StephenMelon

The killer app is military usage, so they just need enough consumer and b2b demand to keep what they charge governments within what they can justify to taxpayers

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek to tell me about a contemporary Scottish indie band that hasn’t had a lot of press coverage. ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all gave good answers based on the small amount of press coverage they have had.

DeepSeek however hallucinated a completely fictional band from 30 years ago, right down to album names, a hard luck story about how they’d been shafted by the industry (and by whom), made up names of the members and even their supposed subsequent collaborations with contemporary pop artists.

I asked if it was telling the truth or making it up and it doubled down quite aggressively on claiming it was telling the truth. The whole thing was very detailed and convincing yet complete and utter bollocks.

I understand the difference in the cost/parameters etc. but it was miles behind the other 3, in fact it wasn’t just behind it was hurtling in the opposite direction, while being incredibly plausible.

The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.

It just wouldn’t be possible to have a fair election when a sizeable percentage of the population is living under foreign occupation.

Google currently has an advertising campaign for Gemini (in conjunction with Netflix!) which is all about how you can use AI to tell you what the key episodes are so that you don’t need to watch the whole thing. If that isn’t an admission that most of it is filler I don’t know what is…

Seems like autonomous personal air travel would be a far, far simpler problem to solve than road-based driving? Far less edge cases, once you are in the air the only obstacles you really need to worry about are other vehicles, birds, leaves and the odd stray plastic bag. With VTOL the whole thing could be an order of magnitude easier than driving. By the same principle, sea travel would also have less edge cases, at least in calm conditions. Is it the case that people aren’t seeing markets for those applications of autonomy or is there some other reason why there isn’t the same hype in those areas?

Maybe never reported in the wild?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8535618.stm

Isn’t that what Cambridge Analytica were aiming for?

Facebook jumped the shark when they started trying to encourage private individuals to “create engagement” and pay to boost their posts. If internal marketing jargon is leaking into your UX, you clearly have serious problems with how your staff are being incentivised.

Facebook could have become an engine that allowed society to maximise human capital and but they sacrificed all that potential at the altar of growth hacking and bleeding advertisers dry.

Nuclear weapons are the reason why the competing global powers have found new ways to compete and project power abroad. Global wars have mostly moved from being violence-based to being fought via propaganda and economics. It probably mirrors the way smaller communities moved from physical to intellectual competition.

Why are we still teaching assemby and C over development languages more popular, enjoyable, and accessible? It is not a good career path, it is not popular with kids or with the masses, and it is a lot more expensive than any other genre of software development.

I am getting the Wikipedia list (“I found this on the web”). Tried asking it to search Wolfram Alpha (which spellcheck corrected to WolframAlpha btw!) and it said it couldn’t find that info on WolframAlpha

Apple autocorrect has gotten worse over the past few years. The worst part is that it often changes words that were correctly typed to something wrong without the user noticing.

There are also obvious mistakes with location that just shouldn’t happen. If I am in Glasgow and ask Siri “how far to Loch Lomond?” it should be obvious that I mean Loch Lomond in Scotland and not Loch Lomond VA.

It’s interesting to note Woz’s current enthusiasm for the watch because he was very down on it when it launched.

Like those janky Bin Laden videos from a few years back?

I'm really impressed that the shadows behind in the window are reasonably realistic too.

Wouldn't the solution to that be to render in the cloud?

The two future directions that Apple are heading in are AR (augmented reality) and AS (autonomous systems). Mapping is more than key to both of those domain. It’s a complete no-brainer for Apple.

I think the new Facetime features are gamechangers in terms of driving usage. All this stuff was already available in Snapchat etc. but Snap's problem is that the impressive AR stuff they were doing 3 years ago is now built into the OS.

Allowing people to call each other as avatars complete with facial expressions or with flattering filters applied gets rid of one of the last remaining key barriers to mass video calling adoption: people tend to look like hell in low light on front-facing cameras. Teenagers will upgrade to Face ID just to get these features, grandkids will love calling their grandparents as cartoon tigers and grandparents will love responding as cartoon dinosaurs.

