I think apple is fine. When AI works without 1 in 5 hallucinations then it can be added to their product. Showing up late with features that exists elsewhere but are polished in apple presentation is the way.
Have you used Siri recently ? It's actually amazing how it can be crap at tasks consistently considering underlying tech. 1 in 5 hallucinations would be a welcome improvement.
Using ChatGPT voice mode and Siri makes Siri feel like a legacy product.
I don’t think that’s the point. Yes, Siri is crap, but Apple is already working on integrating LLMs at the OS level and those are shipping soon. It’s a quick fix to catch up in the AI game, but considering their track record, they’re likely to eventually retire third party partnerships and vertically integrate with their own models in the future. The incentive is there—doing so will only boost their stock price.
Just because the LLM can access kernel does not miracle make it better. Do you think the problem with Apple AI right now is because they don't have access to OS components?
I do think that kernel level access is not needed as this is some good amount of automation though I assume what apple can make do however is actually not require another laptop connected to automate your mobile but rather the npu?/gpu? inside your phone.
I am surprised by why they haven't done it already.
In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full)
That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company actually does a decent job at it.
Today Google is doing a decent job and Apple isn't.
You’re right, they don’t need AI. I finally stopped using Google search after they added the AI summary and didn’t add a way to turn it off. I’m just as bothered by Apple’s lack of AI as a am their lack of a touch screen on MacBooks. I use AI when I need AI.
I think in general we want granularity and choice.
So not just in how much AI there is, but what AI, where it's applied and where we can turn it off, and what context it has access to and where it's off bound.
If you're talking apple... if you used a "standard" 2-3 button mouse, It worked in OSX from pretty much the start iirc. I always used a PC mouse for that reason.
oh absolutely. They have had support for aftermarket mice for a while. Their track pads have supported "right click" for a long time too.
Then again, they've always been way better at making track pads than mice. They have probably the best track pad in the business, and also the Magic Mouse, which everyone hates.
the AI technology might be nice imo but its nowhere near the amount of money being spent. Its dumpster fire amounts of money and the amount of weirdness just everything being AI wrapper slop is so.. offputting.
Things can be good and they can still be a bubble just as how the internet was cool but the dot net bubble existed
They become bubble when economically things stop making sense.
It isn't hard to imagine politicians grandstanding no matter what Waymo does. If they stop service, and save several hundred thousand dollars in property damage, surely some people will be claiming that Waymo is taking sides, and limiting people's freedom to protest. Or that Waymo is like a utility, and they need to provide service no matter what. What if someone was fleeing riot violence, and they couldn't get a Waymo ride out of the area? Waymo gets a lot more cover if they let a few cars burn first.
Or they are insured, including against loss revenue. If your insurance payout included estimated revenue assuming there weren't riots, then it should be a net positive to operate and just let them burn until they hit their payout cap and then recall them.
As someone that worked half a decade in self-driving, I doubt this is a revenue positive, or even neutral, situation with insurance.
We were insured (at the competitor where I worked) for the cost of the vehicle including lidars etc but there’s an enormous amount of time and employee salary to calibrate each vehicle precisely, in addition to provisioning, backend server setup, etc. etc. Bringing a replacement vehicle online, even while heavily automated, is not free.
I think you could argue that Battlefront 2 allows this kind of asymmetrical multiplayer game.
The heroes on the other side are largely over powered compared to the standard trooper. While everyone wants to play the hero, it takes time to build up points to switch to it. It allows every odd character models, where we have bb8 running around quickly and extremely small hitbox.
I do think there are opportunities in this area. When I play fortnite I get disappointed that everyone has to fit into a specific skeleton. Let games be weird.
Never played Battlefront, but that sounds like a short duration powerup mode?
I was thinking of something like Evolve[0] where it is a 4v1 kind of humans vs monster affair. There are also horror games that follow this formula -one psycho killer vs regular humans. I assume all the fun is being the monster, less amusing to be the weakling running and hiding.
Agree. I've been trying to be more proactive in supporting companies and institutions that are doing important work. That includes news organizations that I was previously using archive.ph to read.
Vote with your dollars (and of course vote with your vote!).
I subscribed the day they launched and haven’t regretted it. They have the best tech reporting and your subscription directly supports the journalists.
Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It’s going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team communication fails.
We're all-in on Teams PLUS have management pushing for "service level objectives" on response time. It's impossible to stay on top of the stream of consciousness posts, impossible to find anything you previously answered or value you know is in there somewhere, impossible to measure response time or take ownership of... (what? a chat?). MS keeps cramming poorly thought out "AI-first" features without addressing things like cameras and mics that randomly stop working, blue screens in the middle of meetings. It's such a garbage piece of software that's now THE foundational infrastructure for so many companies. You'll save $600K on the financials and lose $6M across all the things that won't directly show: poor customer service, churn, slower everything, individual and team frustration... but your VP of IT doesn't pay for that.
