For a related example, type "11:00 EST to UTC" into Google and DuckDuckGo. Google says 15:00 because it interprets "EST" colloquially as "the current time on east coast US". DuckDuckGo says 16:00 because it interprets EST literally as "the time on east coast when it isn't daylight savings time" (compared to ET or EDT). It isn't clear which behavior is more desirable.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
401–410 of 776 posts
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#402TBH I always feel amazed about how worked up people get about stuff like this, especially people familiar with software who should know that there are millions, maybe billions of edge cases like this in a generic knowledge system, and thus at least it's easy to make a mistake like this. I mean, the time it took him to write his blog post is probably more than all the times it would take him to follow up with "What ti…
Just because it's hard to implement right doesen't mean Apple should get a pass. I mean, they aren't forced to create a voice assistant by regulation. If they can't make a good one, (and this applies to Amazon and Microsoft too) they should have just left it in the lab until they can.
Totally disagree, because the only way these assistants get better is with real-world usage (which is why I can definitely agree that one should wonder why Apple isn't improving as fast as the competition).
It was only a couple years ago that using Google Assistant was an extremely frustrating experience. I'd say it got about 5-10% of my words wrong, which meant it got my intent wrong about 25-35% of the time. These days I find its accuracy uncanny - it almost never makes a mistake with most of my "standard" queries. No way it could have gotten that good without real-world feedback and data.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#403Screenshot: https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1263578310266679296?...
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#404Twice over 5 years I've gotten phone calls involving our CEO and a higher-up at an airline who was absolutely furious that we had been advertising London International Airport (YXU) as somewhere in Canada for a long time. I still remember how funny it was having to tell them to look up YXU on Wikipedia, and that they probably meant to search for "London Heathrow Airport" (LHR). I wonder if we still get those angry calls, but now people know the answer before it reaches me.
I've also made a similar mistake years ago. I was excitedly looking for a nonexistent building in the University of Miami (Florida), because I found online that the Miami University had a star-gazing club open to the public that met at 10pm once a month. Miami University is in Ohio... :(
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#405If I had a factory in London, Kentucky and I worked in Seattle, and I never did business in the UK, then I very well might mean that one. But no, I probably would never mean just the closest London.
This is a hard, hard problem. Names can indicate multiple entities, and it is context-dependent which they mean. Men get this wrong all the time; I see no reason why machines would be better, and plenty of reason that they will be worse in the near-term.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
22 May 2020 09:28:30 +5 is a perfectly unambiguous date stamp for human reading. by all means use iso6081 for everything else, but i genuinely prefer the above in daily human facing use. it’s in commmon use in the US military, and at least passingly common elsewhere. Not something normal people do here, but it’s be nice.
"May" is English, though. Otherwise, good format.
%b
should respect locale.Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it is the norm these days. I’ve been using macs for 15 years and they bave been fantastic until the very last iteration (after 2016, 17). My latest MacBook (16") is so unstable that it is actually funny at this point.
So do people just buy these to look cool? I tried using a Macbook many times, but often got frustrated and went back to my good old Linux laptop for development. Doesn't look quite as slick, but certainly gets the job done.
The MBP was the first laptop I'd used that 1) had a trackpad good enough that I didn't feel like I needed to carry a mouse around to use it for more than 10min at a time, and 2) had battery life good enough that I didn't feel like I needed to take my power supply with me if I'd be away from my desk for more than an hour. It had every port I was likely to need for most tasks. In short, it was the first time I'd used a laptop that was actually usefully portable as a self-contained device. They kinda ruined that appeal by going all-USB-C and The Great Endongling, but that's another story.
It was also very stable, and over time I came to really appreciate the built-in software. Preview's amazing (seriously, never would have thought a preview app would make a whole computing platform "sticky" for me, but here we are, it's that good), Safari's the only browser that seems to really care about power use, terminal's light and has very low input latency, it comes with a decent video editor, an office suite I prefer over anything I've used on Linux, and so on. In short it's full of good-enough productivity software that's also light enough on resources that I don't hesitate to open them, and often forget they're still open in the background.
These days I like having a base OS that's decent, includes the GUI and basic productivity tools, and that's distinctly separate from my user-managed packages (homebrew) rather than having them all mixed up together (yes, I could achieve this on Linux, if it had a core, consolidated GUI/windowing system so various apps weren't targeting totally different windowing toolkits, but it doesn't, so separating a capable and complete GUI "base OS" from the rest of one's packages gets tricky). There are quite a few little nice-to-haves littered around the settings and UI. Most of the software is generally better polished UX wise than Linux or Windows, and that doesn't just mean it's pretty—it performs well and, most importantly, consistently. There are problems and exceptions to "well and consistently" but there are so many more issues on competing platforms that even if it's gotten worse, it's still much nicer to use.
Given the premium on hardware (that's come and gone—at times there almost wasn't one if you actually compared apples to apples [haha], but right now it's large) I'd rather use Linux (or, well, probably a BSD, but that'd mean even more fiddling most likely) but the only times that's seemed to function genuinely well and stably compared to its competition was when I either kept tight control over every aspect of the system (time-consuming, meant figuring out how to do any new thing I needed to do that other systems might do automatically, which wasn't always a great use of time to put it mildly) or in the early days of Ubuntu (talking pre-Pulse Audio, so quite a while ago) which was really sensible, light, and polished for a time.
I do still run Windows only for gaming, and Linux on servers or in GUI-equipped VMs for certain purposes.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#408I 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…
Just to report that it isn't necessarily/solely cultural myopia at work here: I live in Ontario and have family in London, Ontario, and while visiting them with location services on have both asked for and googled "what is the temperature in London, Ontario" (notice that I said the region!), and gotten results for London England. I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.
As best I can tell, New Yekeba is a tiny resettled former mining town with minimal population. There are very few English-language web pages about it. Somehow this ranked higher for Apple's auto-suggest than the most populous city in the US.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#409It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than set timers. Every few months I try to do something else and just get annoyed at how bad it is. Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close…
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#410Interesting. I can see how the basic algorithm might go "I've been asked for the time (or temp or whatever) in cityname. Citynames are routinely reused globally; what is the closest such cityname?" But that fails completely when you get to names like London (or Paris or Moscow or Cairo). But it happens with people, too. I'm from Mississippi, though I haven't lived there since I left for college. I now live in Houston…
To approximate what a human would do, one would presumably want to start by ranking places on a range of dimensions:
* nearest
* biggest (or maybe size category: big city, city, town, village)
* how many times user has asked about this place before
* how recently user last asked about this place
* ...
If most/all these rankings put the same place in the top spot, go for it! Otherwise, ask the user for clarification.