So far, Google has been better than Apple at treating AI as a technology/feature and not just a product. Staying on hold for you. Google Lens on that coat or bag. Warning you in the middle of a text convo with a stranger, if the conversation veers into typical scam patterns. Better text/email spam detection than Apple. Hanging up spoofed calls posing as your bank. Magic Cue. Magic Eraser. Better transcriptions and tr…
google models have horrible personalities. i feel like i am talking to a disinterested dmv worker.
If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a car, you win. If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a trebuchet, you lose, no matter how fast the trebuchet would technically get them to their destination.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. You want iPhones to be able to differentiate and find clean bathrooms on the fly?
No I want iPhones to solve real problems users have rather than pretend my entire life happens inside a 7" screen. "You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
So you want your phone to transform into a toilet??
AI harbours evil, because unskilled people tend to trust it blindly. People have already been evicted, arrested and harassed by police simply because they choose to trust technology that flags or "recognizes" them, with no proof that they can trust it. This happens automatically. Thus, AI should be treated as potentially malicious, especially when it is sold as neutral.
do computers harbor evil? the thing AI runs on? the thing that has kind of facilitated all the bad things you mentioned with normal boring algorithms? does electricity harbor evil?
That's just asinine. You understood the point perfectly.
Steve already gave away the secret [1] (must watch) a long time ago: "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." AI was never going to be on Apple's roadmap in a significant way because it's in their DNA to differentiate technology from products. [1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=ndUU1H5D3pNifWss
> "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." Ok. Let's try that with some basic needs. And I'm totally serious. Let's go. I am abroad, walking in a city. I look for a book store. I get my Apple phone, open maps, OK, that works. Now I have to go to the bathroom. Hmm, is there an app for that? How do I convert this phone into a nice and clean toilet? Stupid question you say? I'm the user, remember, and…
Wouldn't there just be signs pointing to a public bathroom if you're abroad in a city? This is an utterly bizarre contrivance.
Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. Theyve been shoving random AI usecases down their users throats with no regard for whether it works for the users flow or not. When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Claude code is the best in this right now, probably because the engineers themselves are users. This isnt unprecedented, its wha…
>Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. They lost the plot long ago. They're firmly in extraction mode now: how much value can they get from end-users?
Like many new things, or newly marketed things, the natural acceptance factor is lower than the proponents would need in order to fulfill their dreams.
Beyond that though is the dream that highly persuasive efforts will be effective at overcoming hesitation and converting it into new desires and preferences. Like the way it has worked under so many situations. But with survivor bias firmly in mind, those are the orgs where no miracle was actually required before it could lead to a windfall.
Please go on. You mean at Amazon you would be grilled with questions if you were the presenter?
Standard procedure at the time for a meeting was: - no PowerPoint - 1-6 page write up of the problem, proposed solution and timeline, and alternate methods that were not chosen - meeting participants ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence to read and mark up their thoughts. - presenter says their piece, mostly just summarizing the paper and clarifying tricky sections - intellectual bl…
We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my company. The most senior people are given the floor and they usually spout nonsense because they haven't had time to read the doc, are miles away from the intellectual details, are too busy playing office politics, etc. And then there's just as much meeting gamesmanship as before. I was hoping decision would be more scientific but that just hasn't happened. Maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe we've hired the Amazon rejects. I don't know. Hoping it improves.
> It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right. I just opened the Uber app. The first thing that pops up is a search bar that says "Where to?". I entered a destination address. Next thing it showed was a map with a path to my destination and nearby cars, and buttons where I can choose my type of…
Did you ever take Uber in a unfamiliar place? When you're supposed to be at a particular spot but you don't know where that is? When the driver doesn't speak English very well? When both your hands is busy with luggages? When you need glasses to read signs? That's very common when you travel. Agent would be godsend, and once you're used to it, you don't want to go back to the phone. Anywhere. What if the agent can al…
Yes I have traveled to places where I don’t speak the language, need to get an Uber at a specific place, and need to read the signs. You can get surprisingly far if you know a few words in the local language, and in your hypothetical future, even if you and the driver have an agent, what are you going to do if you need to communicate with someone in person that’s not that driver? Ask your agent to? I don’t see how that’s a feasible idea.
If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a car, you win. If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a trebuchet, you lose, no matter how fast the trebuchet would technically get them to their destination.
Also, some people just want a faster horse
Yes, don't forget if the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a faster horse you still win.
And you may be able to sell them what they are already asking for a lot faster than what they are not.
Now if you are trying to sell them something that they would rather not even have at all, that's another story too.
> This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language. Isn’t this the proverbial ”faster horse”? Ie let me do exactly what I can do now, in a very slightly different, possibly very slightly more convenient way?
A car is still a faster horse in the sense that you decide where to go with it. It doesn’t outsource decisions to somewhere else. (Arguably the car affords you better control than an unruly horse. Self-driving cars are moving us closer to the horse again. ;))
>Self-driving cars are moving us closer to the horse again.
Maybe there is some parallel to the way that AI is moving "cutting edge" programming closer to the mainframe/dumb-terminal paradigm.