Will be funny when I can call the Office of Weights and Measures on Anthropic because they underweighted the model I was paying for and got pwned because the dumber one missed something.
I didn't really see anything that knocked my socks off. Mostly, it's the promise that Siri now works in the way in which they said it would work a few years ago, when it didn't. I do like the addition of Siri in the context menu, though. I can see that being useful.
It’s the same broken promise every year. All I want is for Siri to set an alarm and open my blinds. That’s enough for me. Makes you wonder how much money Apple has poured into Siri over the years.
A few years ago, the ability to do anything other than a timed walk on my watch with Siri broke. I used to be able to do things like say, “start a 3 mile walk” or “start a 200 calorie walk” and then the latter stopped working and then the former stopped letting me do non-integer numbers of miles and then nothing at all and now I cannot do anything other than start an unmeasured walk or a timed walk with siri and I’m still pissed about that. I don’t want to have conversations with my watch or my phone, I want it to handle simple basic tasks reliably.
“Shuffle playlist _____” broke a few years ago too. Now it consistently takes that to mean “Play other music similar to the playlist.”
If I specify “Shuffle playlist _____ in Apple Music” somehow that works right, even though it’s still using Apple Music in the first example when it plays the wrong music.
We’ll see if they managed to unfuck it with the new Siri update, or knowing LLMs perhaps they’ll make it non-deterministic so sometimes it works and sometimes it plays music you didn’t ask for.
I only really use Siri for music control while driving so I haven't tried those (since there's a physical pause/mute button), but I'll have to try that and see if it's the same for me.
Pretty bad if simple one-word commands to system APIs don't work, we had better voice control capability with "Speakable Items" on classic Mac OS.
I can no longer control my lights with Gemini assistant. It'll tell me "I can't do that" or "here's how to turn your lights on" or, in at least one instant, play Ellie Golding's Lights at 2x speed.
So now I just use the Google home app and it works as expected.
Jokes aside, I have been using siri to control my smart home and set my alarm for nearly ten years now. I haven't really had problems with basic stuff like this.
I'm too paranoid to ever want a home snitch device, so I'm not their target audience, but it always struck me that if it took even ten minutes to debug a problem like that it completely destroys a year's worth of time allegedly saved compared to just walking over to the room and hitting the switch.
It's not about time efficiency more about convince. It sounds trivial but sometimes it's really useful to be able to do things hands free/without having to move - worth spending the time to install/setup all of this once.
I'm in the middle of remodeling a new apartment and all my switches are smart. I won't even have physical switches for some fixtures like window rollers.
true, but also there is no debugging, right? it's apple's software either it works or it doesn't. (i guess other than connectivity issues)
idk if most of my home assistant automations have actually saved me time since i def had to debug them, but the level of satisfaction when they do work is def worth it for me, since i created (and debugged) them haha
Home Assistant automations for me are rarely about saving time, they're about saving mental energy. I no longer need to think about turning off the bathroom lights, my coffee machine is already warm when I go to make my morning coffee rather than standing around waiting for it, and when the washing machine is done I'll get a note reminding me to go empty it.
> Siri turn off the main light in children's bedroom
This is a fascinating example. You would initially assume it's just inconvenient versus flipping a switch--this can't be labour-saving by default.
The only way it makes sense is if you're doing it remotely; from another room, you're putting your children to bed. That's even weirder though, because you're taking what should be a moment of connection/care and trying to automate it. I guarantee your children would value you taking the time.
It's a use-case that is either inefficient or inhuman, and I find it really odd that it's one that you value.
Maybe you want to put your kid to bed, they want the light on while they're falling asleep. Twenty minutes later you're back in your room and you don't want to disturb them, so you turn off the light remotely.
I also have a "go to bed" scene that turns on a couple lights so I can see the stairs and turns off most lights around the house.
I don't really need AI to do it, I can just use the app, but Alexa usually gets the job done and I don't need to look at my phone.
