should have an attack surface.
If you are going to have smarts in something, it really needs to fail well. Like, for a bed, it should have something that bypasses the smarts and lets it go back to “dumb bed” mode no matter what. No matter what position it’s in, it should be possible to make it go flat even if you have no Internet connection. In fact, even if the smart parts are not working at all, there should be a way to make it go flat, even if that’s a purely mechanical system that allows you to bypass the motors.
- Comment on Football Manager 25 Delayed until March 2025 1 year ago:
Or, just imagine what it says if they actually didn’t know about this last week. That would be even worse, it would mean that the team doing publicity and taking orders didn’t realize that they were half a year away from being done…
But, yeah, I can’t see how this doesn’t result in a disaster. They really do need to release something before then, something with this year’s DBs before they’re irrelevant. They could take the old game, update the DB and just sell it at half price. Or, they could sell it at full price but with a coupon for say 50% off the new game.
The November release date of Football Manager has always been awkward. The FIFA games all come out in late September / early October, right after the teams have been finalized. By the time Football Manager comes out, 1/3 of the season has already been played. IMO their best bet would be to release in the summer before the season starts and then do a post transfer deadline day patch. The initial release could use the squads as they existed at the end of the previous season – probably something a lot of people would want anyway because they could be in charge of all the summer transfers. In fact, I wonder if a release date of early June or something might be ideal.
My guess is that one major motivation for people to buy Football Manager is that they’re saying “I could do a better job of running my team than this bunch of idiots”. And, that feeling is probably strongest right at the end of a season. A Football Manager release at the end of the season might be ideal for people who want to spend the summer doing all the wheeling and dealing they wish their clubs would do well, as they wait for the season to start again.
If they think they can have the new Unity-based game ready and polished in March, just call it FM 26, release it before the season starts, and do a full update once the various transfer windows have all closed and the DBs are all updated. If they don’t do that, who’s going to buy FM 25 when FM 26 will have all the bugs fixed, the new season’s DBs, and is only a few months away?
- Submitted 1 year ago to gaming@lemmy.zip | 2 comments
- Comment on Propagandists love this simple trick 1 year ago:
This makes me wonder what would happen if you took the content off some celebrity-focused website like say TMZ but changed the formatting to make it look like New York Times articles.
Like, the “gravitas” of the NY Times politics section with content like “Guess Whose Shirtless Selfie!”
- Comment on Success is built through GAMBA 1 year ago:
If you’re rich you can afford to gamble, lose and try again.
If you’re poor, you can gamble, win, and then have to spend your winnings helping out your family and community. Like, paying for the operation your uncle needs but couldn’t afford, or helping mom’s friend from church avoid losing her home.
This is a reason that a lot of poor-person owned businesses don’t grow. They may start strong, but then the business owner has trouble continuing to invest.
- Comment on Success is built through GAMBA 1 year ago:
And if you’re only slightly rich (as in, daddy’s a lawyer) you can afford to gamble, lose, and then try again.