>You wouldn’t fire them for getting that one answer wrong, you’d fire them because that one wrong answer is emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency that permeates everything they try to do. You’d never have hired them in the first place, really, because there’s no way a person this stupid would get through a job interview.
I feel like we're really bad at distinguishing deficits in intelligence from deficits in acculturation.
It is amusing that someone thinking London means London, Canada should be fired for stupidity, but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever) hours to his current time and needs an elaborate device to do it is seen as smart and insightful. This is some pretentious BS.
> but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever)
The whole point of asking is precisely because I dont know how many hours I have to add. And neither do I know if said country, region or city is having whatever DayLight Saving hours etc.
> Haha yeah you're so much smarter than him. Somebody should give you an award!
I think his post is motivated by the kind of pretentious assholery that emanates from the kind of world view, or view on other humans that the article rerflects, that assistants are objects to be fired over whatever opinion their "owner" has on what is to be considered stupid or not.
"Oh! My assistant is so STUPID they didn't think about this thing the same way as I did, they should be fired, lowlife trash!"
Yeah, first in class entitled assholery right there.
> who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 [...]
As someone who frequently talks to colleagues across timezones that are -9, -2, or +3.5 hours from me, where each of these have different dates for summer time, or don't have summer time, and meeting recurrences gets skewed etc, I don't see how asking about the current time off a location could be seen as "pretentious".
Yes, I do this frequently too, and what I meant to be "pretentious" was not having this problem, but writing a post about it and discussing it on a news site. This is like writing a news story about the lint in my pocket.
I hit this all the time with "Salt Lake City", it gives me the time in India. Despite the fact that my phone should know that I have tens of contacts in Utah, but few if any in India.
If you have to constantly "clarify your thoughts" because your assistant is incapable of basic inferences based on context and general knowledge, then they aren't likely to be much use as an assistant.
Maybe GPS data and the fact that due to a pandemic there's a travel ban the actual intelligent answer is in fact "London, Canada" and only a stupid person would fail to see that?
We can spin this all day long. The truth is, if you want a very specific answer, and you fail to ask a specific question, then you're the only one to blame.
How far would you take that though? If I say to my assistant "what time is it?" should I also specify that I mean the time at my current longitude and latitude. If I say "Could you please print this for me," must I specify to print it on the printer in my office and not one in Barcelona, using letter paper, in a font that isn't Comic Sans, and that it shouldn't be thrown in the trash right after it is printed. Or should I assume that a reasonably intelligent person can infer all that?
I see a lot of people here making references to the pandemic but as far as I remember this behavior hasn't really changed since last Year before the pandemic. John Gruber presumably can't travel to either London right now anyways so choosing the nearest London rather then the most known London isn't particularly smarter just because there is a pandemic.
Also I personally ask a question like this (and I assume many people do as well) if I want to call someone which is notably unaffected by the pandemic.
Is it? Siri is a digital assistant. The point is it should be held to a much higher standard. It's currently awful to the point of uselessness. So what standard of assistant is it? Not one you'd employ.
I think treating Siri like a digital version of a Personal Assistant is going a bit far. It is a simple Voice Interface to a bunch of apps, local databases and cloud databases.
Nobody has ever said "Should I buy an Apple Watch for $750 or hire a PA for $35,000/year?".
I'm not a parent, so just speculating wildly, but there's a good chance your 3 year old has already cost more that $1750. Also, having met a few in my extended family I would doubt that a 3 year old not from London would actually know the time there, even if they could properly disambiguate the question. The phone seems like good value by that comparison
I’ve always phrased the question as “What is the time in the UK” (as a British person living in the USA). It’s unclear to me whether my form of asking the question is because it’s the best way to get a “good” answer from Siri, though I don’t think it would ever occur to me to ask what the time is in London versus the last city I lived in (Bath) in the first place, since they’re always the same.
Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK, so there's no point asking "What's the time in London" and "What's the time in Preston" because you know the answer is the same, but since America has 3 or 4 timezones (I'm not sure, I know it's at least three), American people intuitively specify the city, since "What's the time in the USA" is not valid
> Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK
And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I don't really know how it works in the UK because I'm French, so let's take France instead. "What time is it in France?" usually means "in metropolitan France", but now let's say you're in northern Brazil, close to the border of French Guyane. When you say "what time is it in France", do you mean "metropolitan France across the ocean", or do you mean "the closest French department a hundred miles away"?
>> And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies.
I think the UK only consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK has some control over aspects of the dependencies but they are not actually part of the UK.
What’s funny is that if I ask Siri what time it is in London, it gives me the same time as it is here in Waterloo (1hr east of London Ontario).
On the other hand, if I ask what time it is in Preston, Siri gives me the time in the UK, despite the fact that I’m only 15km away from Preston Ontario!
Now if I ask what time it is in Cambridge, it gives me the local time instead of Cambridge England. Preston Ontario is actually part of Cambridge Ontario.
So what it seems to be doing is picking the nearest place that’s well known, rather than the most well known place with that name. Preston Ontario isn’t really known at all unless you’re from this area. Cambridge Ontario is a little bit more well known, though still a far cry from Cambridge England (likely due to the university).
I just spent longer than reasonable zooming into random parts of Canada, it's quite funny seeing places like Morpeth south of London. And also satisfying to see Kent and Essex are neighbours in Canada, too. There were some surprising ones too, like Uttoxeter having a name-twin
It's fairly established that picking a capital / large city is the correct way to specify a time zone, that usually gives you what you want. The alternatives have various problems:
* Pick a country: Some counties have multiple time zones.
* Abbreviations like EST, CET: Not right in summer.
* Words like "Eastern Time": assumes the country from context.
* Offsets like UTC-5: Doesn't follow summer time.
* Click on a map: India will ban your app because one pixel in Kashmir gave Pakistan time.
I'd suggest that the correct way to specify a time zone is the name from the IANA time zone database, which uses area (currently a continent or ocean) and location, avoiding most of these problems. Thus:
Same thing happens with Frankfurt. If I order something from Amazon.de, my package usually goes through Frankfurt. When I checked my package tracker app on my iPhone, I was surprised to find out that Frankfurt is actually on the Germany-Poland border.
Turns out that if I enter "Frankfurt, Germany" into Apple Maps (which I assume is what the package tracker app does), it takes me to "Frankfurt (Oder), Germany" instead of "Frankfurt am Main, Germany".
My company (based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) had an online business travel reservation system which helpfully pre-filled the starting point of all new trips to Frankfurt, Kentucky (which is not even the right spelling of the city).
I filed a request to NOT pre-fill the starting city to a place in Kentucky and got a polite but firm reply that this was the default list provided by the 3rd party online booking engine and cannot be customized. Sigh.
I had forgotten about this until just now but it wasn't so long ago that the Virgin Atlantic (a London, England-based airline) would autocomplete "London" (vs LHR) to "East London, South Africa" in the origin field despite them not flying there. That annoyed me around once a week when I used to fly a lot more.