The stream of consciousness posts is my pet peeve.
A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time answering the same questions again and again, be my guest, but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the chat history on this can't be followed and there's no forum, so...".
Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats. Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their one message to get the context needed, I just reply with "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's the context?" and make them re-explain it.
My company even recently added AI assist tools for our chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get context for a question I've been asked.
The chat systems are basically like being in a physical room with everyone coming and going and having their own verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take the hint its time to wrap it up.
I worked at a company that went through this. Honestly, it changed the entire mood of the company and working there. We went from thousands of messages per day to something like 10 (of those channels I was part of, at least). People just hated it, and only used it if they really, really needed to. No more bouncing of ideas around, no more ribbing, just the desperate 'who do I talk to about accomplishing X, anyone know?'
A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
I'm no UX expert but I'm going to claim it's because of the UX that Teams doesn't work for so many people, and I'm left wondering why Teams hasn't had a UX overhaul yet.
The other competitor to Slack is Discord, and if you remove the playful "gamer" elements I think it'd be a lot less jarring to people used to Slack, because they follow a lot of similar UX and design patterns.
At one point Discord tried to rebrand into something a bit more serious but it didn't work, but I think they should try again; create a Discord Pro or something like that, get the certifications, add SSO support, etc.
The good thing: When you switch from slack to teams, all channel communications go to 0, because the experience is so dreadful, so you don't get 100 channels to read.
I worry about this too. Diversity is a good thing. And when we do email, DNS, Web, calendars, chat, meetings, storage, etc. all on the same platform, how will we operate/communicate when it fails?
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
Teams is so tightly integrated into the MS ecosystem and 365 that it can essentially bring down email and even office apps. Example: PP decks always want to open in Teams by default; every meeting in outlook wants to be a Teams meeting, etc.
Luckily, short of a DNS or auth problem, my experience is that Teams is just an alternate GUI for what already exists - Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive.
And to be fair, you can just tell Teams to open in the desktop office apps by default (settings > Files and Links), and Outlook has a little radio button to turn off whether meetings are also Teams meetings. All the enterprise productivity apps seem to accumulate complexity and resultant scar tissue, usually in the form of busy settings or painfully opinionated defaults - painful when the defaults don't optimize for your use case.
As if slack was any better. I never understand how people accepted this piece of crappy software for regular communication. I mean it has the populate when scrolling behaviour that everyone hates in website design, but somehow it's acceptable for a chat app where looking at past messages is crucial?! I mean you just displayed those messages to me yesterday, why do you need to reload them from the server today. The amount of space saving compared to the bloated mess that your electron app is can't be worth it?! That would be not so infuriating if the search wasn't so crappy that it's often easier to find things by scrolling.
The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop it opens up on his phone.
I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's core competency right.
It's gonna be terrible. There are so many teams integrations with github, jira, our deployments etc that took busywork off my plate when I was at a slack company and has slowed down me down a ton when I went to a teams org. Sorry man.
I just had to use Slack again after 6 years, and it's incredible how much worse its gotten. Honestly I don't know how they managed to make an industry leading tool actively worse by so much that its now _worse_ than Teams.
Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
I'm not really sure what you mean, I'm also coming back to using Slack for some contracting work after a similar period of time and it seems identical to how it always was to me, definitely feels nicer to me than Teams.
Could you point out what has changed? I guess calls are called "huddles" now for some reason, that's a bit weird but doesn't really bother me.
Yet it's better than every single alternative. Teams is a flaming pile of UX poo. Just like the rest of Microsoft products except Excel and _maybe_ Outlook.
Been using it for over 10 years and I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. I suppose I didn't use the features you're mentioning.
For me, it's basically exactly the same except the sidebar is now wider because of the multi-slack thing, and the home/DMs/activity nonsense bar, which I could do without.
Otherwise it's just channels with messages in them. Which has improved since I started using it, when there were no threads or reactjis.
Sorry if I'm ignorant, but how can slack cost 600k/year? I doubt they wouldn't give some form of deal for bigger companies. I know integrations can sometimes suck up money, but 600k is insane
I poked around with Mattermost like ~8 years ago, but never anything serious. I don't know how good it is now, especially w/r/t administration, but I have to imagine that if you're concerned about $1000s -- let alone $100ks -- in annual costs, you can scale up your storage and still come out _way_ ahead. Maybe that's a naïve take?
i hated using MS Teams (in the past) so much, i would probably look for a new job immediately if my company decided to do this today. I’m not joking in the slightest. And i’m not a slack fan boy, i just dislike MS Teams that much.
