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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#131

Post by AmericanChopper »

mattlondon wrote: post #76

I get this problem all the time and I live in "the right" London so it is not just a "nearest London" thing. It is not just digital assistants, but so many other things like Google maps, e-commerce sites, address auto-completes etc seem to assume that I want the North American one with a population of 300k that no one knows about, not the one that everyone has heard of with a population of 9 million. I've always just…

For a lot of products, US sales are just worth so much more than sales from anywhere else, that it is reasonably common to not care much about the rest of the world. I’ve worked for a few companies that started out with a heavy focus on localization, but eventually realized it was just a massive waste of money.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#132

Post by brownbat »

Veen wrote: post #52
jka wrote: post #34

To throw a tongue-in-cheek additional example in here: the population of London, Ontario is (significantly) greater than the population of the City of London, UK. Reality is hard. And with machine learning (especially proprietary, remotely-hosted machine learning) there's rarely a way to pinpoint a line of code and say: "this is what happened and why you're now frustrated and firing hypothetical personal assistants".

Yes, but in the same way people don't usually mean "London, Ontario" when they say London, they also don't usually mean the City of London (which, for the benefit of people who may not know, is a tiny portion of London with a population less than 10,000).

A group of us once tried to rank cities in Europe by population only to realize that most of them are effectively incomparable.

Cities sometimes have clear legal boundaries that feel irrelevant to the question, like the City of London, but more generally have metro areas that sprawl well into an ambiguously defined countryside. There's rarely a "this block is city, the next block over is clearly not" situation, so the number of people you include ends up being pretty arbitrary.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#133

Post by new2628 »

rschoultz wrote: post #50
new2628 wrote: post #6

It is amusing that someone thinking London means London, Canada should be fired for stupidity, but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever) hours to his current time and needs an elaborate device to do it is seen as smart and insightful. This is some pretentious BS.

> who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 [...] As someone who frequently talks to colleagues across timezones that are -9, -2, or +3.5 hours from me, where each of these have different dates for summer time, or don't have summer time, and meeting recurrences gets skewed etc, I don't see how asking about the current time off a location could be seen as "pretentious".

Yes, I do this frequently too, and what I meant to be "pretentious" was not having this problem, but writing a post about it and discussing it on a news site. This is like writing a news story about the lint in my pocket.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#135

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

brnt wrote: post #78
Hamuko wrote: post #11

Same thing happens with Frankfurt. If I order something from Amazon.de, my package usually goes through Frankfurt. When I checked my package tracker app on my iPhone, I was surprised to find out that Frankfurt is actually on the Germany-Poland border. Turns out that if I enter "Frankfurt, Germany" into Apple Maps (which I assume is what the package tracker app does), it takes me to "Frankfurt (Oder), Germany" instead…

If you ever cross the border from Frankfurt/Oder, the first thing you see in Poland is a giant Amazon building. Despite that building being there, Polish people still can't order at Amazon.

Polish people (in fact, people all over the world) can order on Amazon.de, they just can't get the same shipping rates that German customers get.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#136

Post by zeristor »

Veen wrote: post #52
jka wrote: post #34

To throw a tongue-in-cheek additional example in here: the population of London, Ontario is (significantly) greater than the population of the City of London, UK. Reality is hard. And with machine learning (especially proprietary, remotely-hosted machine learning) there's rarely a way to pinpoint a line of code and say: "this is what happened and why you're now frustrated and firing hypothetical personal assistants".

Yes, but in the same way people don't usually mean "London, Ontario" when they say London, they also don't usually mean the City of London (which, for the benefit of people who may not know, is a tiny portion of London with a population less than 10,000).

Just to make things a bit more complicated London has two cities. The City of London, and the City of Westminster, which is also a borough of London.

Two cities in one City; it shouldn't be allowed.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#137

Post by Veen »

dustinmoris wrote: post #124
Veen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to constantly "clarify your thoughts" because your assistant is incapable of basic inferences based on context and general knowledge, then they aren't likely to be much use as an assistant.

Maybe GPS data and the fact that due to a pandemic there's a travel ban the actual intelligent answer is in fact "London, Canada" and only a stupid person would fail to see that? We can spin this all day long. The truth is, if you want a very specific answer, and you fail to ask a specific question, then you're the only one to blame.

How far would you take that though? If I say to my assistant "what time is it?" should I also specify that I mean the time at my current longitude and latitude. If I say "Could you please print this for me," must I specify to print it on the printer in my office and not one in Barcelona, using letter paper, in a font that isn't Comic Sans, and that it shouldn't be thrown in the trash right after it is printed. Or should I assume that a reasonably intelligent person can infer all that?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#138

Post by mattmanser »

He says duckduckgo got it right, but that not true, he got lucky.

When I ask DDG for "the weather in Nottingham", it often answers with the weather of a tiny town in the US, instead of the major city in the UK.

Duckduckgo is also dumb.

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