Fun etymology fact: Both Frankfurts get their name from a simple description of the same thing, which they both are instances of: settlements adjacent to a Frankish river ford (place where the river is shallow enough to cross without a bridge). The English "ford" and German "Furt" come from the same root; hence Francoford / Franken-Furt / Frankfurt. The "an der Oder" (at the Oder) and "am Main" (at the Main) suffixes are clarifications to describe which river is involved.
It's a massive difference. Frankfurt am Main is one of the largest cities in Germany. Frankfurt (Oder) has a population of 50000. You seldom refer to Frankfurt (Oder).
Okay, I knew I was stupid already, but if I was an assistant, and smart enough to know there was more than one London (which I've until recently not been), I'd have asked "Which one?" in case there was not enough context to make a guess.
There are probably _A_LOT_ of people who have a lot more to do with the non-british London who'd be very sad indeed if The Machines (tm) suddenly decided that EVERY request about London MUST ALWAYS be about the British one..
Kinda like how I'm eternally sad when I get german results, just because my connection is from Germany, but I am Danish, sitting in Denmark and am usually NOT looking for the nearest biergarten (lies, I am, but we have none).
You're right that some people want to know the time in London, Ontario. But most people who ask the time in London don't.
In the absence of context, the right thing is to give the time in the UK. If more context is given: "What time is it in London, Ontario," then obviously it should give the time in Ontario, and perhaps remember that this person is an exception to the rule.
There are probably _A_LOT_ of people who have a lot more to do with the non-british London who'd be very sad indeed if The Machines (tm) suddenly decided that EVERY request about London MUST ALWAYS be about the British one..
There will be a lot more people who are asking about the British London than people who are asking about their nearest London. Apple will be making far more people sad by defaulting to the local one. If Siri asked "Which London?" every time most people would get annoyed.
What should happen from a UX perspective is that Siri should respond with "The time in London, UK, is..." which would inform the user that Siri is differentiating between different Londons, and that they need to specify a locality in order to narrow down the query to some other London if necessary. 99% of the time the user will get what they wanted first time, and the other 1% of the time the user will be informed that their query wasn't accurate enough.
Selecting a default behaviour based on what "most people" will benefit from is great some cases, but mostly cases people will encounter only once.
People who happen to fall beside the "most" category should not have to deal with that every single time.
The right thing to do for Siri is to ask, maybe just once, which london you want to know the time for, if its not smart enough to infer it from something else it's learned about you.
Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's entirely likely that they travel there more often, and if the siri software has no other parameters tracked, then it's not unreasonable to assume that they're asking about that.
> Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's entirely likely that they travel there more often
It really isn’t. I can see this being the case for people that live within, say, 100 miles of London, ON - but why would they want to know the time there in that case?
I would guess that there are more people in North America who are interested in London than people in North America who are interested in London, Ontario.
See what I did there? London (which is a major global city) doesn't need a qualifier anymore than New York does.
Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's entirely likely that they travel there more often...
It's also reasonable to assume they're in the same timezone as 'their' London and wouldn't need to ask what time it is in the local one. That's another reason to default to one further away, which for most people would be Britain.
> What should happen from a UX perspective is that Siri should respond with "The time in London, UK, is..."
This is exactly what Google assistant does. You can follow your question up with "what about London, Canada" and it will say "The time in London, ON, Canada is...".
There are two things a good assistant will do: 1. save you time by making reasonable assumptions and 2. inform you which assumptions it has made.
Your #2 is not good. I live in London, UK and when asking "What's the time in London", I mean London, UK.
You may ask why do I need to specify London at all? Here's one of the possible scenarios, sounding very normal as human communication goes:
(I'm in London wanting to phone my relatives in Moscow, which is several time zones away. I don't know the current time in either Moscow or London, and I don't know what's the time difference between the two as not all countries observe DST)
Me: "Hey Siri, what's the time in Moscow?"
Siri: "It's 10:35PM in Moscow, Russia"
Me (thinking about whether I'll finish speaking in time for dinner): "Hey Siri, what's the time in London?"
Siri: "It's 8:35PM in London, UK"
Asking "What's the time?" instead of "What's the time in London?" sounds very unnatural here.
Fair enough, although I do see it as a not so common case. But maybe it is more common than people wanting to know the time in London, Canada while being in London, UK.
That would get annoying very soon. If you look hard enough, almost any question is ambiguous.
I think the best thing to do is to pick one interpretation, answer that, but make it clear which London you picked (“the time in London, England is 12:34”), and then, handle “no, the one in…” correctly.
Falling back to “which one do you mean?” Should be the exception, as a voice assistent that can’t make that initial guess right most of the time isn’t worth using.
I think dates, times, UTC offsets, and locales/cultures is a topic we frequently think of as "that's easy" [1] when in practice it's painstakingly hard to get right.
As an example, we've spent the past few days on our eng team refining our spreadsheet functions for date/time handling, and it's like the 5th time we've iterated on this (after supporting everything Excel / Google Sheets do).
Funny part is, I'm sure we'll iterate on it even more -- it's hard to get this topic both right & make it easy to use / approachable.
Btw, does anyone have good reading materials on this topic? (date/time/locale handling)
[1] I'm biased as a founder at https://mintdata.com, but thankfully our engineers set me straight on the subtleties :D
Any developer who thinks dates, times, UTC offsets and locales/cultures is "easy" is grossly incompetent (unless, of course, they've never worked with human-facing software before, in which case their naiveté can be forgiven).
“Human facing”? Any software worth it’s salt needs to deal with this stuff. Unless it’s a toy program. I quite enjoy Timezone stuff, perversely. Might be Stockholm?
If you're writing firmware for an embedded device without a clock then you'll never have to deal with this. If your software only ever has to interact with other software then you wouldn't ever use time zones unless you really have to. Only humans demand time zones.
Your MintData software looks great. I would love a reasonably MS Access type app like this priced at a level I could recommend to or use on behalf of family members.
I hopefully and naively clicked pricing ;)
Some honest feedback would be to rename Personal. Personal account usually mean individuels, but no home user or hobbyist is going to pay $95/month unless they are making money from it.
>Btw, does anyone have good reading materials on this topic?
I had a slide deck somewhere from when I was at a broker trader and leap seconds mattered (they (can) happen around 10am in East Asian markets on Jun 30).
The moral of the story is: time measurements are fractally wrong, it doesn't matter what format/time system you pick, there will be a use case that breaks it badly. Local time + timezone, epoch, UTC, ATI, doesn't matter it will break somehow.
Ranking and NLP aren't easy. If you are asking a slightly related question (for example, "What is the weather in London"), and if you are living at some place where the nearest major town is called London, but is not London in England, you would expect it to give you the weather in "your" London. However, it you are asking for the time in a particular city, then the ranking should of course consider whether the timezone of the city you asked for is different than your own - it makes no sense to ask for the time in a city which lies in your timezone. Then again, if the distance from your location to that other London is greater than a certain threshold, the question could imply that you actually do not know whether the city lies in the same timezone as your location.