These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
So far I write a rough draft in obsidian copy into chatgpt / claude then copy back into obsidian. I'd love a way in app to work in more a fluid way. Much like how Notion has its simple AI actions (improve this writing, etc).
Since the Judiciary seem to be the only ones pushing back against the Federal overreach it makes sense to them go after them first.
I don't expect Congress to start getting arrested until or if they ever do any significant pushback against Trump and his cronies.
This is America now, the land of the lawless and unjust. Prepare accordingly people, if they do not like what you are doing they will use their full power to stop you.
> I don't expect Congress to start getting arrested until or if they ever do any significant pushback against Trump and his cronies
They won't, or they would have done so already. Granted, I'm not an American so I might be seeing things the wrong way from the other side of the planet, but it has been 3 months already, enough time for Congress to at least be seen as doing something, anything.
Almost no one disagrees with enforcing federal immigration law. The pushback has to do with the illegal manner in which it's happening in reality.
One of the most pernicious memes among the pseudo-intellect crowd is isolating an event from its context and then saying "see, not a problem in isolation!" But these things are not happening in isolation.
With high enough levels of motivated pseudo-intellectual dissection, you can portray a fatal car crash as a series of mundane procedural details and then just say "what bearing does the fatality have on it?"
If you have reason to believe that someone will be deprived of due process, which the Trump administration has essentially assured us, then it's a serious ethical violation to allow that to happen in your jurisdiction.
And by the way, the reason why due process is important is that it's all that stands between you and me and a permanent vacation in El Salvador, if we do or say something that offends the Trumpists sufficiently.
If there is an invasion of millions of people, are you suggesting the federal government would have to merely say that you are one of them in order to pack you and your family into an airplane to a foreign slave camp for the rest of their lives, without even giving you an opportunity to argue that you're not one of those "invaders"?
I trust the government to reasonably determine whether someone is an illegal immigrant. The courts can determine if that process is reasonable. I don't think illegal immigrant "invaders" are entitled to due process (especially when they are gang members).
If we didn't have that then we'd have a gaping hole for foreign adversaries to exploit. Send their people to do harm, bog down our courts, and our government has no recourse.
Does every enemy combatant get "due process" when they are engaged by US military personnel? No.
Are police officers required to provide "due process" when using their firearm on a dangerous perp? No.
We entrust them with the agency to act accordingly and there are systems for review.
It was a yes or no question, but hey I guess a comment literally 100% full of incorrect information works too.
> I trust the government to reasonably determine whether someone is an illegal immigrant.
Your trust is demonstrably misplaced. We already know with 100% certainty that American citizens have been detained beyond the permissible 24hr window without charges. We already know with 100% certainty that completely legal immigrants were deported.
> The courts can determine if that process is reasonable
They have. 9 to 0, SCOTUS said the process is not reasonable.
> I don't think illegal immigrant "invaders" are entitled to due process (especially when they are gang members).
Can you show me this carveout in the 14th or 5th Amendments? (You can't)
> Does every enemy combatant get "due process" when they are engaged by US military personnel? No.
Are US military personnel regularly engaging enemy combatants within US jurisdiction under which the 14th and 5th Amendments apply?
And in any case, even abroad: yes there is a process for legally authorizing specific military engagements.
> Are police officers required to provide "due process" when using their firearm on a dangerous perp? No.
Using your firearm on a dangerous perp is only legal in an immediate defense context, it is not a legal punishment for breaking the law.
If you want to use your firearm on a dangerous perp as legal punishment, then yes, they will get due process first. It's called being "sentenced to death," and is pretty much the most elaborate form of due process we have.
> We entrust them with the agency to act accordingly and there are systems for review.
Funny you say that, because the current administration's argument is quite literally the opposite. Their specific legal argument is that courts do not have any right of judicial review over their deportations.
Hey, regardless of your stance on borders and immigration, maybe let's not normalize defending the United State's horrible immigration law enforcement as it stands by doing this weird interrogative gotcha game.
It's patently anti-American to deny people due process. Refusing to give information to fascists who believe they have no restraint of jurisdiction is the lesser of two evils here.
My company did the same thing - come to the office 3x per week.
We came in to the office to find monitors that were old pre-covid.
No office supplies (tissues, mouse pads, batteries, keyboards)
Expired food and beverages from pre-covid
No desks for my teammembers
The work environment was also much worse than before.
