Why would you ever trust Amazon's Alexa after this? | Hacker News Reader

Why would you ever trust Amazon's Alexa after this?

zdnet.com

30 pointsmiles8 comments

This style of writing was annoying to me, and I couldn't make it all the way through the article, but I take it that you don't need to install these skills before Alexa will go ahead and just pull them in from a third party? That seems... risky, at best.

> What they found was a security Emmenthal that would make a mouse wonder whether there was any cheese there at all.

One of the most overwrought sentences I've ever read

But how else would you know that the author went to college?!?!

Edit: Also the third paragraph: "I concluded that the idea was arrant bonkers, as are most things Alexa-enabled." Arrant should be arrantly (or not used at all because, c'mon, we get it, you went to college). If you want to write all hoighty-toighty-like, you ought to at least get the grammar right.

I think the author was trying to sound UKian and meant to write "arrant bollocks". Unless of course, I'm not up to date and they are all saying "arrant bonkers" now.

“Arrant bonkers” is grammatically correct if one is using “bonkers” in the plural noun sense of “several of those who bonk” and not the adjective sense of “mad, crazy” (which seems likely to derive as metpahor from the noun sense.)

Actually, modifying adjectives that are exactly nouns used metaphorically as if you were modifying the original noun (thus invoking the original metaphor, directly) rather than the adjective it has become in practice isn't all that uncommon.

This is clearly not the case based on the singular form of the verb preceding the phrase.

...because I’ve never found a single Alexa skill to be worth installing?

Smart home controls, music and weather are all that I (and from what I’ve heard anecdotally, most others) use it for.

Why would you ever trust Amazon's Alexa in the first place?

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