All these thresholds or ranking factors seem to come intuitively to humans (I would guess a good intuition for them is actually a sign of intelligence), but it seems to be incredibly hard to capture them in ranking.
As others have pointed out, a solution here would be to make Siri more conversational. A simple "Which London?" could've removed the ambiguity and given Siri the opportunity to learn something about that particular person (that London, England is more important to him than London in Canada).
The problem sounds a little like collaborative filtering. If you have a certain affinity with cities A,B,C, then you can compute the expected affinity with a city X by looking at the affinities other people have with X, and their affinities with A,B,C.
Instead of looking at people, you can also scrape websites to get the relations. But here you may get a recursive problem because if a website speaks of "London", you might not know in advance which London they speak of.
> A simple "Which London?" could've removed the ambiguity and given Siri the opportunity to learn something about that particular person (that London, England is more important to him than London in Canada).
IMO I would be very disappointed if Siri started asking clarifying questions at a significantly higher rate. Siri is already a bit too chatty, and I never feel like having an extended conversation with her.
I’d rather she just say the wrong thing (but make it clear that the answer is for a specific London, e.g. “The time in London Ontario is...”) and I can correct her. It’s the same number of conversational “turns”, but in the happy path when she actually gets it right the first time, it’s one-shot and done.
It’s a lot harder to get signal on this for learning, but I feel like there are ways around this as well. (Maybe saying “thanks” can signal she got something right, and prefixing the next utterance with “no” could signal it was wrong...)
> Siri is already a bit too chatty, and I never feel like having an extended conversation with her.
Tell me about it. I have to unpair my bluetooth headphones every day, for stupid reasons that aren't Siri's fault. But when I say "Siri, open bluetooth preferences", it parses my command on screen VERY quickly, and then slowly enunciates "Okay! Let's take a look at your bluetooth settings." I'm just tapping my foot and waiting for her to quit talking.
Of course, then, 1 out of 3 times it takes me to the wrong settings page. Because if Settings has been opened recently, it can't deep link from Siri. /shrug
It’s the typical example of the meaning problem. Any token derives its meaning from a context. Think of the context as requirement of setting up a careful experiment to measure the spin of an electron. Without the context, we have reasonable confidence that it’s an electron but don’t have any clue if it’s spin up or spin down.
Similarly in this case, we’re reasonably confident that London is a place on earth with a property of time that is being asked. But without the additional context (or supplementary logic) we can’t know for sure which London it is: Canadian, American, or English.
Until we provide such context, London is in a superposition of all the possible meaningful state.
Modern ai has no “common sense”. Worse yet, no one knows what it is or how to add it. It’s why self driving cars can’t really drive, search results produce nonsense, speech recognition barely works, robots can’t do much.
"you’d fire them because that one wrong answer is emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency that permeates everything they try to do. "
Oh, if only, John. But then, who'd write for your blog?
(if you feel that's unwarranted: "Daring Fireball" was the outlet that wrote a character assassination piece on rms, backed by some irrefutable evidence, that turned out to be about esr, and nobody performed even the most casual of fact checking, and it's still up there with some sorry-not-sorry half-hearted retraction, and probably all because rms told Jobs they couldn't grant him an exception to turn gcc proprietary eons ago.)
To throw a tongue-in-cheek additional example in here: the population of London, Ontario is (significantly) greater than the population of the City of London, UK.
Reality is hard. And with machine learning (especially proprietary, remotely-hosted machine learning) there's rarely a way to pinpoint a line of code and say: "this is what happened and why you're now frustrated and firing hypothetical personal assistants".
Yes, but in the same way people don't usually mean "London, Ontario" when they say London, they also don't usually mean the City of London (which, for the benefit of people who may not know, is a tiny portion of London with a population less than 10,000).
Yep; my (indirect) point is that there are multiple possible reasons why Siri may have made the judgement that London, Ontario was more relevant when answering.
My guess is that Apple would find it difficult to provide robust references to John to explain why it happened, or how they've fixed it for him (and whether that fix is a one-off workaround for his complaint, etc..)
A group of us once tried to rank cities in Europe by population only to realize that most of them are effectively incomparable.
Cities sometimes have clear legal boundaries that feel irrelevant to the question, like the City of London, but more generally have metro areas that sprawl well into an ambiguously defined countryside. There's rarely a "this block is city, the next block over is clearly not" situation, so the number of people you include ends up being pretty arbitrary.
While it is arbitrary, and not a city (in the sense that it hasn't received that status from the Queen), Greater London is absolutely a defined administrative area in the UK, with a governing body (the London Assembly) and a mayor (the Mayor of London -- not the Lord Mayor of London, who is the mayor of the City of London).
Anything can be ranked as long as you clearly define the ranking metric first.
When ranking by population it often makes most sense to use the population of the metropolitan area. That is, to ignore the administrative divisions, which vary too much, and focus on the physical reality of the urban area.
The fact that this piece of "news" is front page is really stupid.
There was a BBC piece yesterday about the condition in the Malakasa camp in Greece.[1] Some of our fellow brothers literally don't have anything to eat. And while it's 2020, we still fret about what browser is better (I bet half the globe doesn't even know what a browser is or doesn't care) or spend excessive amounts of time for yet a new color theme or a shiny new website that offers 2 new buttons that the other 50 websites don't.
I think we failed. We were supposed to be the smarter ones. The best income (or close), the brightest minds, the new future, AI, the internet that connects everybody (how nicely did FB solved that). And here we are, gathered around the fire, having an intelligent conversation about nothing.
> The fact that this piece of "news" is front page is really stupid. There was a BBC piece yesterday about the condition in the Malakasa camp in Greece ...
HN is not a news website in the traditional sense, even though "news" is in the name. How is this not obvious?
For what you are seeking you should go to reuters.com, you'd probably have better luck.
Meaning, the rest of the world literally has other pressing problems than the ones the planet's most capable people are spending their days with.
But I get it now. This new technology is not actually about saving the people, is about controlling them, regardless of what the motto of big tech might be. That quote from Dune is still right on track:
"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"
Your outrage rings pretty hollow as you are on Hacker News spending your time complaining rather than doing something about all the problems in the world.
I’ve based most of my life philosophy on the work of Peter Singer. His response to your comment would be, “we can’t save all the drowning children.” There’s a point where trying to do so deteriorates our personal well being, which benefits no one.
I would rather people sit around the campfire discussing what they know (timezone related software design decisions) instead of making it up as they go (superficially discussing policy or political situations they just learned about 10 minutes ago).
It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than set timers. Every few months I try to do something else and just get annoyed at how bad it is.
Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close to "Hey Siri".
I’ve had Siri disabled for years. Even the basic “call home” works every 3rd time. I try it for a few minutes with every new iOS update only to see it’s still the same dumbster fire.