Now you get to overhear the executives bragging about their new cars, the golfing trips they are taking while trying to focus on your work.
You have folks taking calls from there desk without even using a headset.
My team productivity has gone down the drain. The business pre-covid was 90% US engineers and during covid we offshored most of everything to india. Now how am I supposed to get my team to have calls with india at early morning and evenings when we are forced to spend an hour just driving to the office.
Hopefully the market self corrects on this and washington posts loses subscribers. Forcing an opinion section to have only opinions you want is just the opposite of its purpose.
What is the end goal there? This is not a situation where the free market has much influence. I don't particularly like the Washington Post. But I doubt that the owner cares much about subscription revenue, nor does he seem interested in selling. And if the whole organization were to wither away due to lack of readers and qualified writers would that be better than the current situation?
I'm not happy about someone losing their job this way, but then again, who reads the Washington Post for the opinion columns? You can get opinions anywhere, and they're often better researched on Substack.
From a purely selfish standpoint as a subscriber, if they axed the entire opinion section and beefed up news coverage, that would be a win.
I stopped subscribing to the NYTimes, when 8 out of 10 "news items" promoted to me through the app were from the opinion columns. Super annoying. I know they rank and promote stuff that's popular, but we don't really need editorials/opinions in the news. It's why all those Fox/MSNBC viewers are confused by their favorite pundits, and mistaking what they say for "news" and "facts".
The other annoying thing now, even publications like NYTimes does is A/B ing inflammatory headlines to get the clicks, even though when you read the article, the facts presented are often different or opposite than the headline enticement.
> if they axed the entire opinion section and beefed up news coverage, that would be a win.
They're kind of doing the opposite though. They're stripping the text-based news coverage and replacing it with short form videos and podcasts.
I agree with you about opinion sections because somewhat worthless today though. The WSJ actually has great news coverage, even though the opinion columns are absolute garbage.
I feel like it's been a long time since newspapers relied on subscribers, or even traditional advertisers. By now they're all loss leaders for the lobbying industry.
The Post has already lost a lot of the subscribers who would leave over something like this, in successive waves after: Bezos spiked the Harris endorsement, the paper blocked a political cartoon depicting Bezos and others bowing down to Trump, and the announcement of this new "two pillars" editorial policy that the blocked editorial here would have commented on. All amid a stream of resignations.
I don't know that the market can all that meaningfully discipline Bezos, even if a response had the kind of direction and magnitude that would. Though he clearly has sought profitability for the paper, running it at a loss is a drop in the bucket financially for him.
The market cant self correct here because the market is broken. Bezos is using his profits from one industry to prop up his unprofitable business in another industry, which also helps from any real competition starting up as they don't have access to Amazon profits
This behavior and its consequences are why people call for monopolies to be broken up
> the paper blocked a political cartoon depicting Bezos and others bowing down to Trump
So are we saying that Bezos is so plugged into the day-to-day operations of WaPo that he can yank the things he doesn't like, or is there some sycophant put in place that pings Bezos when they think it is something Bezos wouldn't like? I can't imagine that Bezos gives a damn enough to be checking in every day before release deadlines while cruising the globe on his super yacht.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally – wisely – left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.
Isn't it even worse if he only checks in after seeing something make it to print that he doesn't like? Then there's a chilling effect where everyone is guessing what might get them fired, and so they add an extra safety margin to their syncophancy and go beyond the minimum needed.
Bezos is exactly involved like this. Just go look at all the headlines at the end of February that was the precursor started all this. He cared enough to censor the opinion columns.
Sorry but I don't think you understand the newspaper business. Bezos bought the entire Washington Post for $250m. Amazon has a market cap of $2T of which Bezos owns ~9%. The capitalist incentives are very clear, the market dictates that Bezos should do practically anything to WashPo to help Amazon. Let's say that WashPo drop to 0 value, that would be a real shame! And I'm sure Jeff would sigh really quite loudly while sailing his megayatch over to Blue Origin where they're working on that $3.4B contract for Nasa that Trump could cancel any minute. That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.
I don't know what you think market forces are going to do here?
> That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.
Nice. I wonder... A Copilot prompt of "[...] Instead of using units of dollars, please use units of "Amazons", where 1 Amazon equals 2 Trillion dollars." gave a plausible result. And country populations in NYC's. The speed of sound is 19 Zebras (at max gallop). Great Oxygenation Event occurred at 8 gal and Cambrian Explosion at 18.5 gal (galactic year). Oscars viewing cost 100 lifetimes, superbowl 650. c is 1800 Gff (gigafurlongs per fortnight). Rewriting problems and text using alternate units. So... how to use this in education?
