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Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

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Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#391

Post by aftbit »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #253
aftbit wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript thinks that 11 > [11,9,1,3].sort() [ 1, 11, 3, 9 ]

You're getting downvoted because your blatant attempt at language wars has a very simple, logical explanation. If you wanted to use a 'gotcha', there are far better examples.

I was not making an attempt at language wars. I think JS is a perfectly fine language for what it does, warts and all. I was being a bit flippant with my language, but my intent was to point out that `9.11 > 9.8` is not just an LLM thing, and that people who are quick to dismiss LLM usefulness based on contrived math examples do not apply the same rationale to other systems.

I do think that JavaScript's choice to sort numbers lexicographical instead of arithmetically is a bit silly, but of course no language is free from warts. Of course they cannot change it now, because that would break the web. `JSON.stringify` is also pretty silly while we're at it, but Python's `json.dumps` is no better.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#392

Post by aftbit »

recursive wrote: post #293
aftbit wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript thinks that 11 > [11,9,1,3].sort() [ 1, 11, 3, 9 ]

If you want to know whether javascript thinks `11 < 3`, then just evaluate it directly. There is lots of dumb stuff in JS IMO, but be honest about it.

Sure, the real gotcha here is that this:

    const list = [3, 11]
    list.sort()
    console.log(list[0]
logs `false`. JavaScript doesn't "think" anything but its native sort function doesn't do what many people expect it would when called on a list of pure numbers.

If you found this behavior intuitive and unsurprising the first time you saw it, then your brain works differently than mine.

If this happens to be new to you (congrats on being one of today's 10,000), the reason is that JavaScript sorts by converting all elements to UTF-16 strings, except for `undefined` for some reason, which always sorts last. The MDN docs have a very clear explanation. I have been unable to find a historical explanation of why this choice was made, but I presume the initial JS v1 author either had a good reason or just really didn't expect that their language would outlive the job for which it was written.

If this is a bug for you, you can provide a comparison function explicitly and the typical is something like:

    list.sort((a,b)=>a-b)
Somewhat puzzlingly, this will "work" even on lists with mixed number and string like:

    const list = [3, "11", 1, "2", 9, 23]
    list.sort((a,b)=>a-b)
    console.log(list)
    
    [ 1, '2', 3, 9, '11', 23 ]
Because JavaScript goes out of its way to make comparisons like 3 < "11" or "3" < 11 work in the numeric domain. JS only uses string comparison when both sides are strings.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#393

Post by butterisgood »

Haven't had a single positive interaction with Apple Intelligence that I'm aware of so far.

Nor have I had a negative interaction with Apple Intelligence. So I guess that might be a kind of win?

On my Mac mini M4, when I actually want to use it, I can't figure out exactly how haha.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#394

Post by 3vidence »

I think I major issue with LLM based tech to users is that there really isn't a way of declaring what the tech can concretely do.

The camera app? Takes picture, can do night mode photography, boomerang, burst, etc.

The AI magic image / LLM app?? Idk just try stuff as a user until you can somewhat find the bounds of it.

This is a similar issue to what lead to great hype and then fall behind voice assistants but to an even greater extent.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#395

Post by recursive »

aftbit wrote: post #392
recursive wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to know whether javascript thinks `11 < 3`, then just evaluate it directly. There is lots of dumb stuff in JS IMO, but be honest about it.

Sure, the real gotcha here is that this: const list = [3, 11] list.sort() console.log(list[0] logs `false`. JavaScript doesn't "think" anything but its native sort function doesn't do what many people expect it would when called on a list of pure numbers. If you found this behavior intuitive and unsurprising the first time you saw it, then your brain works differently than mine. If this happens to be new to you (cong…

I do not think it's intuitive. The reason it works for mixed arrays is that the minus operator coerce operands to numbers. However if the strings fail to convert to a numeric value, the output is arguably even less sensible. I'd imagine that's why it is.

It may have been thought that js would be more likely to be dealing with strings arrays.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#396

Post by jakemauer »

baggy_trough wrote: post #38

The Message suggestions are insultingly awful. And I can't find a way to turn them off.

