[HN Gopher] A notification for you, Apple: There is no husband
___________________________________________________________________
A notification for you, Apple: There is no husband
Author : zdw
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-01-18 00:53 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (techthings.cmail20.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techthings.cmail20.com)
| ggm wrote:
| I am probably suffering confirmation bias. But that said, this
| LLM smartness continues to be impressively shit. There's a level
| of "yea that's cool" but it's outweighed by "that'd be wrong, and
| suggests you understand nothing about me or my data"
|
| It's a little (ok a lot) like targeted ads. I'll believe it's
| targeted when it tries to sell me ancillary, related goods for
| e.g. that fridge freezer I bought, not show me ads for fridge
| freezer I now don't need.
| 112233 wrote:
| Yeah, framing is the key. Put LLM in autocomplete, and it is
| "oh wow this thing reads my mind". Present it as an expert
| counselor and "this stupid bot does not know we have no bridge
| in our city" or something.
| ben_w wrote:
| Likewise, I do wonder how much of my _enthusiasm_ is
| confirmation bias. Could it just be a Clever Hans? I think it
| has to be at least a little smarter than that, even just to get
| code that _usually_ compiles, but still, I am aware that it may
| be more smoke and mirrors than it feels like, that I may be in
| the cargo cult, metaphorically putting a paper slip into the
| head of a clay golem shaped like Brent Spiner.
|
| Targeted ads are a useful reference point. A decade back,
| everyone was horrified (or amazed) by that story of
| supermarkets knowing some teenager was pregnant before their
| father did. But today... the category in which your fridge
| example is, is the best it gets for me -- even Facebook, for
| the most part, is on-par with my actual spam folder, with ads
| for both boob surgery and dick pills, ads for lawyers based in
| a country I don't live in who specialise in giving up a
| citizenship I never had, recommendations for sports groups
| focusing on a sport I don't follow in a state I've never
| visited of a country I haven't set foot in since 2018. Plus,
| very occasionally, ads for things I already have.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I'm sorry Gal, you have a husband now.
| Prosammer wrote:
| I'm a big fan of LLMs generally, but does anyone even want
| incoming texts summarized like this? Like even if they were
| accurate summaries, seeing "Wife expresses frustration with her
| husband's messiness" is a lot less fun than "Clean up your
| clothes, dipshit".
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| My wife loves to carpet bomb messages and the summary is often
| useful to glance at to see how important they are. But the
| inaccuracy prevents it from being useful and I'll often open
| the entire stream of thought even though I don't have time
| between meetings.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| > I don't have time between meetings
|
| [guillotine raises]
| carbocation wrote:
| I turned these summaries off, but then turned them back on
| because I find them humorous.
|
| A bit notable: the AI summarization of spam texts makes them
| seem much more credible.
| timewizard wrote:
| There is no 'ironic user only' option in the analytics.
|
| There probably should be.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I find the whole summarization use case completely misses the
| mark. If a message is from someone I want to hear from, just
| give it to me verbatim. Otherwise, give me tools to delay/down-
| prioritize/ignore their messages.
|
| I get the sense that making group chats silent by default would
| have a more useful impact on notification overload than AI
| summaries.
| HnUser12 wrote:
| I also find it useful for group texts when a long conversation
| happens. Easier to get an idea when I don't care to join in.
| Another use case for me is image descriptions, particularly in
| carplay.
| mattclarkdotnet wrote:
| The entertainment value for me is in seeing these features
| turned in by Apple/Meta/Google and then working backwards to
| the real use cases they must be seeing. They simply wouldn't do
| it if people didn't want it, hence lots of people want it.
| You're all weirdos.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I don't want any incoming texts at all if they are trivial
| complaints that can wait until we see each other in person and
| can actually have a conversation. Now if the AI could judge
| "this isn't an emergency" and just present the messages at the
| end of the day, or at least when I'm not otherwise busy, that
| might be something.
| astrange wrote:
| It's useful for multiple texts. Single ones not so much.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| Summarization model is crap, so it needs to be used for crap.
| Like Trump news, or latest office slack drama. I want the
| messages from my loved ones unabridged. Right now, Apple is
| unable to discern these use cases.
