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The best use for Alexa is as a voice calculator for woodworking. She lives in my shop, so she can't listen to my regular conversations in the house. When I need to measure things, I can get a calculator out and do the fraction math (which I am not good at).

OR, I can say things like, "Alexa, what is 23 and 1/16th minus 2.1625" And she'll spit it out as a decimal and clarify as a fraction if I want.

It's amazing.

I find it interesting that the culmination of so many amazing technologies result in a tool for americans to handle their crazy ancient measurement system more easily.

For miles, pounds, and ounces, I have no defense, but I will say that having a base 12 length measuring system (in/ft/yd) is much nicer for carpentry than base 10 (m/cm), since it can be divided evenly by 2 and 3. It's the same reason why having 12 notes in a scale works for music.

I genuinely don't understand what you mean here, and I say that as an American who has done a fair amount of carpentry. I can't think of a single time I've thought to myself that using fractions was superior to measuring straight units in mm/cm/m.

I think GP means if you have a 12ft piece of lumber, you can cut in half to have 2 x 6ft, or cut it in thirds to have 3 x 4ft pieces.

It doesn't really follow though, I think what's more important is the length of wood you start with.

It's easier to divide 3m into 2 x 1.5m or 3 x 1m than it is to divide 9'10" into 2 x 4'11" or 3 x 3'3.333333333"

That would be true, except saw blades are not infinitely thin, so you still get these small unwieldy fractions pretty early on in your cut list.

If your blade was e.g. 2mm thick instead of 1/16", I think it would be easier to manage.

Because the ratios are pleasing to the eye.

> I will say that having a base 12 length measuring system (in/ft/yd) is much nicer for carpentry than base 10 (m/cm), since it can be divided evenly by 2 and 3. It's the same reason why having 12 notes in a scale works for music.

When would you want to divide an octave into two or three intervals like that?

The normal way to divide an octave in "half" is at the fifth, which is a ratio of 3:2. If you instead go six half-steps up from the tonic, you'll be a half-step short of a fifth, at fi instead of so, with an irrational ratio of √2:1. That's the opposite of what you want. [From wikipedia: The tritone is a restless interval, classed as a dissonance in Western music from the early Middle Ages through to the end of the common practice period. This interval was frequently avoided in medieval ecclesiastical singing because of its dissonant quality. The first explicit prohibition of it seems to occur with the development of Guido of Arezzo's hexachordal system]

If you divide the octave into "quarters" by going up three half-steps, you get a minor third.

(Going for "thirds" by going up four half-steps will take you to mi and form a third [the name of the chord is not related to the idea of dividing an octave into three equal parts; it's called a "third" because "do re mi" is three notes], which is fine. But it's pretty clearly just a coincidence that that works out; the methodology of "there are twelve half-steps in the octave, so I'll divide that into equal parts and see what I get" just isn't related to the way you compose music.)

I would have a lot more respect for those units if it were consistent around 12. You mentioned the yard but that's equal to 3ft.

What's the name of the 12 ft unit? Why isn't the mile equal to 12×12×12×12 ft? Why isn't an lb equal to 12 oz?

> Why isn't an lb equal to 12 oz?

It is; that's called Troy weight.

Fair enough. Nonetheless, the 16 oz = 1 lb system is prevalent. I had never heard of "Troy" units until I read your response.

Troy weight is used for precious metals. It's important to the standard trick question "which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?"

Excuse me? I as European also use it to figure out their crazy measurement systems (US recipes…)

Sorry, can you speak up? Hard to hear you from way up here on THE MOON

They used metric system to get to the Moon. Anything NASA does is done in metric.

Mars Climate Orbiter has something to say about that, but you'll have to figure out where it ended up in orbit around the Sun if you want to hear it.

"An investigation attributed the failure to a measurement mismatch between two software systems: metric units by NASA and US customary units by spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin"

So, no fault of NASAs, or of the metric system.

For Lockheed to use anything but metric system in the modern world is bizarre.

Same with the auto industry

That ancient system uses base 2 for fractions, though.

I have many issues with Siri but adding things to the reminder list across the family works fairly seamlessly for me, now that my wife has given permission in the 'home' app to use personal requests.

That said, my 11yo daughter said to me yesterday "why don't they just add AI to Siri" after failing to get Siri to tell her how long a timer was originally set for (Siri would only tell you how much time is left on the timer).

Someone did build a crazy ChatGPT-to-Siri bridge through Automations which I haven't tried yet but plan to at some point...

https://matemarschalko.medium.com/chatgpt-in-an-ios-shortcut... if anyone's looking for the link to that ChatGPT-to-Siri bridge. Runs entirely on the phone too

> why don't they just add AI to Siri

Has anyone interacted with chatgpt in a siri/alexa voice interaction for an extended period of time? I too have wondered when AI arrives in these platforms. It could be massively disruptive.

I'd be perfectly fine with voice assistants understanding context better so I could ask thing A and after the response I could ask a clarifying questions.

As often is the case with Apple the lack of interoperability to other apps is what kills me. I do not want to use the apple lists app but third-party support is mostly a miss.

> My main uses cases are: grocery lists, listening to music, setting timers, viewing recipes, making meal related announcements to the house.

The interesting thing is that with the new Whisper models these things can be done with minimal internet or no internet at all. I would pay good money for an offline only home assistant. Maybe it could receive updates if I specifically asked for them.

I kind of like iOS Siri's limitations. Unlike Alexa, which gives you the illusion that it can do everything, Siri fails spectacularly on certain tasks, and, if you use it enough, you can understand the demarcation between Siri-capable tasks and things that you'd be better off doing "manually."

I don’t like this limitations. I’d love to get rid of my Echo and get a HomePod but Siri is just too clunky for the thing I use frequently - AnyList for groceries.

I can say “Alexa, add eggs” and eggs are added to my grocery list in AnyList. On Siri I have to say something like “Hey Siri, using AnyList add eggs to my grocery list”. The Siri prompt feels like I’m speaking a command line.

With Apple, people consider even their failures as features :s

I hope they never take it away though! They don’t make money from me with it but it is an amazing cheap and no subscription kitchen timer, tell me the weather, play my sleep sounds device. For once, we seem to be benefitting from a company’s bad decisions. She’s also pretty great at answering basic knowledge type questions I may have throughout the day. Certainly an Einstein compared to Siri.

As soon as it becomes terminally unprofitable, they will kill her and brick everyone’s devices. It has happened before and it will happen again and again and again to every IoT device that relies on a cloud service. The only way to win this game is to refuse to p(l)ay.