Sky, Natural Computing for the Macintosh | Hacker News Reader

Sky, Natural Computing for the Macintosh

sky.app

6 pointsalwillis4 comments

If there’s something that’s to be sherlocked [1] in 2025, this would be it! There is a very high motive and incentive for Apple to make something like this part of the OS annd it’s probably working on something similar. Apple can also do it (though probably not as quickly) with minimal privacy concerns.

In some ways, this app reminds me of Windows Recall, which has been heavily panned by privacy and security critics. Do we want a third party app to be looking at everything we do? It would have to meet a high bar on privacy.

[1]: referring to the computing term at https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sherlock#English

The implication is Apple could buy this app, which is what it did with Workflow which became Shortcuts, from the same team.

Only this is a much bigger deal given how Apple is struggling with its own AI efforts so far.

Took a look. Beautiful UI and no doubt a great product cooking. But I fear the (current) demo video is a hindrance. The demo video sees a person arranging to go to a bar with friends. Make some calendar appointments, message back, nothing hard. It is a classic example of the "travel booking problem".

You're demoing a solution to a problem no one has, and doing it on a mac where a vanishingly small percentage of people even use messaging apps.

Why?

1. It's not more efficient.

On my phone I can do everything in the demo video faster and more precisely. I'll be done before the demo video finishes. Flicking between apps is a breeze, and there's copy-paste and share sheets to fling data around. Even tougher for you, I greatly enjoy the process - pick a bar and a time to hang out & ask friends what they reckon.

2. It sucks the joy out.

If you focus on this use case, you're up against literal joy. Joy of arranging things to do with your friends. Joy of having made that choice so everyone can have fun. Why would anyone suck the joy out of a social process like that so they can be done with it a few seconds faster - and even then, they'd only be done a few seconds faster if they're woefully inefficient, and one wrong move by the AI (which mind you is acting on pretty minimal instructions) undoes any efficiency gains and makes the whole experience quite grinding.

The tool is no doubt excellent - beautiful UI & a lot of care shown - u clearly care about what you're building, so I do hope it's great.

You should read the article. The author gives a lot of examples of very cool, useful things that he can do using Sky. Personally, I can't wait until it's available.

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