Also nice to see the fruits of the Workflow acquisition, this will allow people to do all sorts of customisations including using slang and profanity to trigger commands. "Hey Siri, order my favourite fucking pizza".

Unfortunately “Hey Siri” starts to grate the 70th time you say it in 3 days. I would actually now rather walk across the room to touch the Homepod than have to say the phrase so much. It’s still in uncanny valley territory a lot of the time as it isn’t smart enough to keep context between interactions or react in a human-like way.

I think a retroactive activation feature would be the way to go, ie. be able to say “Siri” at the end of a sentence and have it parse the phrase that came before. It feels more natural to say “skip this please Siri” than “Hey Siri, skip” because it lets you amend the mistake of not identifying the subject earlier in the sentence rather than the phrase-exasperation-hey Siri-phrase.

I asked Siri to DJ and my daughter said “hey Siri, I don’t like that song”. Siri said “I’ll remember that” and played something else. Now I have no idea how to amend Siri’s notion that I dislike one of my favourite tracks. There should really be a Homepod app where you can see recent interactions and correct misinterpreted ones.

There are also some artists and tracks with unusual spellings that are always going to cause problems for a voice interface and so they need a solution for that.

With up to 2 billion people already profiled by unethical 3rd parties using big data to spot the correlations between likes and behavioural patterns, the privacy ship has in effect already sailed unless all those users delete all the post likes, pages they follow etc. Facebook can’t fix this without throwing the advertising revenue baby out with the micro-targetting bathwater.

Besides the scientifically proven downsides for society and general human wellbeing that inequality is known to cause, why should people’s lives be improved or not at the whim of “business” and the “non-common”, most of whom are the beneficiaries of inherited wealth or a gamed system? What gives people the right to live a parasitic, non-contributory existence at the expense of the labour of other humans? You seem to be systematising and forgetting that you are talking about billions of real lives?

The data that Shazam can gather must be incredibly useful to record labels, in that many people wanting to know the artist/song is a strong signal that a track is a potential hit. Since Apple already have data about what people are actually listening to (by location), this gives them additional data about what people might want to listen to.

Taxation is the price of living (or participating in a market) in a developed country and benefiting from shared infrastructure. Apple needs somewhere for their distribution planes to land, their users need affordable electricity, no-one will buy new phones if they can’t afford to eat. Maybe we can obsolete airports, national energy grids and food distribution networks one day but until then, taxes need to be paid?

Are you implying that you’d be happy for a corporation to pay minimal tax, as long as the amount paid sounded like a large number?

Actually, given that lawmakers are in effect captured by large corporations, and Apple are the largest of all, what they think about tax law actually really matters. Tim Cook has spoken out about cash repatriation several times and the debate seems to be about where the tax is paid.

If a phone is sold in France, a corporation is making money from the French market, so given that that market has fixed infrastructure costs, shouldn’t actors in that market contribute to those costs through taxation?

Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. The brand values include good citizenship, disability awareness, eco-friendliness and diversity. Appearing to be money-grabbing corporate assholes could cause them real damage, so protests absolutely can have an effect.

You mean what every rational organisation and person that are already rich enough to hire a “creative” accountant does?

Well ransomware is a growth market...

It’s not clear to me whether Facebook is in bed with government agencies at a corporate level, or has just been compromised by them, but I have seen active censorship with my own eyes in the UK during politically sensitive periods so this is no surprise to me.

Well the phone is already a trackpad, you can mirror the screen wireless via an Apple TV, and you can use a Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, I’m doing all 3 to write this (The user-experience is more than acceptable, but I’m not going to try to use the setup for coding any time soon).

Apple could pull the trigger on running full OSX on a phone or iPad if they thought there was a market for it but it would be a backwards-looking step.

It’s not exactly an innovation leap to think “hey, phones will match desktop PC performance, we could plug one into peripherals and make a device that can become a desktop”, everyone has had that idea. It just seems a bit backwards looking? In 10 years time the power of a current Mac Pro will probably be available in a watch with 5G+ bandwidth. If necessary, a desktop OS experience could be an app or a cloud service on whichever screen (or headset) is available.