Buckle Up, the Smart Glasses Backlash Is Coming
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
The way Facebook gets singled out for "creepiness" in a world full of bad actors is pretty ridiculous, and actually makes it easier for the others to keep flying under the radar.
One of the div heads where I was working bought a (pair of?) Google Glass to figure out if there was anything useful we could do with them or develop for them.
He was trying them out and a colleague of mine wandered over to him and said something like, “ok Google, image search, pictures of dicks.”
Never has anyone whipped something off their face so fast. However, sadly, despite I believe it should have worked like a charm, for reasons that are now obscure to me no gallery of phalluses was displayed.
Facebook gets a lot of (deserved) flak, but it’s hardly singled out.
[1]: https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/23/samsung-smartwatch-date...
Strange things happen when a leader merges the company brand and with his personal brand. It can strengthen the company brand (in the case of a plucky can-do technologist) but the company brand starts to get colored by the personality of the person (in the case of a person who goes off the deep end and starts saying weird and inflammatory stuff).
Then the creeps arrived, drunk on sudden power and the promise of quick cash, and started capturing and consolidating online activity into 'platforms', or walled gardens if you will. These where void of the creative expression of the free and open web and streamlined every interaction into a very narrow and neatly defined world.
These creeps started abusing their power early on to snoop on peoples activity, pictures and conversations — which would be viewed as totally unacceptable behavior in the offline world — and went on to build the worlds most sinister and cynical manipulation machine.
Creeps are antithetical to the spirit of the early internet and the open web and they are actively working agains the ethos of open protocols and playful creativity!
I appreciate the effort to reform "nerds" into quirky elfin innocents but even USENET was full of creeps.
Maybe it was destined to develop the way it did, given the permissionless nature of the web, and that the ideal of an open and distributed web would be choked out at some point anyway, as a natural consequence of collective human behaviour.
And maybe, if the web could have had a few more years without the power hungry forces we now know, we would have developed a stronger immunity against such behaviour? We will never know, I guess.
Non the less, I'll forever hold a deep grudge towards the power hungry creeps for the catastrophic effects they unleashed on the world and for ruining the potential of a truly open, diverse and vibrant web. In a generation or two, I do think we will look back at the founders of Big Tech companies as creeps that harmed the world in unthinkable ways, just as we do with brutal powerful people in earlier history.
They shaped the world in countless ways, and the negatives are just now beginning to gain space in the collective consciousness.
The modern Internet is basically less like a city and more like a shopping mall now.
Source: I'm old and was there.
It was taken over and perverted by creeps.
If you can't explain why you are invoking No true Scotsman and how it applies, then I don't think you should be accusing the parent of it.
The implicit "no true scotsman" statement was "The people who 'took over and perverted' all these technologies were the creeps, None of the people who were there before this 'takeover' were considered creeps by anyone no sir, all upstanding Scotsmen each and every one of them. (And if there was a creep, he was obviously part of the 'takeover')."
Such smart glasses may actually lead us there: just record everything I do and say in a week, and I'll tell you it's safe to delete it if I've not had any concerning interactions in that time period.
I don't like that society might be heading this way, but I'd not bet money against it.
I can appreciate the potential utility of a HUD in daily scenarios. For myself, I'm content to go sans device when I'm out of the house. Don't I get enough here at my desk? Not everything needs to be computed, optimized or shared.
I know that giving up a habit is very hard, but I don't know why people would go out of their way to make it worse.
I would love to record everything I see (assuming perfect solutions around video security and storage, another topic), not because I’m a creep and want to watch the videos, but because it acts as a personal dash cam.
But I would prefer not to get it via Google or Facebook.
Even the humble recorder app that came with my phone, which I used to record interviews for genealogy - turns out, I am locked out from my own audio file. It's saved on the device, but I need root to access it. If I get that, my bank punishes me for my irresponsibility by disabling the apps I need to e.g. log in to government websites. I can only get my audio file if I upload it to Google first.
So that another topic is quite relevant.
I'm not so sure it will be inevitable and widely used. I'm sure it will be used by our secret police. I also think they prefer we didn't get it, or at least that our use of it was heavily mediated by a government-partnered organization like Facebook or Google.
"wow you send Every Single Frame of your life to zuck?" - i will have no retort than to hang my head in shame.
i just wonder what google will come up with. they can't let zuck have the entire cake, especially when they had The Vision 10 years ahead of him.
Even critical thinking is now being offloaded to ChatGPT.
A friend of mine loads up a YouTube video of how to tie a necktie every morning...
being able to seek-scroll throughout your day like a non-stop livestream is objectively a power-up. some people will get oneshotted by it - but a lot of people have been oneshotted by a lot of different things over the decades.
short-form video fried lots of brains, but it also built out the infra for all the other stuff. it is what it is.
Incidentally if y’all aren’t following this space there are bike rear lights which have cameras and radars in them and they hook up to a cycle computer, warn of cars coming up behind and how far away they are, and can be used as a ‘dash’ cam for near misses / bad driving / accidents.
> That pivot to smart glasses is also apparently dragging Apple in its wake, with reports that the company is deprioritizing an affordable Vision Pro to focus on its own pair (or pairs plural, actually) of specs.
When I saw this news/rumor a few days ago, I didn’t understand why Apple would rush into this now (with the creepiness of Samsung, Google, and now Meta, all being recognized). Apple sometimes has a different take on how things work, but I can’t think of how it could make non-creepy smart glasses unless it doesn’t put a camera that records and stores things for the user.
I hope this product category flops for all makers.
I have all my stuff in a terminal window, with tabs for each server I'm connected to. I have tmux on each of them, with neovim, lazygit, and a bash shell. How would I use this with smart glasses? The idea is mainly to give me a bit of a change of scenery during the day. I'm not quite fathoming how I would input anything while walking around with smart glasses.
That's what Meta is using/developing the electromyographic wristband for, and a major usecase for Neuralink-type tech as well, but for now there just doesn't seem to be a real useable solution.
Or maybe the workaround is there like the simple workarounds on DVD players to bypass region-check: because the manufacturer knows info about it will spread and help sell the product.
(There's also the point that human eyes, a brain, and a neuralink product or competitor will constitute a recording device soon, but I've argued that in these kinds of threads before).
As an aside, I don't consider myself a particularly paranoid person (relative to the median HN commenter, I'm probably still in the 95th percentile of paranoid-ness in the general population), but I couldn't imagine ever wearing a device that records my entire life and uploads it to Meta of all companies....
The internet is littered with a*holes with cameras testing that carve out and members of the public who don’t know who get into fights. Best to not be interesting in public unless you’re okay with being filmed I guess.
There is the University of San Francisco, which is what Gizmodo should have written, as reported in SFGate. This is a private Jesuit school in the Inner Richmond district.
There is the unrelated San Francisco State University, a public university and part of the California State University system.
Which itself is not to be confused with the University of California, of which there are also two SF campuses, University of San Francisco Medical Center, primarily at Parnasusus Heights (at the confluence of the Haight Ashbury / Cole Valley / Inner Sunset), though with another growing campus in Mission Bay, and ... the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings), near the Civic Center.
"The tech bros fundamentally mis-understand human socialization and interaction"
the "tech bros" have DEFINED modern-day human socialization and interaction. they've been defining it for 20 years now, and they will continue to re-define it in their image.
Total Techbro Victory.