Make the bad even worse. Is there a word for this?
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Enshitification
What the fuck is Alexa+ 🤣🤣🤣
After AI became a thing, Amazon decided you needed to pay a subscribtion to use Alexa with an LLM instead of the basic keyword recognition model
Well someone's gotta pay for that small country's worth of wasted electricity
Sounds like another case of Amazon trying to out-Amazon itself
Now I'm going to refuse to purchase one even harder!
I honestly forgot people even buy these
Not only that, I wouldn't even use one if they paid me. How did they convince people to pay to be spied on and advertised to?
I was saving up for one. Nvm lol
Easy fix:
Follow-up fix: get home assistant and recreate this yourself with a $15 device
I started making my own several years ago but got sidelined by health issues and haven't gone back to it. :(
My end goal is I have a lot of comic books. I want a voice assistant that can query a database and then turn on smart lights to show box locations.
I got the database done, I got the queries working, then had a heart attack and never got the voice input or smart light output working. :(
Oh that is fucking awesome. Hope you can finish it and share it one day!
Yeah I understand the health issues for sure. First prostate cancer with a radical prostatectomy and then a year later Guillain-Barré Syndrome. I had lots of projects on hold for several years. This was like 5 years ago and I’m good now.
Damn. I hope you're feeling better, my friend.
Working on it!
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I bought an Alexa echo long before I actually cared about privacy and I regret it a lot. It's been a pricey paper weight since then. I wish I could flash some kind of OS and use it as a sound bar or something. I can't even use the Bluetooth without signing in with amazon account, which requires a lot of data including phone number.
Do you have a shotgun? Makes a respectable flying target.
Once….which is probably the point.
Like always, Black Mirror has an episode on this.
S## and E##?
Isn't Black Mirror a manual at this point?
Or a documentary.
Their users will accept this.
Not this one. I've been a Prime member for many years out of convenience (and because I live in the rurals and need to ship a lot of things to the house). Amazon completely fucked it up for themselves with regard to my subscription this past year or two, I'm done.
- Removed the ability to download and sideload Kindle books
- Ads in Prime Video
- Followed by even more ads in Prime Video
- Now this, and I don't even own an Alexa device
I'm done. Subscription is cancelled (has been for some time now, but unfortunately it was reupped annual). I've found alternative sources for several things I need to buy monthly/regularly that I previously would purchase on Amazon. Video was already trashed, but I barely used it. I've jailbroken my Kindles, converted all my books to EPUB, and installed KOReader on them. Wasn't a hard transition since I've had a Boox device as my main reader for some years now anyway. I've started buying my books from Kobo and other sources.
Looking into other services for online purchases and shipping. It'll be less convenient, and I'll still buy from Amazon in the event I absolutely have to, but I'd like to minimize that now.
How do you jailbreak your Kindle?
Depends on the model and firmware, but for most, Winterbreak is the current method.
Do note if your Kindle is updated to version 5.18.x currently it's not possible to jailbreak. There is ongoing work on a new exploit though, and a new jailbreak method (or update to Winterbreak) is expected later this year.
Edit - actually, if you're on firmware 5.18.0 the jailbreak may work. 5.18.1 and above it definitely doesn't.
I have a prime subscription, simply for the delivery and grocery discounts, but the ads on their streaming service have convinced me to stop using it entirely and just pirate all their shows / movies.
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Alexa already periodically makes "suggestions" that are annoying to disable if you misspeak.
Counting down until it starts demanding credit cards in order to function. Maybe as a form of "identity check", as that's been a popular excuse to collect payment information.
Pretty much why we unplugged all of ours. I just need to set a timer, don't tell me extra shit!
To disable suggestions:
"Alexa, stop By The Way"
I’m amazed it didn't already as someone who has never used or heard one being used. What’s the business model? Just the data harvesting for purpose of their other businesses?
As if I was ever stupid enough to use Alexa.
I’m pretty sure Amazon got this idea from Black Mirror’s latest season
Alexa has ads since the beginning and I can’t imagine that would change just because they are replacing the backend with AI. The first time Echo wasted my time trying to selling me something in my own home was also the last time. I don’t understand how anyone can be okay with that.
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Got 8 Google Minis around the house, mostly ceiling mount. First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I'm taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.
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*Amazon testing public backlash before shoving ads into your conversations with Alexa+
FTFY
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Duh. This is the AI wet dream. Ads won't have discrete patterns that can be filtered. The LLM will deliver content specific garbage as if it were a genuine answer to a query. It will just bias towards ads and deliver the ad Ina different personalized manner each time. For as much as everyone likes to bitch about AI. This may be the golden age. It probably just gets worse from here.
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Anyone see the newest Black Mirror season?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_%28Black_Mirror%29
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It won’t be long until the LLMs are trained with for ad-RAG
While each conversation happens a second model will scan it, send the contents to a vector search, return as embedding and a score, then give those outputs silently to the conversing model.
You do need to train/fine tune the model to not mention that it received the ad and subtly push it.
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I can't even stand when my Google assistant says more than three words to respond 😂 if I start hearing ads out of that thing I will get rid of it faster than anything I've ever done
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