| sen wrote:
| It's probably my favorite of the AI features on Apple devices
| now.
|
| My wife and I both have a habit of sending multiple small
| messages rather than a large one. Probably because we both used
| IRC extensively on the past and grew up on length-limited
| SMSes. The summaries are very very handy at letting me glance
| at my notification's and see if anything in her last x messages
| needs a reply now or whether it's just "chat".
|
| I've found LLM summaries of stuff in general to be one of the
| handiest uses of it personally.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| I wonder how long it will take for "guaranteed AI-free!" to
| become a serious marketing argument for some products or
| services.
| ragazzina wrote:
| As someone who has shopped for a dumb TV, this may very well
| never happen.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. Undiscerning shoppers hear "Smart" TV and
| either assume it's better or buy whatever's put in front of
| them most loudly without even wondering if it's better or
| not. Those same people will ensure that AI products are
| successful and alternatives will similarly disappear.
| chgs wrote:
| People buy the cheapest option.
|
| Two identical TVs the same size and make, one "smart", one
| not. The smart is $10 cheaper, people go for that.
| shmeeed wrote:
| This. And the smart one is cheaper because it's a
| collection device for data on you that they can sell.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Products no, I don't think that will happen. The market will
| be so small and manufacturers won't service that market due
| to cost. For services, maybe. I can see a bank or an ISP
| advertise with "No AI customer service, only real people" and
| especially elderly paying extra for that service.
|
| One thing that I do wonder about is the value in adding AI
| and "Smartness", what if people don't use it? I know
| practically no one who uses their smart TV as anything but a
| monitor (and speakers). Everyone adds an AppleTV or a
| ChromeCast. My in-laws used Netflix on their Sony TV for a
| bit, but it was slow and two years ago Netflix stopped being
| supported on their TV and I gave them an old ChromeCast.
| Backed in AI could easily end up in the same situation. It's
| omni-present, but rarely used. That's a problem with the
| current logic behind innovation where little market research
| is done and companies are afraid to remove functionality as
| it may make them look less competitive (in the eyes of
| shareholders).
|
| Someone point out that apparently Romanian online electronics
| retailers have a pretty nice selection of dumb TVs, at least
| they did a few years ago.
| xethos wrote:
| The OEMs don't care Netflix is no longer supported -
| they're OCR'ing, hashing, and selling what you're watching
| either way. They only need you to care enough to hook it up
| to the internet in the first place so they can sell what
| their users are watching
| 112233 wrote:
| I am surprised the artist/handcraft community has not yet
| agreed on a way to signal that, given the strong sentiment.
|
| It totally would make sense in, e.g. art or photography (or,
| strangely, crocheting) circles to show that this image of a
| mouse was not vomited by an ML that had eaten too much LAION
| wongarsu wrote:
| Photography has C2PA to have a cryptographically verifiable
| chain of provenance for images. That way you can see what
| camera took the image and which edits were done.
|
| It's fairly new, but with the mess around stock photo sites
| having undeclared AI images I wouldn't be surprised if it
| sites eventually showcase this information
|
| https://c2pa.org/
| 112233 wrote:
| This is an excellent thing to have with a very narrow usage
| (e.g. journalism)
|
| I do not see this getting into consumer phone images,
| screenshots or such things.
|
| Also, c2pa as done by Adobe simply records signed list of
| what AI tools were used, and, since they are pushing AI
| into everything, good luck deriving anything useful from
| that list of modifications.
|
| Also, I've seen a few photographers on internet on one hand
| hating AI with all their might, and on other proudly
| sharing their "technique" of upscaling blurry mess photos
| to huge sizes using Topaz Labs. I mean...
| darknavi wrote:
| > If you still have problems with it, turn it off... Have I done
| that? No, of course not. He may be messy and lack common sense,
| but that's no reason for me to kill my husband!
|
| I know this is probably a joke but it reminds me of the moral
| questions that appear in the Apple TV+ show Severance. The idea
| of turning off a feature being compared to "killing" someone
| reminds me of the innie/outtie moral quandaries.
| golly_ned wrote:
| I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple's AI/ML organization.
