• kinsnik@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Or like the blockchain 5 years ago

    Or like VR 10 years ago

    Or like 3D 15 years ago

    It is the hot new thing that you have to use for the VCs to fund your company and for investors to buy your stocks, regardless of the actual utility. AI does seem to have at least more possibilities of usage than those technologies, but it also have an incredibly higher possibility of misuse that is being completely ignored by these companies

      • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        In all honesty, it seems like they’ve been trying to make 3D happen every ten to fifteen years since the 1950s. And they tried making VR a thing in the 80s and 90s, too until it went to sleep for a little while.

          • everett@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            I played one at… I want to say Wal-mart (or maybe K-mart?). The demo station was on display for maybe a year, but it was never working except for one glorious time I got to play… uh, something, I think either tennis or the Wario platformer. Clearly the game didn’t stick in my head, but the overall experience was amazing.

    • radiohead37@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It was always clear that VR, 3D, blockchain were fads. But AI is already useful as is. The hype may not be as high in the future but AI is here to stay.

      • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        I strongly disagree. 3D, VR and blockchain have limited use. They were just extremely overhyped. It’s the exact same now with AI. It has uses, yes, but you don’t need it in your toothbrush.

      • slimarev92@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        VR is also around, it’s possibly the most popular it’s ever been. It’s still a small niche compared to its initial promise.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        LLM are grossly subsidized by piles of investment capital hoping to corner the market. It may ultimately be that the only profitable uses for these services are illicit

  • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    To be fair, we only know where Bluetooth is useful because we put it in a lot of places where it wasn’t useful

    • exanime@lemmy.today
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      8 months ago

      Trial and error isn’t the only way to optimize things… It’s actually one of the worst, the one you use when you have no clue how to proceed

      So no, that is not a justification for having done it or continue to do it

      Now I wonder if substituting the sugar in my coffee with arsenic would render a delicious new beverage… Only one way to find out!

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        8 months ago

        I’m not talking about trial and error, I’m talking about throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

        There might be good ideas out there that no one could think of until they accidentally get invented

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          8 months ago

          I’m not talking about trial and error, I’m talking about throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

          Is that not trial and error?

  • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Or even like modern wifi. I saw a vacuum with wifi capabilities. Do I really need to check my vacuum battery level from my phone?

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      8 months ago

      I saw a Bluetooth toothbrush that send reports to your phone on how good you brushed your teeth, like wtf?!

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          8 months ago

          There are a few that do that but feel gimmicky. It looks like the upper half of a dummy and throws vapor to wrinkle out the shirt.

          Yes, I’ve considered it in the past.

          • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Those things have been around forever and work very well. For domestic use it’s probably only worth it if you have a lot of shirts.

    • toofpic@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Well, this is something that I actually used. I have a robo vacuum. I was preparing my home for some guests once, when I saw that the vacuum wasn’t charged fully (because it was mispositioned on its base). I put it to the right spot, let it charge for half an hour, started it and left to buy groceries.
      At the store, I checked the app where I have my apartment mapped by the vacuum that shows its route and cleaning progress. And I saw that with the current charge, it will have to go back, charge and continue. So I set it from “max” power to “normal”, to let it at least finish the job.
      It is a cool and useful thing

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          8 months ago

          Ah, ok, then yes. If it’s just an indicator on the vacuum against “indicator in an app + register + give us all your data+ “buy vacuum 2.0” notifications”, then fuck them

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Yes? Maybe the battery was left uncharged, or used up, so you’re waiting to do more cleaning. Why shouldn’t you be able to check?

      I have an automation in my Home Assistant setup to notify me when batteries need to be replaced or charged. Currently it’s only for the smart devices in that deployment, but yes. I want my home automation to keep track of all batteries, so I can see status at a glance and be reminded if one needs attention

    • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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      8 months ago

      AI isn’t a product for consumers, its a product for investors. If somewhere down the line a consumer benefits in some way, that’s just a side effect.

      • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Think about the ways that information tech has revolutionized our ability to do things. It’s allowed us to do math, produce and distribute news and entertainment, communicate with each other, make our voices heard, organize movements, and create and access pornography at rates and in ways that humanity could only have dreamed of only a few decades ago.

        Now consider that AI is first and foremost a technology predicated on reappropriating and stealing credit for another person’s legitimate creative work.

        Now imagine how much of humanity’s history has had that kind of exploitation at the forefront of its worst moments, and consider what might lie ahead with those kind of impulses being given the rocket fuel of advanced information technology.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    This is so spot on. I use AI all the time, but the hype and “we should AI all the things” is ridiculous.

