I grew up a few blocks from his funky Santa Monica house [1], passed by it all the time. When you’re a kid you typically see wild new things like that as just normal because you have no context for how unusual they are. His house defied that perspective; even as a kid you understand that being wrapped in oddly angled chain link fences and corrugated metal is just... different. It's an unanswered question, a loose thread, a thing you can't unknow.
I don't particularly like the house - it's meant to be challenging not beautiful - but with perspective I see now there aren't many creations out there that achieve existence in eternal confusion like it does for me. I see his other works like Bilbao [2] and Disney Hall as refinements on the concept with the added dimension of beauty. They're not quite as memorable, but I think do a great job exploring the frontier of beauty and befuddlement.
The Santa Monica spot was, personally, a bit of an eye-sore after about 8 years. I kept wishing someone else would rise to the flamboyance, but nobody ever really did. Well, I'm wrong of course, but I never did see such a striking spot until I got to Europe, or whatever ..
I'm a Hacker News reader and relate with the community. At the same time, it's not like I've same interest and energy in every niche. For example, I might have interest in custom building my keyboards, but may not be in restoring an old router. It's not like HN users exclusively use Linux desktops and many of us prefer simplicity.
The point I'm trying make is that there is more nuance than a simple HN user stereotype.
Very much not true. I'm a seasoned network engineer, and very comfortable deep in the Linux network stack. I still have no interest in doing that for 7-10 hours during work and then having to do it for another 1-3 hours after work to get things working properly. I use UniFi products because they're dead simple and work well.
I would challenge you to try supporting your family using your home network doing esoteric things, the juice is not worth the squeeze. I can give my wife the UniFi login and she can figure things out well enough on her own, and it lets us easily integrated networked devices that don't serve network connectivity (e.g. IP cameras) into our day-to-day as well.
Do I think UniFi is bar none the best gear? Absolutely not. Do I think it's a "good deal"? Maybe. Do I think it's better than the alternative uses of my time, that I'd rather spend doing other stuff? Abso-fucking-lutely, which is why I have been buying it for years.
Discoverability is quite literally the textbook problem with CLIs, in that many textbooks on UI & human factors research over the last 50 years discuss the problem.
With 1B+ users Apple isn't in the position to do the typical startup fast & loose order of operations. Apple has (rightly) given themselves the responsibility to protect people's privacy, and a lot of people rely on that. It'd be a really bad look if it turned out they made Siri really really useful but then hostile govt's all got access to the data and cracked down on a bunch of vulnerable people.
I'm amazed more AI tools don't have reality checks as part of the command flow. If you take a UX-first perspective on AI - which Apple very much should - there's going to be x% failures to interpret correctly, causing some unintended and undesirable action. A reasonable way to handle these failure cases is to have a post-interpretation reality check.
This could be personalized, 'does this user do this kind of thing?' which checks history of user actions for anything similar. Or it could be generic, 'is this the type of thing a typical user does?'
In both cases, if it's unfamiliar you have a few options: try to interpret it again (maybe with a better model), raise a prompt with the user ('do you want to do x?'), or if it's highly unfamiliar, auto cancel the command and say sorry.
Was the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.
Agreed. I often have to verbally battle with Siri to do the most basic interaction. Siri recognizes all my words but misinterprets my intent and does something I didn’t want.
Yeah and the fact that this basically hasn’t improved in a decade tells me that it’s likely that nobody actually works on Siri.
Not to mention the iOS keyboard has gotten so bad in the last year that it took me 3x longer to type this comment (I use the swipe keyboard). I had to fix at least a dozen typos.
Every now and then when they screw up, they’ll have a mea culpa with the press. They haven’t done that with Siri or the keyboard yet.
My understanding is they are just stubborn. They once did it this way and now it is "the Apple way".
Recent example: Apple used to hide "search in page" in the share menu in mobile safari. Far from obvious, but at some point one discovers it because there is no other place to look for it.
Now they have finally decided to make a standard fly dropping overflow menu and hide the share button there. But interestingly you still need to open the share menu from there to find the search button.
Meanwhile other buttons that weren't as obviously misplaced in "share" like "Add to Bookmarks" are now on the top level together with the share button.
Same goes for the arguments against things like cut and paste in finder: they didn't create it back in the day and now there is a complete mythology about why cut and paste in Finder would actually be stupid and almost evil.