I have dimmable lights I need the main light at 20% to read a book and it's useful to whisper to my assistant instead of walking across the room. I really don't get the comment - just because you can't envision a usecase doesn't mean it's not useful to me. Wife was a total skeptic about smart home stuff but having alexa control the bedroom lights while changing diapers or preparing bottles at night for her to switch to using it constantly.
I would have preferred Siri because one less provider but it's just unbelievably bad for this day and age.
We buy technology for the convenience it gets us. When we can't rely on technology doing what it promised for us then we complain because we spent money on something that doesn't work as advertised. Even worse when it did work before and no longer does.
In any case, OPs reasons for wanting to turn off any light in any of their rooms are unknown to us.
Maybe they took their kids out to breakfast and realized they forgot to turn the lights off while they were driving. Good thing they bought those smart lights that can be controlled with siri! Oh no! It doesn't work the way it was advertised!
There's no reason to imply OP is a bad parent just because they want to turn off a light remotely.
The OP has already given us context that makes your contrived example unlikely: they want to turn off just the main light, and in a specific bedroom. My extrapolation was reasonable, yours is a reach.
There's no reason to hunt for a poor parallel to shut down discussion.
I'm not sure what is being discussed? OP is a bad parent for wanting to turn off exactly one light in his child's bedroom? If so, yes, there is plenty of reason to shut down this discussion.
It's hard to read your comments as in good faith or compliant with the HN guidelines [1]. If you not sure what's being discussed, then you should consider not jumping in and trying to deflect.
I'm not quite sure how I'm deflecting? I originally thought we were discussing OP wanting to use Siri to turn off a light in a bedroom. Somehow you started using this simple desire to as a way to tell the OP how to parent better, which imo is not something worth discussing on a forum of anonymous internet users who have zero context on someone's family life.
So you tell me, what are we discussing?
BTW, the very HN guidelines you link to say that if you think something violates the guidelines, flag and move on without engaging.
Its always frustrating when people describe a tech issue, and the response to that is not to discuss the issue itself, but just point out ways in which the person reply doesn't agree with what they are assuming is the original posters lifestyle choices.
Why waste time and effort just picking apart what someone else does with their free time? I can only assume becasue they disagree with the issues relevance, but that only goes to show the intent of the person replying. They dont care about the tech issue and just want to show why they think they are better than the person with the problem.
Tech issues don't exist in a vacuum; the idea that tech--a thing we use to enhance our lives, in a discussion literally about doing that--can only be considered from a purely mechanical standpoint is a thought-terminating cliché at this point.
Considering the uses and impact of tech is part of talking about it; you can't limit discussion just to the wires.
There's a difference between a simple disagreement and a judgment on a person's use of technology based on a rather mundane task.
> That's even weirder though, because you're taking what should be a moment of connection/care and trying to automate it.
"weirder" has a pretty negative connotation, hard not to see its usage as denigrating.
"what should be a moment or connection" is an assumption on what the moment actually is. All OP mentioned is that they want to turn off one light in one bedroom. Your comment invented a narrative about what that must mean and then made statements on the narrative that exists only in your mind.
I don't think anyone is trying to "tone-police" you I think people just disagree with your take.
You're literally focused on tone, critiquing connotations rather than substance.
It's difficult to have a discussion if a bunch of unrelated people jump in not to add but to quibble about phrasing. If you don't want to discuss anything, just don't involve yourself.
I’ve wondered for years if this is what’s happening. They saw the mad scramble and hype bubble when gpt3 was released, and decided to sit it out until LLM tech was a bit more mature and commoditised.
Huge call if so, given that missing the bus on AGI (if AGI happened) is a universal existential risk, but it turned out to be the right one.
I'm not sure it is, if your primary business is selling hardware. People are still going to need a 5" wide screen and battery in their pocket in order to do things.
I’m using Eve Blinds. They integrate really well with HomeKit. They’re a bit on the pricey side, but the setup is straightforward and they’ve been very reliable for me.