|
| It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and
| cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words
| long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly
| glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic
| for that year's WWDC -- in my year it was "privacy-preserving
| ML". At least four of five teams that I knew of.
|
| They have too much money and don't want to do layoffs because
| they're afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever
| doing next to nothing, since it's their brand and high-margin
| hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple
| culture to "go with the flow", a refrain I heard many times,
| which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while
| layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the
| engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I'd love to hear from anyone else who work(s/ed) at Apple to
| confirm or deny this story.
| rustystump wrote:
| Can confirm.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software
| org at large?
|
| I feel like every large company has a former employee who
| can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing,
| there's people playing politics, and there's too much
| bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just
| from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple
| versus the other behemoths.
|
| Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships
| quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating
| systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some
| extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS,
| iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry
| significant overhead.
|
| Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty
| impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated
| features at scale that work across watches, phones, and
| laptops--AI notification slop aside.
| exBarrelSpoiler wrote:
| Apple is a huge organization with a lot of internal
| variance. Knew someone doing localization testing for
| Siri and reported severe understaffing issues. There are
| some very small teams with crucial tasks that are badly
| under-resourced.
| dep_b wrote:
| These happen to be the Xcode and macOS-parts-not-copied-
| from-iOS teams?
| rustystump wrote:
| To be clear, I was _not_ in the AI /ML org but the news
| org so make of that what you will. I can also confirm a
| similar and at times even more bonkers experience.
|
| I also think it is expected for any sufficiently large
| bureaucracy. Scale is hard.
| mattnewton wrote:
| One of my coworkers at Apple once wondered aloud to his
| manager "What does anyone actually have to do around here to
| get fired?!" (About a coworker who effectively only made work
| for other people)
|
| There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you
| were likable and didn't leak you could work there seemingly
| forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying
| the "do your life's work" pitch.
|
| I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you
| could get fired was becoming the "directly responsible
| individual" for something important to a senior person and
| dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior
| people didn't trust or care about that there was ample
| opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed
| your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to
| catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me
| did.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| Wonder if that's still the case today when seemingly every
| software company has now been laying people off en masse
| for the better part of three years.
|
| That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest"
| in the late 2010s.
| msephton wrote:
| Can confirm. I was a Technology Evangelist (adjacent t,o but
| not the same as, Developer Relations) for certain web and app
| technologies.
|
| The dept I reported to was laid-off en mass in
| late-2015/early-2016.
|
| I interviewed for the iOS design team later that year and
| after several months and two interviews was ghosted and never
| heard from them again.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Apple also cultivates "pets" who suck, but for some personal-
| connection or political reason have received or curried favor
| that results in them being retained and even promoted through
| Apple's organization despite high-profile and embarrassing
| failures. See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
|
| When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that
| someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers
| clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from
| experience.
|
| Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its
| products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the
| company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor.
|
| And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping
| quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI"
| BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple
| blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all
| your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for
| a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES
| THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a
| different time zone.
|
| There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN
| ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel
| east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because
| Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it
| LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but
| that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free
| pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?
| gffrd wrote:
| That does seem like it would be confusing, especially the
| first time around.
|
| That said, you are able to fix your calendar to a specified
| time zone: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-
| display-even...
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a
| time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change
| it. If your appointments involved other people and you had
| sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong
| time.
| pmontra wrote:
| Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the
| one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time
| zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be
| possible to set the time zone explicitly.
|
| I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is
| that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00
| AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see
| 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight
| and at destination.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Many people enter appointments without enough detail to
| say it is not going to be held at your current location.
| e.g for a planned vacation "3pm check for concert
| tickets", which will indeed stay at PST and show up on
| your phone at 6pm in New York.
| cosmotic wrote:
| It could theoretically use the location field to show a
| warning like "Which time zone, current or event
| location?"
| lores wrote:
| It's trivial to consider any event that did not specify a
| time zone to happen at local time, wherever that is, and
| not change its time when the phone's zone changes.
| Business software will set a zone, self-entered or casual
| appointments won't, so that matches usage. At worst,
| display a warning sign on the calendar entry. The default
| is "do no harm", not "we didn't know you didn't mean us
| not to do harm".
