TTM Revenue is $561 Million. Am I the only one that thinks this is insane? Even with the Q4 market route some of these cloud stock valuations have a bubble feeling to them.
Kind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it's become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison/recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expelling too much effort. There are many open datasets for it
I've never understood why I care who does it, honestly. Companies? The government? A person stalking my wife? The negatives are obvious, do I really care who is doing it? These discussions often feel like tax law debate to me. We're debating whether or not X person is bad for legally avoiding tax, instead of talking about restricting tax laws.
Likewise, we're sitting here focused on Amazon for implementing facial recognition instead of focusing on changing laws and government "culture" to make such an act against its own citizens far from accepted. I don't like what Amazon is doing either, but attempting to stop people from advancing facial recognition seems fruitless at best. Facial recognition is here, and it's only going to get easier, better and faster.
Can we focus on finding ways to prevent/identify/etc bad actors? Because facial recognition is coming, regardless of Amazon, and bad actors aren't loyal to amazon.
I suspect if this stuff was more widely democratized we might see more progress in that area, but that's not really what Amazon is doing. Amazon's tech is (ostensibly) not available to bad actors, and is designed to dismiss any public concerns like "how will stalkers use it?"
Tech like this is designed and deployed in such a way as to discourage people from thinking it's a problem that needs a fundamental solution. If people realize it's a problem at all they assume it will be solved with just a few laws or a company protest.
If there was a public website you could go to where anyone without authentication could monitor every street in your town, maybe that would spark more citizen-controlled solutions, in the same way that browser extensions intercepting Facebook logins at coffee shops sparked https adoption.
The problem of democratizing surveillance is that many laws prevent neutral actors from building these systems (what's your state's 2-party consent law for audio and video in public spaces?) As a result, the only people doing widescale recording are exempt institutions and companies that people are trained to think aren't a problem, or criminals that people think are rare or limited because their results aren't widely broadcast.
It's like social security numbers. If a company started just publicly releasing them en mass via its Twitter account, we would quickly figure out an alternative way to authenticate that prevented them from doing that. But if instead a company just leaks them to the black market, well that's just a security breach and the system doesn't need to change - even though the practical effects are very similar.
It's trivial to secretly monitor people via facial recognition. It's not trivial to publicize or demonstrate how easy it is in a dramatic way that will spark public attention.
This doesn't really matter. You can do it at scale too, just spin up your NN on any of the cloud platforms available. Instant scale. The fact that amazon offers this recognition lowers the barrier hardly at all.
>just spin up your NN on any of the cloud platforms available
"just"...
Amazon marketed it to police explicitly, I'm pretty sure the open source team working on TensorFlow isn't going around suggesting you plop a model on Linode and use it to catch criminals. This isn't something that police departments have the ability or skill to discover and implement on their own, setting the menial bits up for them and suggesting a solution is half the battle with government stuff like this.
Police departments have started to get smart about technology.
The Seattle Police Department now has a division focusing on data analysis. This came out of a consent decree with the Justice Department to study compliance for use-of-force incidents, but is now being used for other things to quantify how well the police are using resources in different neighborhoods. Recently they sponsored a hackathon sprint for local developers to come up with ways to quickly anonymize police body cam footage so that citizens who were not the subject of an investigation could not be identified, but still provide requested footage in a timely manner.
I don't see that in the article. Can you provide a source for that?
> This isn't something that police departments have the ability or skill to discover and implement on their own, setting the menial bits up for them and suggesting a solution is half the battle with government stuff like this.
It's something I have the ability to do on my own. Any police department could hire someone like me.
Sure you can spin up unlimited servers. But an individual doesn't have the resources to collect data from across the city at all times, which is where we really start getting into invasion of privacy.
Here on Hacker News I’ve read the opposite. Whenever any new technology product is offered by Amazon the refrain is always “that can be replicated with x, y, z”.
>Kind of confused why Recognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here.