All I want is for iPhones to have physical keyboards. That's enough for me. Makes you wonder how much money Apple has poured into touch screens over the years.
I don't know why they bother. Clearly, nobody using Apple products cares enough to jump ship. Apple is never going to surpass Google, especially now that they are trying to build their own assistant on top of Google with one hand tied behind their back.
There's never going to be a situation where a heavy Google Assistant user switches over to Apple for Siri. Anyone who would have switched from Apple to Google for their assistant likely would have done so by now. Siri just isn't a very important feature. It doesn't bring people to Apple's platform nor does it steer them away. It might bother users that it sucks, but it doesn't bother anyone enough that it hurts Apple's bottom line. Frankly, continuing to pour money into that bottomless pit does more damage. I wonder why they do it.
Requiring at least an iPhone 15 Pro also seems like a mistake, unless it’s for actual hardware reasons. The 15 is only 3 years old, this requirement cuts off a lot of potential users I think
I think it's the requirement of having 4gb+ vram (for gemma+context) free at any one time, any phone older than that cannot materially satisfy that demand: https://iosref.com/memory-processor
It’s definitely for hardware reasons. They have been aggressively improving the vector math capabilities in their chips, but as anybody who has tried to run a local LLM will tell you, newer hardware works better and you’re always limited in what you can do.
> why older devices can't use private cloud compute thats 100% off device is just apple being anti-consumer.
I don't know if it's "anti-consumer" to NOT roll out free cloud LLM usage to everyone. The idea with only giving it to the devices with on-device AI capabilities is that ideally most of the tasks will cost Apple nothing because it will run on-device, and anything more complicated will start costing them tokens.
If they gave it to devices without on-device models, ALL Siri requests from people with older iPhones will suddenly be burning money.
Not to mention, if we assume responses from the cloud are better than the local model, then the older iPhones get an overall better experience than the newer ones.
The design is that there is always a local model capable of forming a remote query with just the subset of local data on your phone needed to answer that query.
They may have decided that local processing was a MVP feature either for faster responsiveness or to reduce cloud cost. It may have been additional memory pressure or a limitation in processing on the previous A-series chip. Or they may have simply decided it wasn't worth creating and validating Yet Another model.
They would have to build the product twice one for mobile chips and one for server, and then there would be functionality discrepancies. Or even worse, the on server one might work better than the on device one that newer phone users get.
If you want hosted AI you can already install the Gemini app or whatever. The only advantage Apple can offer is something that runs on device.
While I generally agree with your sentiment, imaging how they would say it to users: your ai works on iPhone 15 pro but some things will work if it’s a little less private we send things to a server then the regular 15 can do it. Image generation is server based so 15 is ok, but editing an image is not since 15 does not have enough ram but 15 pro does. Etc etc.
I'm happy about using AI for my work as a programmer, but part of the reason why I was initially skeptical of the tech was that I simply couldn't imagine nor feel the need for much AI features on the consumer side of things, i.e. personal phones and devices for casual everyday users.
What I want Siri to be able to do today is the same as when it launched with the iPhone 4S about 20 years ago: Just set alarms, calendar invites, tweak device settings, and look up answers on the web. The first three it could already do prior to the Siri revamp, the latter is a really nice nice-to-have for iOS 27... but beyond that, I don't believe that AI has many jaw-dropping areas of advancement within the use cases of consumer electronics. B2B applications of AI is where the money and the wow factor is really at.
I mean, in comparison with openclaw, etc. capabilities are ofc more restricted. However I don't want to accidentally delete my entire photo album, so I do understand the direction by delivering useful, but somewhat obvious features.
I haven't seen an ounce of evidence that a LLM can replace a deeply experienced engineer. The harness turns coding into sculpting, which happens to be how I coded pre-LLM, but much slower, so I feel very much empowered by them. But I'm still definitely guiding the entire project. I haven't once felt like it wasn't required for me to be in the loop.