    I blame it on bullshit jobs. Too many people have to come up with weekly nonsense busywork tasks just to justify themselves. Also the usual FOMO. “Guys, we can’t fall behind the competition on this!”

    • errer@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Yep. I have middle management above me gleefully cheering the fact that ChatGPT can write their reports for them now. Well guess what, it can write those reports for me, the actual person doing the real work, and you are now redundant.

      • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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        8 months ago

        As a person with a useless boss who does almost nothing and (of course) gets paid more than me, I like this take! Let AI report on workers and watch productivity (and profits) soar!

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          As an architect whose job it is to persuade useless bosses to do things the right way or to prioritize their teams to, I love this idea. Let AI take over boss work. They would be so much easier to work with

      • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Like many people, I use it like we used to use Google. Because Google (and most other search engines) suck now, thanks to all the SEO spam out there. My job requires me to be a “jack of all trades” (I am a duct taper with a bullshit job in David Graeber parlance). I have to cover myriad technical things. I usually know the high level way to do things, but I frequently need help with the specifics (rusty on the syntax, etc), so I use the free ChatGPT for that kind of thing. it’s been extremely helpful. I was also the first person to bring it to the attention of my boss ages ago when it first came onto the scene.

        Rather predictably, my boss now acts like he discovered (borderline invented it) and is always nagging everyone to use it to get their work done faster.

        AI has already put some people out of work and will continue to be disruptive. There will be a lot more layoffs coming, is my guess. And it doesn’t really matter if the AI is good or not. If the C-Suite thinks they can save money and get rid of “lazy workers” they will absolutely 100% do it. We’ve seen over and over again how customer service and product quality hardly even matter any more.

        I appreciate your take on it: replace the useless middle manager whip-cracker types. Hopefully we see a lot of that…

        • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          My company did a big old round of AI layoffs and now it’s barely functional at all because it got rid of a bunch of people actually doing things and kept all of the loud idiots.

  • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I remember seeing a DankPods video about a rice cooker with quote-unquote “AI rice” technology. Spoiler alert: there is no AI in there.

    So… it’s not even putting it in something where it’s not useful, it’s straight up false advertising.

      • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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        8 months ago

        It’s usually an entirely mechanical timer with a spool or a simple sensor that shuts the heating when the water is gone. No coding required.

        • cordlesslamp@lemmy.today
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          8 months ago

          Imo, that’s coding, just analog LOL

          “If” Sensor reached temperature. -“then” Cut power.

          Disclaimer: I have ZERO coding knowledge of any kind.

          • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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            8 months ago

            It depends. If there is a component that evaluates the sensor status through some form of runtime and then regulates the temperature based on that, you could call it coding (I don’t think this is ever done since it has no practical use). Else, it’s just system architecture.

            Of course, there is some overlap within those areas because they both rely on logic, but the latter would not be considered coding.

            If you study CS, you will most likely have a course that gives you a basic idea about system architecture and if you study engineering, you will probably have to code some small thing or at least have a course on the basics. So yeah, not entirely distinct.

    • evranch@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      They’ve been claiming things like rice cookers had AI for decades, so at least this isn’t part of the current AI hype.

      • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Bluetooth rice should be blue and also should make your teeth blue (because blue tooth, get it?)

        I suck at comedy.

  • Aggravationstation@feddit.uk
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    8 months ago

    I work for a fairly big IT company. They’re currently going nuts about how generative AI will change everything for us and have been for the last year or so. I’m yet to see it actually be used by anyone.

    I imagine the new Microsoft Office copilot integration will be used only slightly more than Clippy was back in the day.

    But hey, maybe I’m just an old man shouting at the AI powered cloud.

    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      A friend of mine works in marketing (think “websites for small companies”). They use an LLM to turn product descriptions into early draft advertising copy and then refine from there. Apparently that saves them some time.

      • llama@midwest.social
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        8 months ago

        It saves a ton of time. I’ve worked with clients before and I’ll put a lorem ipsum as a placeholder for text they’re supposed to provide. Then the client will send me a note saying there’s a mistake and the text needs to be in English. If the text is almost close enough to what the client wants, they might actually read it and send edits if you’re lucky.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          I’ve actually pushed products out with lorem ipsum on it because the client never provided us with copy. As you say they seem to think that the copy is in there, but just in some language they can’t understand. I don’t know how they can possibly think that since they’ve never sent any, but if they were bright they wouldn’t work in marketing.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      The problem with GenAI is the same as any system. Garbage in equals garbage out. Couple it with no tuning and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Good GenAI can exist, but you need some serious data science and time to tune it. Right now that puts the cost outside of the “do it by hand” realm (and by quite a bit). LLMs are useful given that they’ve been trained on general human writing patterns, but for a company to be able to replace their functions with highly specific tasks they need to develop and push their own data sets and training which they don’t want to spend the money on.