Because some people respond to a hypothetical better when they can see concrete aspects of it, not just hear a description of the possibility space.
"I could build that if I wanted to" vs. Recognition is a bit like the difference between the black market and dispensaries, a difference of scale is a difference of kind.
Agree that it's a problem that needs to be fixed in more permanent ways, but debatably protesting and slowing down companies like Amazon gives us more time to find a solution.
It's a band-aid, but band-aids are an extremely useful medical tool. They only become problematic if used as an excuse to avoid stitching the wound.
Most people could probably steal from two or three houses without expending too much effort too. Of course, that's illegal because most people don't support allowing random third parties to steal from them. The wider population considers people who do that to be objectively shitty people, and always did, even before there were formalized national codes of laws to forbid it.
Kind of interesting to see Microsoft & Amazon 'passing by' Google lately, considering how much more earning power they have than either of them.
Even if Amazon didn't spend a dime on R&D the most they could've earned on operating income is ~$26B, if Microsoft zeroed out their R&D they could've had about ~$35B.
Meanwhile, if Google decided to go full-profit last year they would've had on the order of $42B.
If Microsoft had zeroed out their R&D last quarter, they'd have produced $12 billion in operating income. Your $35b figure includes a fluke quarter.
Microsoft's trailing four quarters figure, with R&D zeroed out, will jump to ~$47 billion once the present quarter is reported. Google's trailing four quarters figure will be similar, around ~$48 billion, assuming their present quarter is close to the prior three (which are at about $36b together, with R&D zeroed out).
Not unlikely, but as well; both the stock discount and the moonshots have to do with Google being so dependent on one source for its income (ads) as others here have noted.
Gmail and Android can be considered moonshots, completely separate bets from the cash cow search product. They have both been enormously successful and been the starting point for new revenue lines (the whole GSuite for businesses, the Play Store)
Next moonshot which looks extremely promising is Waymo
Also improves their offering against companies like Shopify and Salesforce. Square's never really offered an online store option beyond allowing you to link your account with companies like BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, etc. putting them at a disadvantage as most brands want a strong online presence that a horizontally integrated offering won't be as good at providing.
>"I actually wish you could set them to instantly go to your story rather than having to transfer the photos to your phone and do it manually later."
Is there any word on why this is? These would be a lot better if I could just click the button on the glasses and have it post to my story automatically (I understand this means the user wouldn't be able to add any overlay effects but I feel like the vantage point of the video is the main attraction to posting it in the first place). With this friction it makes the process a bit less sexy.
Would you need a constant connection? Auto-uploading to the phone if it’s in range after each recording would drain the battery faster but with their advertised ~2 day battery (one week of use on 4 case charges) it doesn’t seem impossible, it seems like a trade-off they decided not to make.
Seems like part of what this article is discussing is the emerging 'Shopify effect'. The barriers to entry for starting an online brand-based business have plummetted to the point where even people with little means financially and no means technically can still set up a business for a fraction of what it cost in the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if we're in the middle of a Cambrian explosion-esque period for consumer-based brands.
And not just US based brands trying to all sell the same products. I have a "joyroom design" phone charging case, shamo's phone case, yivvin wireless keyboard, powerextra camera flash, godox battery charger, auxia ring light, and all other manner of cheap Chinese whitelabel brands that didn't even take the time to consult an English speaker before coming up with a name.
And all of these products have at least 20 to 30 or more other listings of the exact same product with some other made up "brand name" on it.
Many of those shops won't make much profit. Shipping companies are probably the only ones profiting (if not shipped via national mail services). Most of the value will flow to the customer as prices are now much lower.
It will turn into what eBay turned into: Cheap, misrepresented crap. Web design used to be a reliable way of judging a stores product quality, but less and less every day.
So happy to have a real term for this! I've always just said "A known metric is a gamed metric". Everything from "if you can't touch your toes you're unhealthy" to "price per square foot maximizing" in real estate... once a group has consolidated on a metric and let that metric be known, that metric is useless.