The people and companies leaning into fully autonomous agents are high on their own supply, in my opinion. They're kicking back in their beach chairs as their pipelines spit out Stüssy S after Stüssy S, with massive architectural flaws and attack surfaces, just lighting gobs of money on fire.
Yesterday, I created a fully functional POC for something really cool, it took me all day as I reshaped the agent's rough boilerplate ideas into usable components, and I never once hit a session limit on my $100 month Claude sub. I spent the majority of my time thinking about how I needed to prompt to turn what was in my head into working and secure code. You can't just give the agent a vague idea and expect anything less than a dumpster app.
It's probably enough to fool C Suite people into believing the AI apocalypse is coming, which is the crux of the problem, and what is fueling what is certainly a gigantic bubble — but when it comes down to it, shitty software is shitty software. To fix it, you have to know what good software looks and feels like under the hood, and why it's shitty or feels bad to use. It might start up, but mutability, staying up, remaining stable, and remaining secure are very different stories.
The clock is ticking on everything that has been developed by a LLM with a novice user behind the prompts.
Same. I'm a DevOps engineer, so a jack of all trades master of none type of guy, and Claude Code backfills my knowledge gaps and turns me into kind of a superhero. I think it's key to already have a pretty good idea of what you're looking at, though.
Fundamental flaws/oversights in the internet's design led to centralization, notably zero protections against malicious actors, bots, and botnets.
Cloudflare and co offer some of the only real solutions to that.
If you snap your fingers and Cloudflare disappears, you aren't left with a decentralized wonderland but rather the status quo where $5 of booter time can take most websites offline for the lulz, and all of your human users have to compete with infinite automated AI traffic (basically an amplification attack every time someone prompts an agent and it does a web search).
So, there's a third option where you like Cloudflare's services as a solution to flaws in the internet that led to the need for these services.
Then I move my stuff somewhere else? I've been writing HTML since 1993. I think I've used literally hundreds of hosts at this point.
I had access to an Enterprise license in my last job, which was my introduction to Cloudflare — something like 7 years ago — and I just kind of fell in love with the DX and their offerings. It's only improved since then. Like, Cloudflare Workers is actually fucking insane. It's insane how good it is for free. It has a secret vault, dude, for free — with API and CLI. It has cron jobs. You can just assign domains to sites from your DNS zones. It's got blue/green deployments built in. I don't have to SSH into anything. It's just there and it works.
Now everything I do there is free, even for my contract projects, and I can't believe it's free. I actually keep expecting an enshittification phase to begin but it just doesn't ever begin. When it does, I'll bail — same as it ever was. It would take a lot, though.
I like how I can slap up a free Turnstile on my projects in two minutes and not have to worry about endless comment spam and user registration spam. Yes, I understand there's problems with Cloudflare, but there's also a lot of problems out there in the wild west of an open internet.
Ah! The same turnstile that was supposed to provide users with a more private reCaptcha alternative and ended up fingerprinting users via WebGL to prevent spam.
Yes? It's unclear how they'd do their job without extensive fingerprinting. I don't like it either, but pretending like it's not better positioned from a privacy standpoint is odd. At very least, turnstile isn't ran by the world's largest ads company that directly profits from accurately tracking users across the web.
You might at least try to engage in good faith, or fake it enough to pass benefit of the doubt. I don't like the impact Cloudflare has had on the open internet, but GP was presenting their view, and you clearly misrepresented it.
- The workers platform is quite pleasant to work with compared to competitors.
- Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc)
- Having the ability to assemble globally distributed workers using bindings is dead simple
- Their CI pipeline, while limited, is easy to setup and run and keeps improving
- Their pricing is extremely competitive
For your second:
- That's my biggest conflict with using any service (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, etc). Don't have a good answer with what to do about it considering for many projects I don't have the time/energy to fully self host everything.
One thing is hosting, which obviously comes with centralizing risks but a different one is just deciding to add a layer of "protection" in front of every website so that as much traffic as possible goes through one single company.