    • VodkaSolution @feddit.itOP
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      8 months ago

      I’d love a boosted Clippy powered by AI! It would have incredible animations while sitting there in corner doing nothing!

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I have one guy using AI to generate a status report by compiling all his report’ statuses!

      I’m hoping to be one of the people to benefit, if Security would approve AI. As a DevOps guy, I’m continually jumping among programming and scripting languages and it sometimes takes a bit to change context. If I’m still in Python mode, why shouldn’t I get a jump by AI translating to Java, or Groovy, or Go, or PowerShell, or whatever flavor of shell script? As the new JavaScript “expert” at my company, why can’t I continue avoiding Learning JavaScript?

    • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Copilot is often a brilliant autocomplete, that alone will save workers plenty of time if they learn to use it.

      I know that as a programmer, I spend a large percentage of my time simply transcribing correct syntax of whatever’s in my brain to the editor, and Copilot speeds that process up dramatically.

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        8 months ago

        I feel like the process of getting the code right is how I learn. If I just type vague garbage in and the AI tool fixes it up, I’m not really going to learn much.

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          8 months ago

          Where “learn” means “memorize arbitrary syntax that differs across languages”? Anyone trying to use copilot as a substitute for learning concepts is going to have a bad time.

        • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Autocomplete doesn’t write algorithms for you, it writes syntax. (Unless the algorithm is trivial.) You could use your brain to learn just the important stuff and let the AI handle the minutiae.

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 months ago

          AI can help you learn by chiming in about things you didn’t know you didn’t know. I wanted to compare images to ones in a dataset, that may have been resized, and the solution the AI gave me involved blurring the images slightly before comparing them. I pointed out that this seemed wrong, because won’t slight differences in the files produce different hashes? But the response was that the algorithm being used was perceptual hashing, which only needs images to be approximately the same to produce the same hash, and the blurring was to make this work better. Since I know AI often makes shit up I of course did more research and tested that the code worked as described, but it did and was all true.

          If I hadn’t been using AI, I would have wasted a bunch of time trying to get the images pixel perfect identical to work with a naive hashing algorithm because I wasn’t aware of a better way to do it. Since I used AI, I learned more about what solutions are available, more quickly. I find that this happens pretty often; there’s actually a lot that it knows that I wasn’t aware of or had a false impression of. I can see how someone might use AI as a programming crutch and fail to pay attention or learn what the code does, but it can also be used in a way that helps you learn.

        • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          If you blindly accept autocompletion suggestions then you deserve what you get. AIs aren’t gods.

        • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          you don’t catch it

          That’s on you then. Copilot even very explicitly notes that the ai can be wrong, right in the chat. If you just blindly accept anything not confirmed by you, it’s not the tool’s fault.

    • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      I’m a developer with about 15 years of experience. I got into my company’s copilot beta program.

      Now maybe you are some magical programmer that knows everything and doesn’t need stack overflow, but for me it’s all but completely replaced it. Instead of hunting around for a general answer and then applying it to my code, I can ask very explicitly how to do that one thing in my code, and it will auto generate some code that is usually like 90% correct.

      Same thing when I’m adding a class that follows a typical pattern elsewhere in my code…well it will auto generate the entire class, again with like 90% of it being correct. (What I don’t understand is how often it makes up enum values, when it clearly has some context about the rest of my code) I’m often shocked as to how well it knew what I was about to do.

      I have an exception thats not quite clear to me? Well just paste it into the copilot chat and it gives a very good plain English explanation of what happened and generally a decent idea of where to look.

      And this is a technology in it’s infancy. It’s only been released for a little over a year, and it has definitely improved my productivity. Based on how I’ve found it useful, it will be especially good for junior devs.

      I know it’s in, especially on lemmy, to shit on AI, but I would highly recommend any dev get comfortable with it because it is going to change how things are done and it’s, even in its current form, a pretty useful tool.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s in to shit on AI because it’s ridiculously overhyped, and people naturally want to push back on that. Pretty much everyone agrees it’ll be useful, just not replace all the jobs useful.

        And a chunk of the jobs it will replace were on their way out the door anyway. There are already plenty of fast food places with kiosks to order, and they haven’t replaced any specific person, just a small function of one job.

        I expect it’ll be useful on the order of magnitude of Google Search, not revolutionary on the scale of the internet. And I think that’s a reasonable amount of credit.

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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      8 months ago

      I’m yet to see it actually be used by anyone.