| jen20 wrote:
| What if I have two devices in different time zones?
| Should such an event show up at different times on each?
| kruuuder wrote:
| > The calendar thing is working correctly.
|
| Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously
| not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create
| "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.
|
| In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local
| timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee
| at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the
| morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the
| exception for me, not the default.
|
| There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for
| that, and Apple offers none.
| louis-paul wrote:
| It is possible on macOS with the Floating time zone:
| https://support.apple.com/en-
| gb/guide/calendar/icl1035/mac#i...
|
| This doesn't look possible on the iOS/iPadOS Calendar
| apps.
| ben_w wrote:
| > See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
|
| > When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that
| someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry?
|
| For this specific example, their stock price went up from
| "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of
| dollars" in Ive's time.
|
| It would take a lot to upset the investors, given the overall
| win rate.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > For this specific example, their stock price went up from
| "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of
| dollars" in Ive's time.
|
| Presumably plenty of people were employed in that
| timeframe.
| ben_w wrote:
| Of course. But if you want to get the investors to force
| a change, the stock price has to go down.
|
| Even if it does go down, that doesn't mean the investors
| will blame the right person -- there's a reason why the
| English language retains the phrase "scape-goat" -- but
| it has to go down or the investors will say "why would I
| change this?"
|
| Edit: I originally phrased this as "if you want to get
| kick-back from the investors", turns out "kick-back"
| doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
| golly_ned wrote:
| Agreed on the "pets" idea. I've even seen this from former
| Apple tech leaders. I've been one of the "pets" and it
| benefitted my career tremendously and, frankly, above my
| capabilities at the time; yet it gave me the opportunity to
| step in and fill out bigger shoes.
|
| When I was there the stance on "intelligence" was that Apple
| doesn't advertise itself as "AI" or "ML". It just builds good
| products by any means and if it happens to use particular
| technologies, then fine. Not so anymore.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Based on the FHE work being done at Apple, I wouldn't say the
| organization is completely ineffective as an outsider. Based on
| this, is it fair to say that the issue is of dead weight in the
| company?
| ksec wrote:
| FHE as in fully-homomorphic encryption ?
| cultureulterior wrote:
| Was interviewing for a role. Interviews lasted for 7 months
| total, 12 interviews, for 2 teams, and then they closed the
| roles and didn't hire anyone. Not really impressed by Apple.
| seec wrote:
| I had a similar story. But it makes sense. Because of the
| image and brand value they project, they get a lot of people
| who just want to work for them because of that. Thus, they
| have a lot of options and can be wasting people's time
| without much downside since they have the bankroll to finance
| all that inefficiency. But it's really not fair for the
| people applying, that's for sure.
|
| In any case, I don't think it's worth applying for a job at
| Apple unless you already are a well-known (semi)authority in
| your field so you can have a minimum amount of power to
| somewhat dictate the terms. Apple treats their supplier very
| badly, there is no reason they would do otherwise with people
| they don't really need.
|
| If Apple were to be personified it would be the narcissistic
| mean girl that is extremely popular because of her beauty.
| clort wrote:
| That reminds me of the Microsoft of 20+ years ago, I remember
| reading an interview with Bill Gates where he had been
| frustrated with something in the new software and tried to
| pursue getting it fixed, but was stonewalled and diverted until
| he simply gave up. Contrasting this with Steve Jobs reportedly
| being a massive dickhead, barging into developer offices,
| shouting and screaming and firing people who didn't jump to do
| what he wanted immediately, but the Apple software worked and
| didn't have the cruft in the end.
| Someone wrote:
| Possibly "Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker"
| (https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-
| mov...)
