Hacker News Reader

Amazon's market cap is 1.72T. If anyone can afford to push the state-of-the-art in terms of safety, they could.

They just don't care to because nobody pushes them to.

I personally don't want the toxic mix of Big Corp + Gov Regulations for something like a home assistant. Literal nanny state. Micromanaging is not the answer. We need Gov regulations to break up Big Tech in general.

Just throw the goddamn device out of the window. Problem solved.

How is that "literal nanny state?" We're talking about removing a home assistant's ability to tell you to do something lethally stupid. Basic consumer safety measures are a staple of a healthy society; just because a device is in your home doesn't exempt it from the government setting safety standards for it. If anything, the opposite is true.

Though on your last point we agree. Throwing the thing out the window is the best solution overall.

There are plenty of government regulations that work. Regulation doesn't preclude breaking them up, which I'm also in favour of.

Sure, I want natural gas lines leading to my apartment to be regulated. But, I see Alexa as an information source. I don't want books to be regulated just as much as I want Alexa to be regulated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com