X's Grok AI is great – if you want to know how to hot wire a car, make drugs, or worse
Elon controversial? No way
AI + ML
2 Apr 2024 | 37
Toys
Being able to control lights from a tablet in your room is just toys for the sake of toys. You're in the same room as the light you're controlling, and bedside switches actually work perfectly well, having a powerful microprocessor wasting clock cycles to turn lights off and on is just wasteful.
Worse, though, is that if they used generic devices, those devices have other sensors, including microphones and cameras, potentially. Maybe these ones didn't, but you can bet some will, and still have a poorly configured network.
And finally, if I go into a hotel freshly refurbished with toys, they'll mostly work and be mere chrome. If I go into one that's coming up for a refit, those toys will be embarrassing - what was once cutting edge bluntens rapidly. I had a room the other day which had a SD TV system which also offered a wireless infrared keyboard for using the built in browser which couldn't cope with being a TV, let alone a web client. Right now, I'm in a pretty decent room, technically with a view of Westminster Palace, the desk had evidence of once housing a SCART interface, and I've got a CD alarm clock, presumably for the one guest in a million who brings their own CD's to a hotel. It would have been a nice touch a decade ago, but tech dates so fast that I'm more impressed by seeing the centuries-old top few feet of Big Ben than what would have been an achingly hip refurb some years ago.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