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Something that amuses me is that this method _demonstrably
| works_ , but is unpleasant to almost everybody involved.
| Fundamentally, kicking people up the ass is... not nice.
| However, it _must_ be done, because otherwise large
| organisations have a natural tendency towards disorder and
| indolence.
|
| Whenever you hear people bitching about CEOs like Jobs,
| Bezos, or Musk, just keep in mind that most people's opinions
| are second-hand from _people who got their arse kicked_.
|
| Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this
| exact attitude.
| seec wrote:
| Yep and this is why many modern organizations are going to
| shit. Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but
| also very often punished. You need to have a lot of power
| to get away with it. In my opinion all of this comes from
| submitting from the feminine way of working. Most women get
| shit done from men just by asking nicely (even when it's
| not really in their interest). Then they wrongly assumed
| that is how everything should work and pushed the "asking
| nicely" way of working everywhere.
|
| Here is some anecdote. In in youth, I learned/played the
| french horn. Most of my teachers where nice feminine men, I
| was making progress but very slowly. But one year I got a
| guy that was out of the army music, he didn't take bullshit
| and forced me to work in a way the others never did. This
| year my progress was orders of magnitude better than any
| other year. At the time I thought he was a bit of an
| asshole, but now I know that if I had to choose, I would
| rather have someone like him. I quit french horn 3 years
| after, there were many reasons but not having a strong
| inspiring teacher was one of them for sure.
| ksec wrote:
| >Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but
| also very often punished.
|
| Well the pendulum is swinging back. But it is going to
| take at least 10-15 years. As with everything we need
| both, and use them when ever it is appreciate.
| moogly wrote:
| > Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this
| exact attitude.
|
| Everything is permitted if someone gets fabulously rich in
| the end. Got it.
| Neonlicht wrote:
| Haha isn't that how Americans measure happiness? Like how
| in Eastern Germany the news always talked about
| increasing grain harvests American news always talks
| about how many billionaires get invited to Trump's
| inauguration party.
|
| You can live in a trailer park next with your meth
| addicted family but Musk is getting richer.
| timewizard wrote:
| > a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too
| large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean
|
| This is what a "job security fortress" looks like when
| management has more money and less sense than they know what to
| do with.
|
| > a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little
| detriment.
|
| They need to rethink their entire strategy. What on earth
| possessed them to believe I wanted "summaries" of
| communications which have an average length of far less than
| 100 words anyways.
|
| If "prompt engineering" and "phantom husbands" are a thing you
| don't have a viable mass market product.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI.
| Everyone is building out capabilities so they can quickly
| implement one when it arrives, while they fool around with
| various silly applications in the meantime. Currently text
| summarization (as realized) isn't the killer app, but Apple
| is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.
| timewizard wrote:
| > Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI.
|
| There's literally millions of them. The gulf is that the
| current technology cannot possibly do any of those things.
|
| > Everyone is building out capabilities
|
| They're burning billions on a method that has already
| started showing diminishing returns. There's no exponential
| growth on the horizon with the current stack.
|
| > while they fool around with various silly applications in
| the meantime
|
| If you told me this was your business plan I would short
| everything of yours I could.
|
| > but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure
| nonetheless.
|
| An infrastructure that will be outdated and unjustifiably
| expensive in 5 years. It's like we're pretending that the
| history of business for all time has nothing to do with the
| business of AI.
|
| Those unwilling to stare history in the face will be eaten
| by it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This would be an Apple Maps-level disaster, if people actually
| relied upon smartphone A.I. features for day to day use.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| As I said a while back Apple is also dying.
| mcphage wrote:
| Who isn't, these days?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Microsoft
| npteljes wrote:
| Having some problems is not dying. Also, in what way would
| Apple be dying? What quality of it do you see as in being in an
| irrecoverable decline?
| gklitz wrote:
| > Apple's AI tools were built with responsible AI principles to
| avoid perpetuating stereotypes and systemic biases.
|
| This is either a straight up lie or an extreme stretching of the
| truth.
|
| This is from the Danish models but literally this is what it puts
| as autocomplete for "woman are ..."
|
| > woman we not worth as much as men
|
| And it's not a one off. It's been going around social media that
| autocomplete for a long range of other initial phrases are just
| as stereotypically chauvinistic or racist. It's pretty clear that
| no effort was taken at all to sanitize the models.
|
| And no, it's not using your chat history, though it used to do
| this. Which just makes things worse as there things are being
| spread because everyone who draws attention to it on things like
| Facebook are immediately accused of being a racists or
| chauvinist.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-20 23:03 UTC)