FYI, an easier way to search in pages in Safari is to just type what you want to search for in the address bar, and then at the bottom of the list of suggestions (you may need to scroll it down) you can tap "On this page".
I just noticed it randomly many years ago, I don't remember the occasion but I guess I was scrolling trying to find a page in history lazily and noticed it at the bottom.
It's an example that sums up feature discoverability (well, lack of) on iPhones - there are so many things like this, that are really useful to know if you find out about them but the only way to find out is luck or having a friend tell you. Occasionally the official Apple "Tips" app has useful stuff, but not much.
I actually have a thing in my family Signal chat of every few weeks sharing a new random iPhone tip, as I'm by far the nerdiest in the group. Maybe I should collate them all into a "hard to discover Tips" blog and share on HN...
Some of the things didn't really get fleshed out, some are "oh, that's something in there?" (Restaurant reservations? Ride Booking?) and feels more like the half baked mysql interfaces in php.
However, as part of privacy - you can create a note (and dictate it) without a data connection with Siri. Your "start workout" command doesn't leave your device.
Part of that is privacy. Part of that is that Apple was trying to minimize its cloud spend (on GCP or AWS) by keeping as much of that activity on device. It wasn't entirely on device, but a lot more of it is than what Android is... and Alexa is a speaker and microphone hooked up to AWS.
This was ok, kind of meh, but ok pre-ChatGPT. With ChatGPT the expectations changed and the architecture that Apple had was not something that could pivot to meeting those expectations.
> Apple first implemented artificial intelligence features in its products with the release of Siri in the iPhone 4S in 2011.
> ...
> The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence and the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 reportedly blindsided Apple executives and forced the company to refocus its efforts on AI.
ChatGPT was as much a blindside to Apple as the iPhone was to Blackberry.
1. Apple is big enough that it needs to take care of edge cases like offline & limited cell reception, which affect millions in any given moment.
2. Launching a major UI feature (Siri) that people will come to rely on requires offline operation for common operations like basic device operations and dictation. Major UI features shouldn't cease to function when they enter bad reception zones.
3. Apple builds devices with great CPUs, which allows them to pursue a strategy of using edge compute to reduce spend.
4. A consequence of building products with good offline support is they are more private.
5. Apple didn't even build a full set of intents for most of their apps, hence 'remind me at this location' doesn't even work. App developers haven't either, because ...
6. Siri (both the local version and remote service) isn't very good, and regularly misunderstands or fails at basic comprehension tasks that do not even require user data to be understood or relayed back to devices to execute.
I don't buy that privacy is somehow an impediment to #5 or #6. It's only an issue when user data is involved, and Apple has been investing in techs like differential privacy to get around these limitations to some extent. But that is further downstream from #5 and #6 though.
I'm amazed 'set a reminder for x when I leave this location' still doesn't get the 'when I leave this location'. It's clear user expectation created internally (by siri marketing) and externally (by ai tools) has far outpaced capability.
Apple seems weird about that and I'm not sure why, maybe accuracy or creepiness factor?
A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.
Apple Reminders has a feature to remind you when you are leaving or arriving at a location. It's super useful! But it's not super low friction to add to a Reminder via UI (it's buried at the bottom of the edit screen), so it's a feature ideally suited for a voice-based reminder. Nevertheless, nobody implemented it.
It's a great feature! I was demoing it to my parents over Thanksgiving and forgot about the lack of Siri support, and of course it failed. Parents were excited when I mentioned it but now won't be using it. Ah well.
I can set location-based alerts manually. For me, or for those who voluntarily already share their location with me. No reason Siri can’t drive those same notifications.
Edit: to be clear, Siri doesn’t. Still no reason it shouldn’t be able to.
Ah its great you bring this up, it's timely as my app is adding contacts syncing soon and I want to do it in a secure/private way. If you choose to go ahead with this, are there any plans to make it open source? ty!
I don't particularly like the house - it's meant to be challenging not beautiful - but with perspective I see now there aren't many creations out there that achieve existence in eternal confusion like it does for me. I see his other works like Bilbao [2] and Disney Hall as refinements on the concept with the added dimension of beauty. They're not quite as memorable, but I think do a great job exploring the frontier of beauty and befuddlement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehry_Residence
[2] especially the aerial perspective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao#/medi...
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