      None of your programmers are using genAI to prototype, analyze errors or debug faster? Either they are seriously missing out or you’re not following.
      I think the “AI will revolutionize everything” hype is stupid, but I definitely get a lot of added productivity when coding with it, especially when discovering APIs. I do have to double-check, but overall I’m definitely faster than before. I think it’s good at reducing the mental load of starting a new task too, because you can ask for some ideas and pick what you like from it.

      • shastaxc@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Mine aren’t. Because it has been mandated by the execs not to because there is a potential security risk in leaking our code to AI servers.

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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            8 months ago

            There are company agreements to secure that, we are not using the public websites.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          My company has an agreement with a genAI provider so the data won’t be leaked, we have an internal website, it’s not the public one. We can also add our own data to the model to get results relevant to the company’s knowledge.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Makes me feel a little better. In 2024 I Can’t get a “Windows ready” Bluetooth dongle to be recognized by my still supported Windows computer.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That sounds cool, I don’t have a smart home setup, but Bluetooth sounds kinda nice to me for changing the temperature on the thermostat in the house, car not so much. Now I do know many people who use Bluetooth to cast their phone calls to their hands free devices in cars, as well as to hook up those diagnostic tools and have the error codes go to your phone instead of buying a product that costs hundreds of dollars to have a screen you would only use for that one purpose.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Probably, but if you want to improve your dental health, maybe some people find it useful to collect data.

        You can make the same case for a lot of personal data collection. A lot of it just seems silly excessive and pointless, but you’ll always find someone who wants to use the data somehow.

        My case of silly excess is notifications. I want all sorts of appliances to be able to notify me of current status and completion, probably including a rice cooker. One of my shortcut meals is chicken strips/breasts over rice: I can fill the rice cooker and air fryer, then go do something else for 20 minutes or so. How do I know when they’re done? It would be nice if it could tell me, then I don’t have to think about it or pay attention to it

  • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    I’m too young to know what Bluetooth was like 20yrs ago, can anyone elucidate?

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      8 months ago

      It wasn’t so much that it was put in stuff that wasn’t useful it was more that it was put in stuff that needed something better than Bluetooth but they put in Bluetooth because it was new and shiny rather than old boring radio.

      The problem with Bluetooth, especially back then, was that the range was terrible (about 1 ft in my experience), you couldn’t connect to more than one thing at a time, it consumed quite a lot more power than radio (we have ultra low power modes now), and the bandwidth wasn’t great either (still somewhat the case but the bandwidth has improved). So you had things like Bluetooth car keys which were like keyless entry systems we have today, but rather than using radio they used Bluetooth so half the time you’d go near your car and nothing would happen.

      A lot of the cases where things used to have Bluetooth now use Wi-Fi today. Of course there were always things that had Bluetooth for a gimmick, but the vast majority of it was simply things that had Bluetooth when something else would have been the better option. Back then Bluetooth headphones were seen as a gimmick because they basically didn’t work, now they work, so they’re not a gimmick anymore. The perception of if something is or is not a gimmick is more about if it works rather than if it actually is a useful product.

      • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I had a great pair of bt headphones about 12 years ago. I could get 50+ feet away before they started cutting out.

      • allan@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Pretty accurate except Bluetooth is also radio of course, so it sounds weird contrasting them like that.

    • thirteene@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Op is describing the early stages of Internet of things https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/iot/

      The general idea is that every Device can communicate with every other Device. Bluetooth was added to everything in hopes that we could better automate every aspect of our lives when a critical mass of devices can talk to each other. The Bluetooth receiver in your alarm clock tells your coffee machine to start remotely. But we quickly realized that the overhead isn’t worth the payoff. But up until that point we made Bluetooth glasses, beanies, dash buttons, replaced inafred in most devices, power tools and appliances. It wasn’t that bad, but there were moments when you would pick up a smart nose trimmer and wonder why they included it.

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        And in the mid 2010s it got worse where everyone and their mother put bluetooth in anything and everything. IoT became accessible, only to be used in the dumbest way to try and get rich from Kickstarter.

        • EvilLootbox@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          only to be used in the dumbest way to try and get rich from Kickstarter

          Followed of course by an obligatory Shark Tank appearance asking $2 million for 4% of their product where all profits go to the Zuck (the cost per customer acquisition is the entire margin and its all spent through facebook and ig ads)

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            The goal isn’t to make money now, it’s to have growth, the sacrosaint nectar of gods, to be bought and have a big payout.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          8 months ago

          I got an oral thermometer with Bluetooth.

          It doesn’t have any sort of a display on it. The only way to use it is with their app.

  • baatliwala@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    That scene in Better Call Saul with the investment guy permanently on his BT earpiece was such a wave of nostalgia for me, used to see those everywhere in the 2000s with a little blue light on them flashing.