Brands, sure, but it's a side effect of nobody actually making anything anymore. The manufacturer or distributor, of which there are certainly many fewer than mattress brands, could steal huge hunks of the entire market just by deciding to do so. I'm not sure all of these are positive developments.
I have to wonder if the low barrier to entry takes Hotelling's Law and explodes it into high gear. Like, how many actually-different mattress design patterns and materials are there anyway?
Seems like the quality of content & comments posted on HN goes down dramatically whenever the discussion is on Facebook or Snap. I understand these are hot-button companies but I think HN could do better than to have these aimless discussions on obscure things. For the vast majority of companies this news would hardly even get posted.
Sadly it seems like the comments are becoming more like reddit comments. I think more and more people are coming from there which isn’t a bad thing but they are bringing that style of comments.
Niche topics will have deeper comments because the people interested typically have a deeper understanding. Then you have Facebook and Snap which everyone has an opinion on even without understanding the situation.
Very good postulation I had not thought of that. I think it will be important for HN to retain that level of quality as I think we have all benefitted from the higher-than-average level of thought that goes into an HN comment relative to other internet communities.
Can anybody who lives in the valley speak to whether people really hate Zuckerberg enough over there to the point where this seems like a rational thing to do? I live out in Mass and while the 'scandal' has definitely been front page news, for a company to do this (especially with a well-known entrepreneur) would be decidedly odd.
I live in the valley, have several friends at Facebook, etc. I don't know anybody who hates Zuckerberg. I don't hate him. But I am very upset with Facebook-the-company and Facebook-the-system. What bothers me most is that, to the best that I can tell, Facebook-the-company and especially Facebook-the-system just _do not care_ about me or you as individuals.
Talking about Facebook on Twitter seems to be the height of irony...
(I hate Twitter, although if you ask me to substantiate why, I would probably come up with the oft-repeated talking points of echo chamber, Russian bots, rage mobs, etc, etc.)
If we were to compare reasons why we dislike Twitter, I expect that we'd have a lot to agree on. I tried to leave Twitter too, but found that I couldn't because I still get too much value from Twitter. I still hope that someday the winds will shift to a system that brings me the joy I got from Twitter between 2008 and 2016.
LOL... that comment is hilarious because it touches one key truth about Vietnamese culture...
When you ask a Vietnamese person if they can do something, they ALWAYS say they can, even if they have no clue what it is. Especially Vietnamese men. We have this weird need to always pretend like we know everything.
It's similar to the TV sitcom stereotype of how all men think they can fix a leaking pipe, even if they have no clue how to do it.
First it used to be excitement, then "love to hate" with increased utility but ads, but then your parents and other family started joining and it became a chore and "meh".
The dilution of your newsfeed and privacy issues highlighted meant you got more for your money from Instagram/Snapchat/Whatsapp and you got better responses from tweeting your issues with @company. Most folks I knew at this point either claimed they didn't use FB regularly (ie, they probably still did but maybe only by habit) or just for FB messenger.
All the while the slow drip drip of privacy issues eroded trust.
So we're at the point where if you haven't dropped, the utility can be elsewhere and there's no love lost if you drop FB. FB is in Uber-territory here, some don't mind - but you no longer get weird looks when you tell someone you shut down your FB account. In fact, it's often a good conversation starter.
Elon and SpaceX have enough existing 'juice' or brand cachet or whatever to get away with a move like this and maybe even get a PR boost from it. My local Girl Scouts chapter, Jeep club, etc... not so much. They're married to Facebook as infrastructure.
I don't have the privileged information to know if it is true, but this feels more like a gut reaction then a cost benefit analysis action. Musk is known to be pretty polarized in his tech ethics opinions.
Cambridge Analytica isn't the first incidence where Facebook was used for political purposes. Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina explains their use of it in 2013:
