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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

> minor tools for making emojis, summarizing notifications, and proof reading.

The notification / email summaries are so unbelievably useless too: it’s hardly more work to skim the notification / email that I do anyway.

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Like most AI products it feels like they started with a solution first and went searching for the problems. Text messages being too long wasn't a real problem to begin with.

There are some good parts to Apple Intelligence though. I find the priority notifications feature works pretty well, and the photo cleanup tool works pretty well for small things like removing your finger from the corner of a photo, though it's not going to work on huge tasks like removing a whole person from a photo.

I mean it happened quite a few times that phishing emails became the priority notification on my phone

Do you know if apple is using their new tools to do mail filtering? It's an interesting choice if they are since it's a genuine problem with a mature (but always evolving) solution.

Really those should have been filtered out by the spam filter. If it's made it all the way to your inbox it's not surprising it got marked as a priority since phishing emails are written to look urgent, something which if real would be a priority notification.

Honestly I love the priority notifications and the notification summaries. The thing that drives me absolutely insane, is that the fact that when I view the notification through clicking on it from another space other than the "While in the reduce interruptions focus" it doesn't clear. Because of this, I always have infinite notifications.

I want to open WhatsApp and open the message and have it clear the notif. Or atleast click the notif from the normal notif center and have it clear there. It kills me

What do you love about the notification summaries? I'm hearing a lot of hate for them

> it's not going to work on huge tasks like removing a whole person from a photo.

I use it for removing people who wander into the frame quite often. It probably wont work for someone close up, but its great for removing a tourist who spends ten minutes taking selfies in front of a monument.

I didn't realise this was a feature, very cool!

> Text messages being too long wasn't a real problem to begin with.

Except for that one friend. You know the one I mean.

The Ring app notification summaries still scare me.

> "A bunch of people right outside your house!!!"

because it aggregates multiple single person walking by notifications that way...

That is a fantastic example of blind application of AI making things worse.

Hopefully we'll get examples of smart applications of AI making things better

That makes... That makes just enough sense to become nonsense, rather than mere noise.

I mean, I could imagine a person with no common sense almost making the same mistake: "I have a list of 5 notifications of a person standing on the porch, and no notifications about leaving, so there must be a 5 person group still standing outside right now. Whadya mean, 'look at the times'?"

> A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician were sitting in a street cafe watching the crowd. Across the street they saw a man and a woman entering a building. Ten minutes they reappeared together with a third person.

> - They have multiplied, said the biologist.

> - Oh no, an error in measurement, the physicist sighed.

> - If exactly one person enters the building now, it will be empty again, the mathematician concluded.

https://www.math.utah.edu/~cherk/mathjokes.html

Unrelated, but am I the only person who finds the concept of “getting notifications for somebody walking by a house” to be really creepy?

it isn't creepy, it's super annoying if you don't live in the woods. got a ring doorbell and turned them off a few hours after installation, it was driving me nuts.

Well yeah, but that's in part a problem with always-on doorbell cameras. On paper they're illegal in many countries (privacy laws, you can't just put up a camera and record anyone out in public), in practice the police asks people to put their doorbell cameras in a registry so they can request footage if needs be.

Anyway, I get wanting to see who's ringing your doorbell in e.g. apartment buildings, and that extending to a house, especially if you have a bigger one. But is there a reason those cameras need to be on all the time?

At least in the USA it’s legal to record public spaces. So recording the street and things that can be seen from it is legal, but pointing a camera over your neighbors fence is not.

And a lot of people don't share that opinion, so this isn't the law in a lot of countries. When you wanted to suggest that it is a problem, that US companies try to extend the law of there home country to other parts of the world, then I endorse that.

the advertising of those spy doorbells is entirely based on paranoia

so ramping it up the rhetoric doesn't really hurt them...

To be fair, I'd rather be scared by false positives than sleep through false negatives

It does feel like somebody forgot that "from the first sentence or two of the email, you can tell what it's about" was already a rule of good writing...

You sometimes need to want to quickly learn what's in an email that was written by someone less helpful.

Eg sometimes the writer is outright antagonistic, because they have some obligation to tell you something, but don't actually want you to know.

Even bending over that far backwards to find a useful example comes up empty.

Those kinds of emails are so uncommon they’re absolutely not worth wasting this level of effort on. And if you’re in a sorry enough situation where that’s not the case, what you really need is the outside context the model doesn’t know. The model doesn’t know your office politics.

This is a pretty damning example of backwards product thinking. How often, truly, does this happen?

Never heard of terms of service?

No one cares about the terms of service. And if they actually do, they will need to read every word very carefully to know if they are in legal trouble. A possibly wrong summary of a terms of service document is entirely and completely useless.

Are you regularly getting emails with terms of service? You're, like, doubly proving my point.

Yes, I regularly get emails about terms of service updates.

I think humans are quite well capable of skimming text and reading multiple lines at once.

And you trust AI to accurately read between the lines?

I think people read texts because they want to read them, and when they don't want to read the texts they are also not even interested in reading the summaries.

Why do I think this? ...in the early 2000's my employer had a company wide license for a document summarizer tool that was rather accurate and easy to use, but nobody ever used it.

The obvious use case is “I don’t want to read this but I am required to read this (job)” - the fact that people don’t want to use it even there is telling, imo.

Maybe they remembered that a lot of people aren't actually good writers. My brother will send 1000 word emails that meander through subjects like what he ate for breakfast to eventually get to the point of scheduling a meeting about negotiating a time for help with moving a sofa. Mind you, I see him several times a week so he's not lonely, this is just the way he writes. Then he complains endlessly about his coworkers using AI to summarize his emails. When told that he needs to change how he writes to cut right to the point, he adopts the "why should I change, they're the ones who suck" mentality.

So while Apple's AI summaries may have been poorly executed, I can certainly understand the appeal and motivation behind such a feature.

There’s a thread here that could be pulled - something about using AI to turn everyone into exactly who you want to communicate with in the way you want.

Probably a sci-fi story about it, if not, it should be written.

And AR glasses to modify appearance of everyone you see, in all sorts of ways. Inevitable nightmare, I expect.

I feel too many humanities teachers are like your brother.

Why use 10 words when you could do 1000. Why use headings or lists, when the whole story could be written in a single paragraph spanning 3 pages.

I mean...this depends very heavily on what the purpose of the writing is.

If it's to succinctly communicate key facts, then you write it quickly.

- Discovered that Bilbo's old ring is, in fact, the One Ring of Power.

- Took it on a journey southward to Mordor.

- Experienced a bunch of hardship along the way, and nearly failed at the end, but with Sméagol's contribution, successfully destroyed the Ring and defeated Sauron forever.

....And if it's to tell a story, then you write The Lord of the Rings.

Sure, but different people judge differently what should be told as a story.

"When's dinner?" "Well, I was at the store earlier, and... (paragraphs elided) ... and so, 7pm."

Now, that's very true! But it's a far cry from implying that all or most humanities teachers are all about writing florid essays when 3 bullet points will do.

It's not even that they are useless, they are actively wrong. I could post pages upon pages of screenshots of the summaries being literally wrong about the content of the messages it summarised.

I find it weird that we even think we need notification summaries. If the notification body text is long or complex enough to benefit from summarizing, then the person who wrote that text has failed at the job. Notifications are summaries.

Soon they'll release a "notifications summary digest" that summarises the summaries

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