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Comment by 0x5345414e | Hacker News Reader

This is having a direct impact on my wellbeing. I was at Whole Foods in Hudson Yards NYC and I couldn’t get the prime discount on my chocolate bar because the system isn’t working. Decided not to get the chocolate bar. Now my chocolate levels are way too low.

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"alexa turn on coffee pot" stopped working this morning, and I'm going bonkers.

Alexa is super buggy now anyway. I switched my Echo Dot to Alexa+, and it fails turning on and off my Samsung TV all the time now. You usually have to do it twice.

This has been my impetus to do Home Assistant things and I already can tell you that I'm going to spend far more time setting it up and tweaking it than I actually save, but false economy is a tinkerer's best friend. It's pretty impressive what a local LLM setup can do though, and I'm learning that all my existing smart devices are trivially available if anyone gets physical access to my network I guess!

This is the kind of thing Claude Code (bypassing permissions) shines at. I‘m about to setup HA myself and intend to not write a single line of config myself.

Most of HA is configured in the gui these days, you won't need to write any config anyways.

Something I love about HA is that all thr gui can always be directly edited using yaml. So you can ask claude for a v1 then tweak it a bit then finish with the gui. And all of this directly from the gui.

Ugh. Reminds me that some time ago Siri stopped responding to “turn off my TV.” Now I have to remember to say “turn off my Apple TV.” (Which with the magic of HDMI CEC turns off my entire system.) Given how groggy I am when I want to turn off the TV, I often forget.

I just use a "Alexa goodnight" to trigger turning off the tv and lights

I upgraded to the old Alexa. Alexa+ is a hot pile of crap.

i agree. the new LLM is better for dialog and Q&A, but they haven't properly tested intents and IOT integration at all.

How can this be? I had great luck with GPT3 way back when… and I didn’t have function calling or chat… had to parse the JSON myself, extraction “action” and “response-text” fields… How has this been so hard for AMZN? Is it a matter of token cost and trying to use small models?

that's a reasonable theory. they've likely delayed the launch this long due to the inference cost compared to the more basic Alexa engine.

I would also guess the testing is incomplete. Alexa+ is a slow roll out so they can improve precision/recall on the intents with actual customers. Alexa+ is less deterministic than the previous model was wrt intents

Someone posting on HN should know better than using Alexa and Samsung TVs. These devices are a unique combination of malware and spyware.

I was attempting to use self checkout for some lunch I grabbed from the hotbar and couldn’t understand why my whole foods barcode was failing. It took me a full 20 seconds to realize the reason for the failure.

This is a fun example, but now you've got me wondering: has anyone checked on folks who might have been in an Amazon Go store during the outage?

Life indeed is a struggle

First World treatlerite problems. /s What's going to suck years after too many SREs/SWEs will have long been fired, like the Morlocks & Eloi and Idiocracy, there won't be anyone left who can figure out that plants need water. There will be a few trillionaires surrounded by aristocratic, unimaginable opulence while most of humanity toils in favelas surrounded by unfixable technology that seems like magic. One cargo cult will worship 5.25" floppy disks and their arch enemies will worship CD-Rs.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

We're getting awfully close to that scenario. Like frogs in a warming kettle.

0th world problems

I had to buy a donut and the gas station with cash, like a peasant.

That's it, internet centralization has gone too far, call your congress(wo)man

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