I’ve talked to Apple engineers.
Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is.
Everyone made fun of them for protecting them.
This is exactly the opposite of that, where Mark is throwing you and your children under the bus again because he’s unoriginal and doesn’t know how to make money any other way than by getting all up in your business, statistically.
Besides, we just need to set verbal timers and control music. We don't need a full-blown verbal Oracle.
I prefer to read reference material and do research instead of asking chatbots, for instance, because it helps the material stick better and enables me to make broader connections to disparate pieces of knowledge.
I also prefer technology to be narrow in scope and function, so I can spend more time enjoying life and less time troubleshooting why some needless complexity has failed again. This extends to voice assistants that consistently fumble on accents and grammar when asking for more complex queries, and often want to send data out of my LAN to some random server I have no control over just to process something that could be done on any of the myriad of GPUs and CPUs in my home instead.
Despite the EULA, TOS, and Privacy Polices governing these interactions, I intrinsically don’t trust a relationship that requires revalidation of those policies every time an update is pushed, whose changes fail to be summarized, and which force me into hostile relationships with the vendors. I also generally believe that as live services, there is no sufficient incentive for security or privacy but ample incentive for data mining and prolonged/frequent interactivity. Repeated incidents of supposedly “anonymous” and “private” conversations or data being inappropriately disclosed or compromised do not help lend any sense of security to said services, at least to me. Then you consider the wider economic environment prioritizing immediate gains over sustainable business practices, and my own personal preference for building and nurturing long-term infrastructure to solve my problems on a consistent basis, and it’s less a threat model and more just incompatibility between my personal needs and corporate goals.
I send hundreds of prompts to OpenAI's LLM daily. I do not have a concern about it.
Explicitly: I have that turned on and I still need to unlock before using.
Having seen multiple leading messaging/VoIP stacks from inside, the amount of engineering spent to work around various limitations of E2EE in real prod scenarios is insane, and even for simple every-day-use features metrics don't compare to the metrics of the same feature running without E2EE.
It may just be that ROI doesn't make sense: very few user out there truly care about (or even understand) E2EE, for quite some users it creates an inconvenience & support incidents (harder to move from device to device, forgot your passphrase - lost your history, new joiners to a group chat don't see previous history, etc), it requires a significant additional engineering effort to just maintain it, many new features get shipped much slower because of it...
Just give people some benefit of doubt. There're much simpler ways to explain certain things that suspecting some universal evil in every move...
They’re a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy for why it is a futile effort for trying to secure information near them.
Garbage. That's some good spin, though. Siri is a turd in a punch bowl for many reasons that have nothing to do with privacy.
"Siri, do X thing" "Done"
"Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean"
Siri is connected to my Apple HomeKit. "Siri, turn off my Kitchen Lights" "I don't know what lights you mean."
Siri feels like it never evolved past a proof of concept.
It’s funny. Even a team of interns could’ve mapped more synonyms, right?
& Apple Intelligence, when it uses ChatGPT, it wouldn’t be quite as horrible if Apple had paid for better tokens instead of quantizing into oblivion… I think.
Two savings for Apple resulting in subpar experiences.
That makes zero sense.
The problem with Siri is... Siri. The interface itself.
Zero of my complaints around Siri have to do with it not being able to access my private data.
They're entirely about it not understanding my request in the first place or lacking a basic capability.
It’s about the sum of all expression being able to be reflected back to you in such a way that Dawkins believes he’s met intelligent life.
Facebook and Google just slurped up their data centers, while Apple was encrypted.
"Apple hasn't come up with anything new in 20 years"
Very likely in response to Apple's granularity. Poor Zuck can't steal people's credentials
Apple has made incredible progress in the last 20 years, but almost none of that has been a brand new product. It has all been evolving the existing products and on building the world’s best supply chain and rearing incredible market share from Windows. To be clear, AirPods are a much bigger market than Nike shoes. Those, plus Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro are new in the last 20 years.
In the past 20 years, the Facebook website has evolved, but all of the other major investments by the company have been acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. Diem (or whatever that proprietary cryptocurrency was called) and the Metaverse were massive failures. I don’t know what to credit Meta for in the AI era except some of the LLAMA tooling and some open weights LLMs. CZI is doing cool things, but that’s Zuck’s private science company, not part of Meta.
(Looking for anything here!)
I would argue that FB’s bigger wins have been in being the first app / website to get perhaps 50% of the world population using it, and also the Herculean effort it took to moderate that’s volume of content (whether or not you agree that moderation was the right choice or successful).
Neither did Meta, but that's a different discussion
I can't think of a single new thing Facebook did in 20 years that stuck. Metaverse?
Apple Watch doesn't really count in my books - it's just a silly toy without much practical use (of course YMMV).
> I can't think of a single new thing Facebook did in 20 years that stuck
Again, I am not a fan of Meta. They didn't invent anything, arguably including FB itself, but again, this is topic for a separate discussion.
Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
Google, out of all companies, also decided to partially walk away from the Chinese market in 2010 over censorship concerns [1].
Nobody is forcing Apple to do business in China, or the UK. They actively choose to do so, and because of that also put themselves in a position where they have to comply with these laws, presumably because it makes them more money.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html
ProtonMail / ProtonVPN responds to the vast majority of warrants with the data they keep.
Apple iCloud always responded to iCloud warrants with whatever data they had (eg. If the user didn’t enable encryption). They shouldn’t have removed end-to-end encryption for the UK, but they have thousands of employees in that country and millions of customers.
Sometimes it’s not the company that is the problem, but the country / legislators.
You could argue Signal is the most "moral" here, but even then they don't really allow self-hosted backends and refuse to open-source their setup
Uhh. What the heck are you talking about? I’m calling straight bs on this unless presented rational.
Siri has access to knowledge.db or whatever it is, which is the centralized hub for pretty much all things. Siri phones home every request made via Siri.
I think you got sold snake oil
I’m sure this will not be a popular take on HN however.
I literally helped create Android to prevent Microsoft from controlling the phone the way they did the PC - stifling innovation. So it's always funny for me to hear Gates whine about losing mobile to Android.
— Rich Miner (https://x.com/richminer/status/1879004092602982765)
Precisely because it's your feelings, not objective observation.
No public company would care of their users, even remotely.
Indeed, during Jobs time it actually worked that way, but that time is long gone.
The OS is not nearly the best, just like laptops.
Whereas Microsoft and Google care about their users like a farmer cares about a herd of pigs.
They stay rather secure because of all these measures. But they’ll get dismantled, too. Because idiots push idiots in power to weaken Apple’s stance. Useful idiots is the right term.