tl;dr:

The research was initiated after scientists on the research team reported seeing occasional flashes of green light while working with an infrared laser. Unlike the laser pointers used in lecture halls or as toys, the powerful infrared laser the scientists worked with emits light waves thought to be invisible to the human eye.

But packing a lot of photons in a short pulse of the rapidly pulsing laser light makes it possible for two photons to be absorbed at one time by a single photopigment, and the combined energy of the two light particles is enough to activate the pigment and allow the eye to see what normally is invisible.

“The visible spectrum includes waves of light that are 400-720 nanometers long,” explained Kefalov, an associate professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences. “But if a pigment molecule in the retina is hit in rapid succession by a pair of photons that are 1,000 nanometers long, those light particles will deliver the same amount of energy as a single hit from a 500-nanometer photon, which is well within the visible spectrum. That’s how we are able to see it.”

Neat! But please don’t shine lasers into your eyes even if it’s supposed to be invisible.

Sometimes it can’t connect to the server (which is a completely stupid necessity).

That’s where it does the voice processing. The only processing it does on-device is the wake word and taking commands. Actually figuring out what you mean is done in The Cloud. Doing that on-device would not only make the devices significantly more expensive, but they would also rapidly become outdated.

The rest of your complaints are valid and I’ve experienced them all myself to boot.

Probably AWS stuff. An application that hasn’t been designed to scale well can get very expensive very quickly.

Usually the first thing I put on a new phone is a case.

Only if you file suit and the court finds it enforceable. Sometimes they say you can sue anyway.

Evolution doesn’t select for positive traits, just not-negative. If a trait doesn’t strongly reduce the chance of reproducing, it can get passed down.

For example, humans have plenty of neutral traits (hair color, eye color), and even plenty of negative ones (Alzheimer’s, arthritis, baldness, cancer, sickle-cell disease). But they’re not so fatal that they don’t get passed down.

Similarly, if neutral traits like cannabis including whatever chemical causes the munchies doesn’t reduce that plant’s ability to reproduce, it’ll get passed down.

They say their biggest expense is marketing. But I think they’re honest in saying that there are no current plans for layoffs. They just made the plans right after making that statement.

A lot of those people need to get a hobby. Arguing over definitions in someone else’s projects doesn’t count as a hobby.

That would probably dissolve some of the plastic parts.

Seems like a bit of a reach to go from knowing which appliances you use and when, to identity theft and harassment by your landlord.

Besides, I feel like even if your landlord was able to get this info (in the US, utilities are surprisingly protective of account access), they’d be able to do much more just by virtue of having physical access to the property.

The burglary or home invasion angles I can see, but it actually working out like that seems extremely unlikely.

That can also happen if the cable is worn out. They’re designed to wear faster than the port, since that’s much harder to replace.

I assume you mean flashlight and not a flame.

Not my Model M.

Yes, I understand there are orders of magnitude of complexity between the two. And no, it’s not remotely feasible, like I said, they wouldn’t be any good. If anything, I’m agreeing with you that no system of government, or system of economics for that matter, would make it practical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace

It’s a parallel. Mao tried to create industry in people’s backyards. It took people away from food production, destroyed existing valuable metal products, deforested the areas, and for all that effort, resulted in product with quality so bad it was unusable.

While it would probably also be more like input material production, silicon ingots and wafer slicing and such, I’m sure the quality would equally be shit enough to be unusable. Especially since metalwork tolerances are usually in micrometers at best, but microchips are in the nanometers.

Communist China and Soviet Russia would do it.

They wouldn’t be any good, but they’d do it.

They absolutely do fund development like this. But they keep it for themselves until such time that it no longer gives them a competitive edge.

For example, when the US sells tanks or planes to other countries, those export versions have much less fancy equipment on the inside. Or in pure science like cryptography, you can assume that when the NSA publicly approves of an algorithm, they’re confident that they can break it if they really need to (either because they inserted a backdoor, have identified a weakness they can exploit, or just have no use for it any more themselves).

I think most people will continue to just use their smartphone and get a Fairphone or something if it matters to them.

Music in particular can be described the most mathematically. Personally, I think it’s fascinating.

In a way, we have. There is already ML-generated music. It doesn’t sound bad, just boring and all the tracks sound the same.