When I lived in the United States I frequently used Siri while driving to setup the gps or change what music I was listening to. But indeed, ever since moving to a country with a nice public transportation system, I’ve had it disabled. There just isn’t a compelling use case.
Meanwhile, my iPhone has gotten much smarter about adding meetings to my calendar, or guessing the person who is calling me. These seem like the real use cases for AI going forward.
I mostly use Siri to play Spotify, but most of the time she won't listen to me through my car's microphone. If she isn't working then I need to pull my phone out of my pocket and place it somewhere the phone can clearly hear me.
Every once in a while she will decide to listen through my car, but it's very rare. I don't have Apple Car Play so not sure if that's a factor.
Google has been far better and more consistent listening through my car even if it didn't get my query correct all the time, at least I could correct it without pulling my phone out.
I had never used an Apple product before the company which I joined recently gave me a MacBook Pro. I am really surprised how bad the product quality is. The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over. Similarly the keyboard shortcut is random. Sometimes it opens the app, sometimes it does not.
The laptop also gets very hot if you are not sitting in A/C. Not sure if it is this specific laptop or it is a general issue
> The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over.
I see something similar and assumed this happens because Mail / Calendar are relying on ics attachments (not sure what the behaviour is with the Gmail integration). I believe this means that if Mail is closed you don’t get Calendar updates until you open both and refresh.
Either way I find I have to refresh Mail and Calendar a lot to keep them in sync.
So do people just buy these to look cool? I tried using a Macbook many times, but often got frustrated and went back to my good old Linux laptop for development. Doesn't look quite as slick, but certainly gets the job done.
I develop on this thing. It is running a great Unix os. I can't stand desktop Linux. The hardware quality was the best with a wide margin before the latest gen. Battery life is also great. I like them for development work when they are stable.
A lot of people are also really invested into the ecosystem. My entire photo collection is on iCloud. I use an iPhone. I can copy paste between my computer and phone. My Apple watch unlocks the computer when I'm near... List goes on.
But now I feel like Apple is a fantastic phone company that also happens to make some computers. They have been degrading pretty bad.
It's also that Windows/Linux has many of these issues as well. It's not as if Windows 10 notifications are clear and intuitive. When I go to my desktop after a day of work, Windows will slowly replay every single slack message and email I got all day, one at a time, for almost an hour, as single notifications.
I think it's less that OS X is bad now, but more that it's finally degraded to a level of annoyance that people just have gotten enured to with Windows. It's not to say that that's a good thing, but at this point, I have known bugs and annoyances with all of the computers I work with, no matter the platform.
Some of it is also that Apple has a "real" integrated ecosystem. To what you say, you can easily move things between iOS and OS X. If you're watching stuff on your Mac, you can throw it to an Apple TV or your Airpods. Windows doesn't have a version of that that "just works". The closest you get is opting into Google's ecosystem and going Chromecast/Android, but I'd rather not trust Google with even more of my info.
My first Mac was an employer-provided MBP in... oh, 2011 or so. Before that I'd used DOS, Windows (3.1 and up, including NT4 and 2K) and Linux (Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, roughly in that order with a little Redhat and Fedora here and there). I'd seen some early OSX server edition thing, but not really used it, and I'd used pre-OSX Macs at school (hated them, "it's more stable and faster than Winblowz" my ass). Some exposure to Solaris, too. Used BeOS (loved it) and QNX on home machines for various purposes, as well.
The MBP was the first laptop I'd used that 1) had a trackpad good enough that I didn't feel like I needed to carry a mouse around to use it for more than 10min at a time, and 2) had battery life good enough that I didn't feel like I needed to take my power supply with me if I'd be away from my desk for more than an hour. It had every port I was likely to need for most tasks. In short, it was the first time I'd used a laptop that was actually usefully portable as a self-contained device. They kinda ruined that appeal by going all-USB-C and The Great Endongling, but that's another story.
It was also very stable, and over time I came to really appreciate the built-in software. Preview's amazing (seriously, never would have thought a preview app would make a whole computing platform "sticky" for me, but here we are, it's that good), Safari's the only browser that seems to really care about power use, terminal's light and has very low input latency, it comes with a decent video editor, an office suite I prefer over anything I've used on Linux, and so on. In short it's full of good-enough productivity software that's also light enough on resources that I don't hesitate to open them, and often forget they're still open in the background.
These days I like having a base OS that's decent, includes the GUI and basic productivity tools, and that's distinctly separate from my user-managed packages (homebrew) rather than having them all mixed up together (yes, I could achieve this on Linux, if it had a core, consolidated GUI/windowing system so various apps weren't targeting totally different windowing toolkits, but it doesn't, so separating a capable and complete GUI "base OS" from the rest of one's packages gets tricky). There are quite a few little nice-to-haves littered around the settings and UI. Most of the software is generally better polished UX wise than Linux or Windows, and that doesn't just mean it's pretty—it performs well and, most importantly, consistently. There are problems and exceptions to "well and consistently" but there are so many more issues on competing platforms that even if it's gotten worse, it's still much nicer to use.
Given the premium on hardware (that's come and gone—at times there almost wasn't one if you actually compared apples to apples [haha], but right now it's large) I'd rather use Linux (or, well, probably a BSD, but that'd mean even more fiddling most likely) but the only times that's seemed to function genuinely well and stably compared to its competition was when I either kept tight control over every aspect of the system (time-consuming, meant figuring out how to do any new thing I needed to do that other systems might do automatically, which wasn't always a great use of time to put it mildly) or in the early days of Ubuntu (talking pre-Pulse Audio, so quite a while ago) which was really sensible, light, and polished for a time.
I do still run Windows only for gaming, and Linux on servers or in GUI-equipped VMs for certain purposes.
Honestly I'd dare to say most of Apple's market right now is purely from vendor lock-in. Both their hardware and software are getting worse, but not bad enough for people to switch their entire digital lives to a different ecosystem.. not yet, anyway.
Heating is either a hardware issue or something like a broken program running continuously - on a normal setup that doesn’t happen.
Calendar / Todos depends on the backend. If you’re using Exchange, check the settings to confirm that it’s not set to poll every hour or something like that.
It's not just Apple, I've got a Mi phone, sometimes reminders pop up hours after they happened. They've mucked around with the default android lockscreen to save power and I think this is causing the problem.
The devices are so complicated now that they cant do their most basic functions right.
TBH, Google Assistant is not that much better. In the last few months it has become absurdly racist against my Italian accent, replying to me in Italian after I ask stuff in English - and getting the question wrong anyway.
Are you sure it's due to your accent? That seems like a difficult feature to even implement. I know Google loves to play language shenanigans based on your current IP address.
Google Assistant failed on me recently trying to set a timer. It correctly understood my "set timer for three-and-a-half minutes" request, says it's setting a timer for 3am instead and proceeds to actually set a timer for 30 seconds. How is there that much disconnect between the stages of the query?!
