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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#241

Post by buildbot »

dididn284d wrote: post #215
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs. "Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.

I think this is a naming problem. CLI is usually the name for the interface to an application. A Shell is the interface to the OS. Nonetheless agree with your post but this might be part of the difficulty in the discussion

To be super pedantic, wouldn’t the interface to a shell itself be a Command Line Interface? ;)

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#242

Post by venturecruelty »

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

So now can we all agree that voice interfaces are mostly useless? Other than "Siri, set a timer for ten minutes" while your hands are full in the kitchen. Siri could never work because voice interfaces are not good.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#243

Post by philistine »

andy_ppp wrote: post #125

My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.

Indeed, the UI designers are 100% transferable to AI R&D.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#244

Post by venturecruelty »

scoot wrote: post #139
kshacker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while. If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single func…

Why on earth would you want to accelerate, brake, and steer by voice?

"Car, turn right. Shit, no left, left!" slams into wall

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#245

Post by venturecruelty »

nahikoa wrote: post #224
drewg123 wrote: post #181

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

I had a nearly identical anecdote. I was driving my car to work soon I had moved to the Bay Area. I wanted to know what city I was currently on. "Hey Siri, what city am I in?" "Calling Ian"

Was Ian able to help, at least?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#246

Post by jkestner »

ianferrel wrote: post #71
elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement. Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not: 1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri is my…

I would love to know why Siri has clearly deteriorated. I assume it’s opaquely failing due to server infrastructure not keeping up. Thought device-side was supposed to help with that. That’s another thing I’d like to understand — what are the moving parts to Siri?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#247

Post by dididn284d »

buildbot wrote: post #241
dididn284d wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a naming problem. CLI is usually the name for the interface to an application. A Shell is the interface to the OS. Nonetheless agree with your post but this might be part of the difficulty in the discussion

To be super pedantic, wouldn’t the interface to a shell itself be a Command Line Interface? ;)

that’s the ambiguity that I think is tripping the discussion up a little. Also the idea of a CLI/Shell/Terminal is also quite coupled to a system, rather than services. Hence the whole ‘web service’ hope to normalise remote APIs that if you squint hard enough become ‘curl’ on the command line

But the point is none of that is intrinsic or interesting to the underlying idea, it’s just of annoying practical relevance to interfacing with APIs today

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#248

Post by nerdponx »

discordance wrote: post #183
drewg123 wrote: post #181

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

It's always shocked me how dogshit Siri is. I run into this one every day: "Siri, play some music" "Sorry you will need to unlock your phone to do that" "Siri, play some music"

I wish I could speak my unlock code so I didn't have to, you know, take my eyes off the road in order to play music or change my GPS destination or something like that.

I'm not saying that way to solve a problem, but I refuse to believe that it has to be as bad as it is. The worst part is that it's still better than the alternative of leaving the iOS ecosystem.

Apple is just so bizarre in general. I would say "nowadays" but I think they have always been like this. It took them how many decades to add a unit converter to the iPhone? And after all that time, they buried it in a menu in the Calculator app?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#249

Post by heresie-dabord »

QuercusMax wrote: post #205
gdiamos wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iphone is so useful they can probably ride it for a couple more decades at least. I would still buy it. From a technology or engineering perspective, I have no idea how to work with Apple.

MacOS (or whatever they're calling it now) for all its faults is still probably the best desktop OS for getting things done without having to fiddle around much. ChromeOS is close but still so far in many ways. And for audio production - I'm just a dabbler, really, but I've been able to do some really impressive things with just GarageBand and a Fender Mustang Micro amp-plug over USB-C. It "just works" unlike my expe…

> ChromeOS is close but still so far in many ways.

I continue to be impressed by ChromeOS. With the Linux development environment (Debian VM), it is a brilliant work environment.

Add Android apps as well and ChromeOS is an awesome convergence platform. There are Chromebooks that are high enough quality that I don't miss anything about Apple OS or Microsoft Windows.

> And for audio production

For specialty use-cases, driver support will favour Windows and Apple OS.

And gaming is still Windows-first, although Linux is improving.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#250

Post by epistasis »

highwaylights wrote: post #100
epistasis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going…

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating. I’m looking at you, Photos sync. EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right ( h…

I don't even use Photos, except in extreme situation. It was such a major UX downgrade from iPhoto that I could never get it to work without lots of mystery meat guessing, and every interaction with it was so unpleasant because of that.

Knowing that a company had competent product designers that made a good product, but then shitcanned the working product for a bunch of amateur output from people that don't understand dry very basics of UI, from the one company that made good UI its primary feature for decades... well it just felt like full on betrayal. The same thing happened with absolutely shitty Apple Music, which I never, ever use, because it's so painful to remember what could have been with iTunes...

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