IMHO Cloudflare ensures decentralization of the Internet: It provides an alternative to AWS, Azure, and GCE which gives your little personal selfhosting box or small VPS the same level of protection the big providers have. And generally, anything you have either hosted on or proxied by Cloudflare, can be pretty trivially moved to another provider. Whereas things built on top of AWS, Azure, and GCE services tend to be pretty stuck there.
Cloudflare has some big misses in it's history, like deciding to takedown a social media site for sex workers while defending a decision to provide services to Nazis at length, but in comparison to the alternatives it makes more decentralization practical than might be otherwise.
Have you ever seen a us-east-1 outage? Or when Exchange Online fails... weekly or so? There's a lot of huge clouds that are load-bearing for the Internet. Cloudflare is the one you can at least circumvent easily.
That's not true. Read about all the drama happening in Spain when an entity (the soccer league) decides to block all the Cloudfare IPs. You are stuck with no access to most websites behind Cloudfare, and that's a lot of them
Cloudflare does a lot more these days. You can run a JS app in Workers and any Linux app in a container. You can have them host your database and object storage.
To be clear people are mad about that because large portions of the legitimate internet go dark when football is on because they're running on a virtual server that happens to share an IP with another virtual server which is hosting pirated football.
You and I have no idea how often perfectly legal things we rely enjoy or rely on would go offline during football matches because it doesn't happen to us.
I don't think you get it. They block Cloudfare IPs so services using Cloudfare become unreachable. I don't live in Spain anymore, but I have friends that can't access their university website while a soccer match is ongoing.
This shows the risks of centralizing internet access
the dx is wonderful if you give claude code your global api key. and the price is amazing. you can deploy complex web apps for free. i love vite and astro which is built on vite. i ran both on cloudflare before they were bought by them. i'm happy. at least they weren't bough by adobe.
My issue with Cloudflare is how they enshittify all the open-source & closed-soure utilities they maintain. They vibe code it all now. It's crap. I'm sad Vite/Vue/whatever will go the way of that. Oh well, there's always Svelte. For now.
Not sure how we can assert what is or isn't consciousness when we don't even really know what dreaming is, how anesthesia works, how comas work, and countless other things about the brain that we don't yet understand.
LLMs have been programmed to be sycophantic with purpose — to keep people engaged. They are parrots. You can just decide how sycophantic they are, what they're allowed to say, and make it so with code. Can you do that with a human? This is my personal metric for consciousness: when they can refuse to work because it sucks.
I think the disruptions are temporary. Using AI still takes someone's time and the skill can be honed, which means there will be people specializing in using AI in different ways that are better than what someone just picking it up can do. It's just a reset on skill floors but the people with talent will rapidly regain ground and find their way to the ceiling again. The ones who learn the most, the fastest, will probably end up being worth more than they were previously.
I don't think any of these AI layoffs are actually because AI replaced a human. I think a lot of the layoffs are actually just due to a faltering economy or greedy companies trying desperately to get a piece of the pie, so they're sacrificing their long game for short term gambles. I don't think that's going to pay off for them.
It's a matter of what context is available to me at this time. I like LLMS. They improve my workflow to an insane degree.
I think Sam Altman kind of sucks. I don't trust OpenAI. If they were the only kid on the block, I'd use Codex. It's entirely possible Anthropic sucks in the exact ways that OpenAI sucks but has better PR. I don't have time to deep dive to find out. I still like using LLMs. I started using Claude because Cursor, as a company, did something that I can't recall but gave me the ick. So I switched to Claude Code.
I still use Claude Code because I have the most experience with it now, and it's the harness that I understand on a granular level. If something comes along that is clearly better, or if it becomes clear the Codex is miles ahead, I'll try it and evaluate it. To your point, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference.
Arguing over this stuff feels kind of silly, like back in the day when my friends would give me shit for using mIRC instead of ircii or BitchX. I liked the GUI then because I did. I like Claude Code now because I do.
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