It's ridiculous how poor in functionality all of them are... The best they can do is, what? Creating schedule entries, for me. All I ask Google is the weather, time, some search when I'm lazy and translate (the voice translate app itself is great btw). Feeling like a total corporate bitch saying "Hey Google" every time, too :D
This is supposed to be a personal assistant. And I have a whole list of what it could do for me, personally. But it doesn't.
I've been trying to figure out how to hook Google's speech recognition and voice into other apps, since they're great and it's 99% of what I need, hands-free control and feedback. Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something.
I agree, some things are just astonishingly bad given the immense effort and resources that are being put into machine learning.
Microsoft OneDrive tags my photos. It's mostly useless. For instance, I have some pictures of squirrels on the tree outside my window. Squirrels can really do the most amazing things on trees, but they are small compared to the tree.
Microsoft with all its AI muscle will invariably tag those images as something like #Outdoor #Grass #Plant #Tree.
It's the same problem with all of those benchmark beating AIs. They have no clue what's special about the picture and what just happens to be in them as well.
> Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something.
Like they would ever do that. Then you would no longer be their "corporate bitch".
Seriously, the one thing that stands between home assistants and being useful is opening the software up and letting it be used by regular OSS devs. Alas, every one of the four big providers (Apple, Google, MS and Amazon) treat them as their moat; they want control over the ecosystem. It's the same in many other places in the industry - we're technologically way behind where we could be, because everyone wants to be the platform and commoditize everyone else, which necessitates having total control.
It even sucks at setting timers. I asked to set a timer for 50 minutes and it clearly said 50 minutes on the screen and then “corrected” it to 15 minutes.
For a while, it randomly decided that “call my wife” meant to “call my mom.” It clearly said call my wife on the screen and then switched to “mom”.
The problem is not just that it is wrong, nor that it doesn't have enough personal information, but that it lacks proper personalisation and the ability to learn.
You can't reply with "no Siri, not that London" and have it remember. It doesn't learn your voice among the people who normally use your Siri in your household.
"Artificial intelligence" is always going to make mistakes, as do real humans. Humans can perform unsupervised learning - in fact it's one of the key skills that employers like to select on! Until AI can learn in context it's going to be very limited.
I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri.
I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.
That might be because the activation words are recognized by a separate chip (so it's low-power and works offline). Whereas the rest of the conversation is with the software service.
At least that's what I heard about how iirc Alexa works.
Siri is easy enough so we never looked much into it, but “OK Google” for instance looked like a real PITA, so we did some research before buying an assistant.
It appears a ton of people just intentionally say “Ok GooGoo”, “Ok Boogle” etc., whatever is easier for them to pronounce and it works perfectly fine.
I may be biased as I helped a voice recognition internal project in a previous life.
It’s a genuinely hard problem to solve, and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Apple for instance when they have humans reviewing samples. There may be other motivations, there’s ton of people in any of these companies, any given feature must be seen from a different angle depending on the department looking at it.
But I think a lot of what we see as privacy violating is primarily an effect of the flaws and all the hacks needed to make the feature work at all (when it works).
I think that up until the real AI appears that can mimic human personality and expand it, understand variety of languages, virtual assistants will remain what they are: virtual assistants capable of executing basic commands provided by a human (preferably in English). This technology isn't bad per se - in particular cases is helpful (blind people) but it's still far for what we dream about.
My Nokia 1320 with Windows Phone 8.1 come with a very basic VA that was capable of understand Polish but only if I drop all grammar and talk like a robot. The "call mum" is "zadzwoń do mamy" in its proper form, but I had to do "zadzwoń do mama" which sounds unnatural; not mention that stuff is also being read without proper Polish grammar; "calling mum" is synthesized as "dzwonię do mama", not "dzwonię do mamy". The grammar complexity is a problem for VA technology and probably that's why neither Siri nor Cortana supports Polish or other Slavic languages, not mention dozen of other languages.
Yesterday I was washing the car while listening to Music with the air pods. I mistakenly clicked them and it launched Siri which for some reason it called a number on my phone through Facetime.
I always immediately disable siri because something similar happened the very first week I got my first iPhone. It seems to want to call the one person you haven't talked to in years.
It may not be the main selling point but it's certainly a factor for many people. And the fact that Siri is so bad makes the whole phone feel less high-quality.
And maybe I'm the exception here, but I have refrained from buying an Apple Homepod specifically because of how bad Siri is. If it was on the same level as Google Assistant I would have bought one by now.
I almost never use the "google assistant". However it has an habit of firing up while I'm driving listening to podcasts : "I didn't understand your command" (generally, at a annoyingly loud level, with that). I didn't ask you anything, you stupid. You've just misunderstood a sound coming out of the phone itself, where nobody said anything remotely related to "hey google" or "OK google". Puhlease.
I'm convinced it's actually gotten worse with the 11, I recently went from an iPhone 7 where Siri only really activated randomly a handful of times a year and could set timers (Only thing I ever use it for) with a shout across a room over the sound of an oven and fan.
Now it randomly activates multiple times a week and really struggles to even pick up me talking to it right next to it.
Convinced they've switched to a less capable microphone system because assistants were all the rage in the 7 era but now I think people have realized it's not really that important.
Like others have said - it's Apple's privacy policy, they don't know enough about you and can't use the recordings to train.
I think Apple should have been more honest about it in their privacy messaging -
"Hey guys, pretty please can we listen to your Siri recordings? We know it's not the privacy style you're used to from Apple, but if you want Siri to ever not be a piece of crap, this is really the only way."
I don't buy that anymore. There's a multitude of ways to improve Siri while respecting privacy. Apple doesn't have to go the Google way to improve.
Apple knows a ton about me, they have realtime access to my email, calendar, contacts etc. If they have guarded access, then I would accept a toggle. A lot of Siri processing happens locally on the device nowadays, which could be why the Watch, Mac, iPhone and Homepod all can give wildly different results.
Also, Apple could train it themselves, they possibly do, except we haven't gotten an update yet. A large portion of my personal training data could be stored in iCloud, I mean my passwords, mail, documents and my photos are there, right? The analysis of my voice data is sent to Apple anyway.
Siri is utterly useless. Like, I just don't. The only capacity in which I use it is to tell it to open an app on the phone, or set the timer.
Siri is like that nice employe who was hired by way of nepotism, and she's attractive, but she sucks at most things, but the organization won't fire her because of aforementioned nepotism in the organization and the only reason you put up with her is cause she's attractive and she, at the very least, makes coffee and makes photocopies just good enough, but you can't trust her with more advanced tasks.
What's worse is that the organization also won't hire her more talented and equally attractive contemporary Google Assistant because of aforementioned nepotism. The boss thinks there's only room for one assistant.
In the last year or so it's gone from correctly handling "add red salsa to the shopping list" to consistently adding two items "red" and "salsa". (It also fails on "buttermilk" and others.)
And around the time this started happening, Siri went from acting after a short pause to saying "just a sec" after a short pause.
Perhaps it's time to file a feature request to Apple to allow us to plug in alternative digital assistants in place of Siri.
