Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
There are definitely more than 3 or 4 HomeKit Secure Video Cameras. That page @Leo pulled up on the show were the cameras sold by Apple, but there are a lot more.
1 Like
When Alex says home automation is a ‘cluster’, is this based on his requirement that it must be HomeKit?
I decided on Amazon as my ‘integrator’ at home years ago. Ikea/Kasa/Phillips/Sonos/Ring/Eufy/Echo stuff all works fine. Voice control plus automations.
1 Like
The Marcus on AI article was enlightening. I had not heard that GSM-NoOp example where you could reliably throw off AIs with misdirection that would never affect a normal human. I was searching for science about grounding/earthing, and I thought at AIs would be a good way to find it. I prompted to ChatGPT:
Please list 100 science papers that have investigated grounding/earthing. Provide the DOI number
I thought I was clever to request the unique id number of each science paper; I wasn’t cleaver enough. Chat provided a DEI number for each “science paper”, but only a handful were DEI numbers for actual science papers on the topic. All the others were DEI numbers to other science papers. How useless! I do not know how to create a prompt to have ChatGPT find actual science papers on the actual topic I’m searching for. 
I recently asked Chat to tell me if there’s any evidence of DNA contamination in mRNA COVID vaccines? Chat gave a boilerplate dismissal response:
There is no credible scientific evidence suggesting that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are contaminated with DNA in a way that poses health risks. However, discussions around potential DNA contamination have emerged in certain circles, mostly fueled by misinformation or misunderstandings of the vaccine manufacturing process.
Unfortunately, Chat fails to keep track of the current science like “DNA fragments detected in monovalent and bivalent Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna modRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Ontario, Canada: Exploratory dose response relationship with serious adverse events.” [And–yes–I know that is a preprint.] I find Chat’s own disinformation campaign rather revolting. While there are conspiracy theories floating around, that really says nothing about the science.
Alex disagrees. You don’t have to wonder why Alex thinks Amazon is a “cluster”. Alex and Leo spelled it out in this episode. From this episode’s transcript:
0:41:52 - Leo Laporte
I, uh, I hope Apple succeeds. You know, amazon um had that kind of unified plan with the ring cameras and the ring doorbell and all that. In fact, when I I have a ring doorbell, I thought, oh, maybe I should use Amazon’s uh security system, which is was at the time, was cheaper than anybody else’s, and then that Amazon just doubled the price of it, annoying a lot of people, uh, and do you really want Amazon to know what’s going on inside?0:42:17 - Alex Lindsay
well, I think the first time I said that I saw that the police were able to acquire the ring camera and that was the end. Like I was not, like I’m afraid of the police, but I was like you mean, somebody else can just subpoena my data.
You can also gain insight from this comment:
0:40:44 - Alex Lindsay
You know, and you know, my Apple TV is the only thing, the only entertainment device that talks with the rest of the world, because I trust Apple to do it. And I don’t trust them because I think Apple’s altruistic. I trust them because I think this when we look at this entire rollout, this is their business plan Like it’s it is, and I think it’s a lot easier to trust someone’s business plan than it is to trust their altruism and their entire future is based on the fact that they are not. You know that they want to protect that data, um, and so that’s the. So I think that that that’s why they have a huge opportunity here. It’s just it’ll be interesting to see if they’re able to capitalize on and again, I don’t, I’m not, I don’t, I’m not saying that they will build hardware. I just don’t think that they’ll be successful if they don’t.
I personally can’t believe that anybody connects a Vizio TV to the Internet. Are they oblivious to the fact that this vendor was caught selling customer data? The only solution is to castrate this monster’s connectivity and force it to operate as a passive TV. Alex takes that one step further and will only use an Apple TV as his streaming box. Alex is way ahead of the curve, but I think growing masses will agree with his approach. For me, Amazon’s promiscuity with Ring device data are also problematic. YMMV.
2 Likes
That transcript is so hard to read. I think it gets the essence of what was said, but it seems to have a lot of repeats and unfinished sentences that I don’t think were left unfinished.
But the key points are there.
I have a single Hue light and 2 HomePod minis and an Apple TV 4K and that is about it for home automation. Matter makes me feel a bit better. If the automation can be done in the home, without sending my data into somebody else’s cloud.
1 Like
That’s a fascinating observation. Yes, it is faithful to what was literally (but not always literately) said. I didn’t stumble on the transcript. I suspect this is because English is my native language; that gives my brain the ability to essentially ignore the extraneous words. The noise is easily ignored. In some other language, I would have to work much harder to filter the signal from the noise. That was always obvious with the spoken word, but I’d never ever thought about it with noisy transcripts.
AIs could easily clean up that transcript. If they’re that good at figuring out the words, cleaning up the superfluous words should be easy. It may even be an option in the AI that TWiT is currently using. Would the AIs never screw up fixing a transcript like they did with the Kiwi word problem? I guess that AIs could screw up anything.
I am a native English speaker, but I am mildly dyslexic and I have real problems following sentences when they are mixed up.
It was things like “It’s it is,” that were causing me problems. Listening to it, I don’t remember Alex tripping over his words like that, but maybe I just didn’t notice it in the flow of the conversation.
1 Like
I also found the transcript hard to follow, even though I did not find the conversation hard to follow while happening on the show
1 Like
Not having the TV connected to the Internet just wouldn’t fly in our family. The UK free-to-air broadcasts have an EPG that goes back in time so you can access catch-up TV for example. Needs an Internet connection. Plus all the hassle of juggling remotes, switching inputs etc.
Ring has a number of encryption options, including end-to-end, which addresses the police concern doesn’t it?
I just use the Apple TV, the TV hasn’t been connected to the Internet since 2017/2018 and we don’t have terrestrial or satellite where we now live, we just use Waipu.tv on the Apple TV, so just a single, simple remote control for everything.
2 Likes
I’ve been through the settings on the family TVs turning off any ACR (Samba seems to be common on cheap TVs), not allowing sharing of ID, turned off tracking etc.
So not sure what I’d gain from using waipu on an Apple TV vs. the TV? Guess it’s all about trusting Apple more than Panasonic (or whoever).
Mainly because the Sony Bravia TV only got security updates in 2016 and 2017, so not letting it anywhere near a network.
1 Like
Ours get an annual update, in November usually. So 
they get another this year.