cjk2

Ah it's much higher than that.

I always ask: tell me the question you are answering with this.

99% of people can't answer that question.

Oracle evil - check. Microsoft privacy violating mess - check. Azure rolling disaster zone - check.

What could possibly go wrong?

Says the guy selling data collection machines on wheels...

Asshat!

apart from the financial crimes unit...

To be fair it was terrible on macOS as well.

And my colleagues laugh at me for using Apple provided vim with no extensions for everything…

it's bloody terrible on the ipad too.

I tried it with my studio display for a day and it was like wrestling a raccoon all fucking day.

Err we already have that in Sonoma. Press F3 and move the mouse to the top of the screen.

You can even switch between them with a triple swipe on a magic trackpad...

This stuff will be well integrated, is useful, will be high quality and doesn't require you to buy new hardware.

Microsoft are so boned. They don't even have a mobile proposition.

The most annoying thing for me is the lack of completion of swear words. This results in lots of gucking and shut.

We have a pool one for expeditions. But it's not reliable. The one time we needed it, the thing was on the fritz so we had to carry a guy with a broken leg 10km.

I would like 2 completely different channels to communicate over.

I hang around in the middle of nowhere in dangerous and stupid places a lot for days. It'd be nice to bounce the odd message to family to inform them that I'm not dead.

I think it's free (for now) like the emergency SOS. Well not free, you pay for it when you buy the phone.

Nice but the thing they said that interested me was iMessage via satellite. Now that is impressive for a minor feature.

There's a whole web site! https://www.caffenol.org

I spent 1990->2010 using windows. Certain things get stuck in your mind.

What I'd like is the windows user experience but not broken as fuck and with the breadth of default high quality applications you get on macOS and the hardware flexibility of a PC.

None of those things were commoditised in even a 20 year span. Many more things died.

Effectively everyone is running on faith. That’s not good enough.

Ah I just use it to control music when driving and adding stuff to the shopping list. I find any other tasks require a human. Not because of Siri as such but because the problem is deeply concerned with context and semantics.

I'm wearing Dick Tracy's watch so the ideas were already out there...

The point is that idea was actually useful!

I think the disillusion here is when you find out that these things are mostly smoke and mirrors that tend to generate very suboptimal solutions. For example I am forever having to shoot down ChatGPT generated code before it hits production which is naively and lazily generated and the engineer is not aware of this at all. Yes it can write SQL but does it understand the index strategy on the destination table or the consequences of running thousands of those queries a minute in a production database? No. Does it have a deep understanding of context rather than just syntax (ask a French language translator what they think of it). No. And with trip planning and ideas, which is a speciality of mine, it is always better to find someone local and ask them about it because a huge portion of the information out there isn't something a model can infer about because it isn't written down anywhere. Case in point, I'm off to the Azores islands shortly - it can't generate anything useful for me. I had someone suggest that already. On top of that it is compelled to over explain sometimes to the point of incorrectness, which it likes to do on travel advice. This becomes dangerous. I found someone local to talk to instead.

So personally I think the LLM and question based uses are limited and quite ridiculous from an objectivity perspective. They barely scratch the surface of the problem and the hit rate is less than I'd get doing the legwork myself, which I do not find useful. And the information is hard to verify and judge if it's safe without deeper contextual knowledge. This is a complete mire.

The other use cases, like classification and search are where I see it winning but those aren't sexy and don't play on our human emotions as well enough to part with cash. They will be left after the hype of course.

Really I think people are buying into a romantic fantasy at the moment.

Not really. Your point is hyperbole. Personal computing was a paradigm shift. This is a relatively minor change in a small subset of it.

Well I'm not sure they are giving Apple a run for their money. They haven't delivered anything in quantity yet, the benchmarks and reliability are unknown and the big problem as always is software and they're in bed with Microsoft who are running a shit show on windows 11.

I'd like this to work out. Objectively I'd prefer to use Windows than MacOS (there I said it!) but the hassle is not worth it any more to take on the software.

I don't get the hate for Siri. If you know the constraints it's extremely useful and reliable.

I suspect similar. None of the AI stuff they have is particularly fantastic at the moment. I mean it's mostly used to suggest things which I am not interested and mix up cows and horses in Photos.

Working with OpenAI is interesting. That means they can cast their proposition off or replace it later. Even they know it's a massive risk.

The AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found people have literally no interest or just disdain for this. Personally I haven't found a single use for any of the current AI tools out there which materially improves my life other than the de-noise in Adobe Lightroom.

I suspect Apple are the most likely organisation to be able to change this as they have a track record of taking existing technology and making it useful and demonstrating it effectively.

If they can't do this or it's a disaster I expect it will by proxy reflect badly across the entire industry. This will be an interesting year.

I dunno. Quite frankly I’m bored of it and don’t care any more. I suspect it’s just attrition. I have better things to do than deal with some transient technology provider’s existence.

Other than to bitch about this meta point of course :)

Really the metric is: if they died tomorrow would my life be materially impacted. Apple yes, OpenAI nope!

Of course it depends on the subject matter. Wildlife and sports are exceptional cases. I recently fucked up a nice shot of a dragonfly because I wasn't machine gunning it (I have a Nikon Z6-ii which can really hammer the frames out but I don't use it like that).

But most of the good shots I take are good because I put time into them. Or did a lot of research first. Or went and stood in front of interesting stuff.

I've been doing it at home with cheap chemicals for a few years (instant coffee!). The film is the expensive bit but you can usually find expired rolls floating around for not much money that work absolutely fine. B&W only of course. Colour developing at home is a pain in the ass.

I think this is a silent constraining factor of photography. You used to have to do most of the work before you hit the shutter because every shot was expensive both in cash and time. Now you can fire it like a machine gun and dredge through the crap later. This added to the mental investment in the process and the mental investment in the device itself as you felt more connected and decisive.

You can and I do run my digital camera within these rails artificially. It's more fun!

(Edit: just checked my mirrorless - it's at 1875 shutter activations and it has been around the world at least once)

I call this one FDD: Fuckwit Driven Development. Because if it was resume-driven I'd expect it to be something that they would want to put on their resume. But this is unmentionable.