"Timers"? You mean: the timer. You can still only set one timer. Yet another deficiency. Its like the people who work on iOS don't ever cook multiple things at once.
Same deal for me but with Google. I had to turn it off because it kept activating itself, despite voice training it to apparently just my voice. I'd be driving in the car by myself, playing music (via BT, from Google Play, on the same phone!) and it would randomly pause my music and give me an assistant prompt (after, I assume, hearing something in the song that it was playing itself that sounded like OK Google). It was absolutely infuriating and would come up a few times a week.
DuckDuckGo is usually guilty of this as well, usually picking up a less relevant city in the Americas rather than the more relevant city in Europe (when doing a generic query of "something" in "city")
An actual assistant would have a lot of context. Do I know that you're going to travel to London, UK for a break next week and therefore I would naturally assume that you are interesting in the time there.
However, are you planning to visit your parents in London, Canada this weekend? Then an assistant who would still answer with the time of London, UK would maybe also not be the smartest?
So really context is everything and making broad statements that if an assistant was to answer with anything but London, UK should get fired is something that someone would say, who IMHO should get fired. shrug
Also, IMHO, if someone doesn't know that machines don't have human context and therefore doesn't know to ask their digital assistant "What is the time in London, UK" when they want to know the time in London, UK, then maybe they should get fired from their tech job. shrug
There was minimal context, location data from the watch. Maybe even the fact that there's a pandemic and he ain't gonna go to London, UK, but possibly Canada.
However you spin it, someone will find a reason to find the answer "stupid", so the only one who is really stupid is the person who fails to ask a concrete question if they expect a concrete answer.
If your company is located in Paris, Texas and you are in New York, ready to embark for a business to Paris, France and that you ask your assistant over the phone, out of the blue, "what is the temperature in Paris?" they would probably ask "which one?".
ha! I was wondering how hard it'd be to find someone making an appeal to "context". While you're not exactly wrong, you are. Parsing meaning is something humans are surprisingly good at, and trained for.
I think the most damning part is how, at the bottom, he list a handful of other "smart" assistants which correctly list London UK's time... for now.
But, his point about consistency and slowness is exactly why I never use these shitty voice assistants. If I'm going to be interacting with some pedantic robot, I generally want to be able to edit the text of my request.
> he list a handful of other "smart" assistants which correctly list London UK's time...
It's only correct if that is what you secretly asked for. If I have never travelled to Europe and I am planning a trip to London, Canada then in my subjective world I would kind of be disappointed when my digital assistant told me the time of London, UK. That person would have equally zero understanding, like "WTF SIRI, why would I want to know some city somewhere I don't even know where it is located on the map when you (know) that I often go and visit Canada. Gosh you stupid idiot assistant!"
A London, Ontarian would probably expect/accept the confusion. Because if he's travelled and met international people and they asked where he's from, he would've specified ", Ontario", otherwise they would've all assumed he hails from where Sherlock Holmes lived.
In the absence of context there is no best answer. You need context to know why London, UK is much more likely to be the right London "without additional context".
> In the absence of context there is no best answer.
sigh why do people always feel the need to redefine words?
By any definition of the word, "best" is correct term to use here.
Here's a few definitions of the word "best", please and in all honesty, tell me why the use is wrong given the following:
• best: "In the most excellent or most suitable manner; with most advantage or success: as, he who runs best gets the prize; the best-behaved boy in the school; the best-cultivated fields."
• best: "In or to the highest degree; to the fullest extent; most fully: as, those who know him best speak highly of him; those best informed say so; the best-abused man in town."
• best: "Of the highest quality, excellence, or standing: said of both persons and things in regard to mental, moral, or physical qualities, whether inherent or acquired: as, the best writers and speakers; the best families; the best judgment; the best years of one's life; a house built of the best materials."
So if there is a finite set of possible answers and a set of criteria that establish a metric to turn this set into an ordered set, there is by definition a non-empty set of best answers. The context-free metric for ranking cities is global relevance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city
And now please look at the number 1 spot of this list.
There is no context whatsoever in global relevance.
If you ask someone what time it is, you don't get asked "where?" in return - the current location is implied. Same with cities - if you mention London, it is implied that you mean the most globally relevant London, not the one that was named after it.
I do not find the word context-free in that page. That's even ignoring that there are different rankings on that page, each with different outcomes, once again showing that without context there is no "best".
> If you ask someone what time it is, you don't get asked "where?" in return - the current location is implied.
Just because it's implied doesn't mean it's not context.
> Just because it's implied doesn't mean it's not context.
So you're that guy who people should never ask for directions then, because instead of explaining how to get to a place from where you stand, you'd ask for the exact date and time of travel, and the starting location (including continent, country, city, and street address)?
> I do not find the word context-free in that page.
Of course you don't, why would you even? "Context-free" is specific to the issue at hand, e.g. given no additional information (e.g. where are you right know and in what context do you ask the question) and a list of possible answers, what would be the most likely?
Have you ever watched "Family Feud"? It's an entire show based around that concept. It sounds like you are one of those guys who, when given "We asked 100 people what you would find in a kitchen" would expect the top answer to be "DEA agents", because "kitchen" could refer to a drug lab...
> That's even ignoring that there are different rankings on that page, each with different outcomes, once again showing that without context there is no "best".
Are you shitting me? The point is, that in none of those lists - regardless of relative ordering - other cities besides London, UK, and the rest of the well-known global cities are listed.
It doesn't matter whether London, UK takes the #1 spot based on some set of metrics, or the 3rd based on another - the point is that it's ALWAYS London, UK and NEVER London, Ontario.
In Western PA, if I hear someone talk about Indiana or Washington, I'm inclined to think of the counties/boroughs first, because they're closer. If someone says they're going to college at Cal, I'd think of California University of Pennsylvania before the University of California, because that's one of the more popular state schools in the region and a lot of people go there.
London, Ontario is a weird case because it is closer, but not close enough to be the better answer.
Isn't half the point of these digital assistants that they do have the context?
I've got no idea about Siri, but the android one ties into your Google account to get your calendar and mail so it can get context about up coming travel etc.
See my answer below, there was context and still there is no right/wrong answer. If you expect a specific answer, ask a specific question. If you fail to do so, then maybe that is the stupid thing which happened?
767 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadI feel like we're really bad at distinguishing deficits in intelligence from deficits in acculturation.
The whole point of asking is precisely because I dont know how many hours I have to add. And neither do I know if said country, region or city is having whatever DayLight Saving hours etc.
You know, how about you learn it? Once. Instead of asking Siri or Google every time.
In other words, learn to fish.
> Haha yeah you're so much smarter than him. Somebody should give you an award!
I think his post is motivated by the kind of pretentious assholery that emanates from the kind of world view, or view on other humans that the article rerflects, that assistants are objects to be fired over whatever opinion their "owner" has on what is to be considered stupid or not.