The suggestions are terrible and insensitive at worst and benign at best. No matter what they're distracting. There doesn't seem to be a way to turn them off, you have to turn off Apple Intelligence as a whole on the device. As long as I can't turn this stupid feature off on its own, Apple Intelligence will remain disabled.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#397

Post by leoedin »

cyberpunk wrote: post #284
graemep wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my immediate reaction. Accounting has to follow very strict rules and needs some application of judgement. It might answer questions in a useful way, but you have to make sure you understand the answers and that they match accounting standards or tax rules (and one danger, at least in some places, is that they are different and you might apply the wrong one).

I couldn’t be arsed typing a reference number into my online banking for a bill payment the other and it was a copy protected pdf, so I fired a screenshot into Claude and GPT and asked it to extract the details I need and both of them repeatedly got the OCR wrong. I don’t trust these at all for anything apart from code which I can at least read/rewrite. It’s quite nice for unit tests I guess. And weird k8s manifests…

I needed to normalise a big list of dates recently. I thought maybe GPT could help. It spat out a list of normalised dates which, after a bit of careful reading, were about 95% right.

How can you trust a tool that's right 95% of the time? In the end I wrote a script which handled edge cases explicitly. That took a little bit longer, but the output is deterministic. It took less time than manually cross referencing the output and input would have.

I tried asking GPT to write the conversion script instead, but the script it generated just didn't deal with the edge cases. After a few rounds of increasingly specific directions which didn't seem to be helping, I gave up.

I've been using copilot for development work. It has some magic moments, and it can be great for boilerplate. But then it introduces subtle bugs which are really hard to catch in review, or suggests completely incorrect function signatures and I wonder if it's adding very much at all.

The biggest problem with these tools is that they turn a fun problem solving exercise into an incredibly tedious reviewing exercise. I'd much rather do it myself and understand it fully than have to review the unreliable output of an LLM. I find it much simpler to be correct than to find flaws in other peoples work.

Am I missing something?

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#398

Post by nunez »

bangaroo wrote: post #218

Apple Intelligence is kind of uniquely bad. I don't understand how, but its AI message summaries often completely flip the meaning of texts I've received. I've gotten summaries that say "X person hates Y" and I read the message and it's them talking about how much they love it. It is impressively, wildly inaccurate. It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase…

This happened to me!

We were discussing a book that I didn't like in a book club Slack thread. I mentioned how I'm against AI in general. Someone in the channel showed me an Apple Intelligence summary of the notifications from that thread, and it concluded that I disliked the entire book club channel, which wasn't true!

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#399

Post by nunez »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #381
bangaroo wrote: post #218

Apple Intelligence is kind of uniquely bad. I don't understand how, but its AI message summaries often completely flip the meaning of texts I've received. I've gotten summaries that say "X person hates Y" and I read the message and it's them talking about how much they love it. It is impressively, wildly inaccurate. It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase…

I’m not shocked they shipped. This is their mo now. Same as the apple maps rollout. Big fanfare about some feature competitors already had that apple would clone and do it better because apple. Apple releases it and its laughably worse. Apple wins the long game for some users because they privilege their app in the os relative to the third party option. And repeat for next feature.

Apple Maps in particular frustrates me. It's integrated extremely deeply into the OS in ways that Google Maps can't take advantage of. Navigation on lock screen and built-in guidance on Apple Watch (versus having to use notifications).

As a result, users are "forced" to use Apple Maps if they want these very useful integrations. While I think Apple Maps is much better designed than Google Maps, this advantage is anti-competitive as hell.

It's a smaller version of the IE problem that got Microsoft in hot water, and yet it persists unabated.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#400

Post by nunez »

nozzlegear wrote: post #311

Lots of negative comments on this story so far. I've enabled Apple Intelligence and don't have anything negative to say except that it's difficult to figure out where I can and can't use it when I want to. It mostly stays out of the way, and when I do notice it it's been useful, which imo is about exactly what I want in an AI product built into the OS. My favorite feature has to be the email summarization thing. When…

I can't get with summarization features. It's letting an app decide what's important enough for you to know about without knowing what you would consider important (which can change depending on loads of factors). It's too easy to miss key details.
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