"Oh! My assistant is so STUPID they didn't think about this thing the same way as I did, they should be fired, lowlife trash!"
Yeah, first in class entitled assholery right there.
As someone who frequently talks to colleagues across timezones that are -9, -2, or +3.5 hours from me, where each of these have different dates for summer time, or don't have summer time, and meeting recurrences gets skewed etc, I don't see how asking about the current time off a location could be seen as "pretentious".
The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.
We can spin this all day long. The truth is, if you want a very specific answer, and you fail to ask a specific question, then you're the only one to blame.
Also I personally ask a question like this (and I assume many people do as well) if I want to call someone which is notably unaffected by the pandemic.
Nobody has ever said "Should I buy an Apple Watch for $750 or hire a PA for $35,000/year?".
I think it shows a lack of imagination on your part to NOT make that connection.
It reminds me of Gamers Online that demand for people to be fired whenever the slightest mishap happens.
And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I don't really know how it works in the UK because I'm French, so let's take France instead. "What time is it in France?" usually means "in metropolitan France", but now let's say you're in northern Brazil, close to the border of French Guyane. When you say "what time is it in France", do you mean "metropolitan France across the ocean", or do you mean "the closest French department a hundred miles away"?
I think the UK only consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK has some control over aspects of the dependencies but they are not actually part of the UK.
On the other hand, if I ask what time it is in Preston, Siri gives me the time in the UK, despite the fact that I’m only 15km away from Preston Ontario!
Now if I ask what time it is in Cambridge, it gives me the local time instead of Cambridge England. Preston Ontario is actually part of Cambridge Ontario.
So what it seems to be doing is picking the nearest place that’s well known, rather than the most well known place with that name. Preston Ontario isn’t really known at all unless you’re from this area. Cambridge Ontario is a little bit more well known, though still a far cry from Cambridge England (likely due to the university).
It also makes driving around New England most confusing, since towns which _should not_ be in the same direction often are...
* Pick a country: Some counties have multiple time zones.
* Abbreviations like EST, CET: Not right in summer.
* Words like "Eastern Time": assumes the country from context.
* Offsets like UTC-5: Doesn't follow summer time.
* Click on a map: India will ban your app because one pixel in Kashmir gave Pakistan time.
This is a big bug bear of mine that seems to come up a LOT from Americans online. Eastern fucking what? Australia? Anglia?
- America/New_York
- Europe/London
- Indian/Mauritius
- Pacific/Chatham
Turns out that if I enter "Frankfurt, Germany" into Apple Maps (which I assume is what the package tracker app does), it takes me to "Frankfurt (Oder), Germany" instead of "Frankfurt am Main, Germany".
I filed a request to NOT pre-fill the starting city to a place in Kentucky and got a polite but firm reply that this was the default list provided by the 3rd party online booking engine and cannot be customized. Sigh.
According to Wikipedia Frankfort, KY doesn't even have an airport so this is a double whammy of stupid on the part of the 3rd party
Judging from the published pictures [0], it looks like Google Maps may lead to the same result as Apple Maps for "Frankfurt".
[0] https://talksport.com/football/529808/benfica-fan-wrong-fran...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uio1J2PKzLI
Kinda like how I'm eternally sad when I get german results, just because my connection is from Germany, but I am Danish, sitting in Denmark and am usually NOT looking for the nearest biergarten (lies, I am, but we have none).
"How far is Jupiter from the sun?" "Jupiter, Florida; or Jupiter the planet?"
"How old is Donald Trump?" "There are 21 people with that name, do you mean ...?"
"Call 911" "The emergency number or the English 90s boy band?"
In the absence of context, the right thing is to give the time in the UK. If more context is given: "What time is it in London, Ontario," then obviously it should give the time in Ontario, and perhaps remember that this person is an exception to the rule.
There will be a lot more people who are asking about the British London than people who are asking about their nearest London. Apple will be making far more people sad by defaulting to the local one. If Siri asked "Which London?" every time most people would get annoyed.
What should happen from a UX perspective is that Siri should respond with "The time in London, UK, is..." which would inform the user that Siri is differentiating between different Londons, and that they need to specify a locality in order to narrow down the query to some other London if necessary. 99% of the time the user will get what they wanted first time, and the other 1% of the time the user will be informed that their query wasn't accurate enough.
People who happen to fall beside the "most" category should not have to deal with that every single time.
The right thing to do for Siri is to ask, maybe just once, which london you want to know the time for, if its not smart enough to infer it from something else it's learned about you.
Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's entirely likely that they travel there more often, and if the siri software has no other parameters tracked, then it's not unreasonable to assume that they're asking about that.
It really isn’t. I can see this being the case for people that live within, say, 100 miles of London, ON - but why would they want to know the time there in that case?
See what I did there? London (which is a major global city) doesn't need a qualifier anymore than New York does.
It's also reasonable to assume they're in the same timezone as 'their' London and wouldn't need to ask what time it is in the local one. That's another reason to default to one further away, which for most people would be Britain.
This is exactly what Google assistant does. You can follow your question up with "what about London, Canada" and it will say "The time in London, ON, Canada is...".
There are two things a good assistant will do: 1. save you time by making reasonable assumptions and 2. inform you which assumptions it has made.
- you are from London, Ontario and are traveling in another TZ
- you are in London, UK
In all the other cases, without no further context, Londo UK should be used because it's one of the "capitals of the world"
You may ask why do I need to specify London at all? Here's one of the possible scenarios, sounding very normal as human communication goes:
(I'm in London wanting to phone my relatives in Moscow, which is several time zones away. I don't know the current time in either Moscow or London, and I don't know what's the time difference between the two as not all countries observe DST)
Me: "Hey Siri, what's the time in Moscow?"
Siri: "It's 10:35PM in Moscow, Russia"
Me (thinking about whether I'll finish speaking in time for dinner): "Hey Siri, what's the time in London?"
Siri: "It's 8:35PM in London, UK"
Asking "What's the time?" instead of "What's the time in London?" sounds very unnatural here.
I think the best thing to do is to pick one interpretation, answer that, but make it clear which London you picked (“the time in London, England is 12:34”), and then, handle “no, the one in…” correctly.
Falling back to “which one do you mean?” Should be the exception, as a voice assistent that can’t make that initial guess right most of the time isn’t worth using.
That’s actually the exact interaction you get with Siri today (I just checked):
U: What time is it in London?
S: It’s 7:09 AM in London, Canada
U: No, London UK
S: It’s 12:09 PM in London, England
The only problem is she doesn’t really learn this for subsequent requests, although that is a different problem IMO.
That's kind of the 'how do you take your tea?' problem, which I think really annoys users.
(context: the first or second time you make tea for someone, you ask milk/sugar etc. Ask it after that and they're going to think you're pretty rude)
As an example, we've spent the past few days on our eng team refining our spreadsheet functions for date/time handling, and it's like the 5th time we've iterated on this (after supporting everything Excel / Google Sheets do).
Funny part is, I'm sure we'll iterate on it even more -- it's hard to get this topic both right & make it easy to use / approachable.
Btw, does anyone have good reading materials on this topic? (date/time/locale handling)
[1] I'm biased as a founder at https://mintdata.com, but thankfully our engineers set me straight on the subtleties :D
I hopefully and naively clicked pricing ;)
Some honest feedback would be to rename Personal. Personal account usually mean individuels, but no home user or hobbyist is going to pay $95/month unless they are making money from it.
I had a slide deck somewhere from when I was at a broker trader and leap seconds mattered (they (can) happen around 10am in East Asian markets on Jun 30).
The moral of the story is: time measurements are fractally wrong, it doesn't matter what format/time system you pick, there will be a use case that breaks it badly. Local time + timezone, epoch, UTC, ATI, doesn't matter it will break somehow.
All these thresholds or ranking factors seem to come intuitively to humans (I would guess a good intuition for them is actually a sign of intelligence), but it seems to be incredibly hard to capture them in ranking.
As others have pointed out, a solution here would be to make Siri more conversational. A simple "Which London?" could've removed the ambiguity and given Siri the opportunity to learn something about that particular person (that London, England is more important to him than London in Canada).
But that would make it almost as smart as an Infocom game from 1981. Something, something, doesn't scale, mumble, something...
Instead of looking at people, you can also scrape websites to get the relations. But here you may get a recursive problem because if a website speaks of "London", you might not know in advance which London they speak of.
IMO I would be very disappointed if Siri started asking clarifying questions at a significantly higher rate. Siri is already a bit too chatty, and I never feel like having an extended conversation with her.
I’d rather she just say the wrong thing (but make it clear that the answer is for a specific London, e.g. “The time in London Ontario is...”) and I can correct her. It’s the same number of conversational “turns”, but in the happy path when she actually gets it right the first time, it’s one-shot and done.
It’s a lot harder to get signal on this for learning, but I feel like there are ways around this as well. (Maybe saying “thanks” can signal she got something right, and prefixing the next utterance with “no” could signal it was wrong...)
Tell me about it. I have to unpair my bluetooth headphones every day, for stupid reasons that aren't Siri's fault. But when I say "Siri, open bluetooth preferences", it parses my command on screen VERY quickly, and then slowly enunciates "Okay! Let's take a look at your bluetooth settings." I'm just tapping my foot and waiting for her to quit talking.
Of course, then, 1 out of 3 times it takes me to the wrong settings page. Because if Settings has been opened recently, it can't deep link from Siri. /shrug
Similarly in this case, we’re reasonably confident that London is a place on earth with a property of time that is being asked. But without the additional context (or supplementary logic) we can’t know for sure which London it is: Canadian, American, or English.
Until we provide such context, London is in a superposition of all the possible meaningful state.
Oh, if only, John. But then, who'd write for your blog?
(if you feel that's unwarranted: "Daring Fireball" was the outlet that wrote a character assassination piece on rms, backed by some irrefutable evidence, that turned out to be about esr, and nobody performed even the most casual of fact checking, and it's still up there with some sorry-not-sorry half-hearted retraction, and probably all because rms told Jobs they couldn't grant him an exception to turn gcc proprietary eons ago.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/correction_regarding_an_e...
I don't think "I sincerely and deeply regret the error." is fairly described as "sorry-not-sorry half-hearted retraction".
Reality is hard. And with machine learning (especially proprietary, remotely-hosted machine learning) there's rarely a way to pinpoint a line of code and say: "this is what happened and why you're now frustrated and firing hypothetical personal assistants".
My guess is that Apple would find it difficult to provide robust references to John to explain why it happened, or how they've fixed it for him (and whether that fix is a one-off workaround for his complaint, etc..)
Cities sometimes have clear legal boundaries that feel irrelevant to the question, like the City of London, but more generally have metro areas that sprawl well into an ambiguously defined countryside. There's rarely a "this block is city, the next block over is clearly not" situation, so the number of people you include ends up being pretty arbitrary.
When ranking by population it often makes most sense to use the population of the metropolitan area. That is, to ignore the administrative divisions, which vary too much, and focus on the physical reality of the urban area.
Two cities in one City; it shouldn't be allowed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daeB46Z4fjs
There was a BBC piece yesterday about the condition in the Malakasa camp in Greece.[1] Some of our fellow brothers literally don't have anything to eat. And while it's 2020, we still fret about what browser is better (I bet half the globe doesn't even know what a browser is or doesn't care) or spend excessive amounts of time for yet a new color theme or a shiny new website that offers 2 new buttons that the other 50 websites don't.
I think we failed. We were supposed to be the smarter ones. The best income (or close), the brightest minds, the new future, AI, the internet that connects everybody (how nicely did FB solved that). And here we are, gathered around the fire, having an intelligent conversation about nothing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cnx753je2q4t/europe-migrant-...
HN is not a news website in the traditional sense, even though "news" is in the name. How is this not obvious?
For what you are seeking you should go to reuters.com, you'd probably have better luck.
But I get it now. This new technology is not actually about saving the people, is about controlling them, regardless of what the motto of big tech might be. That quote from Dune is still right on track:
"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"
I think you are greatly exaggerating the capability and means of the average HN visitor, submitter, and commenter.
That said, I think people, generally, are unable to work non-stop, 24/7 on just the important problems.
Commenting on some trivial shit here doesn't mean you don't give a fuck about the problems of the world, or that you're not working on them.
I would rather people sit around the campfire discussing what they know (timezone related software design decisions) instead of making it up as they go (superficially discussing policy or political situations they just learned about 10 minutes ago).
Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close to "Hey Siri".
Meanwhile, my iPhone has gotten much smarter about adding meetings to my calendar, or guessing the person who is calling me. These seem like the real use cases for AI going forward.
Every once in a while she will decide to listen through my car, but it's very rare. I don't have Apple Car Play so not sure if that's a factor.
Google has been far better and more consistent listening through my car even if it didn't get my query correct all the time, at least I could correct it without pulling my phone out.
I see something similar and assumed this happens because Mail / Calendar are relying on ics attachments (not sure what the behaviour is with the Gmail integration). I believe this means that if Mail is closed you don’t get Calendar updates until you open both and refresh.
Either way I find I have to refresh Mail and Calendar a lot to keep them in sync.
My latest MacBook (16") is so unstable that it is actually funny at this point.
I develop on this thing. It is running a great Unix os. I can't stand desktop Linux. The hardware quality was the best with a wide margin before the latest gen. Battery life is also great. I like them for development work when they are stable.
A lot of people are also really invested into the ecosystem. My entire photo collection is on iCloud. I use an iPhone. I can copy paste between my computer and phone. My Apple watch unlocks the computer when I'm near... List goes on.
But now I feel like Apple is a fantastic phone company that also happens to make some computers. They have been degrading pretty bad.
I think it's less that OS X is bad now, but more that it's finally degraded to a level of annoyance that people just have gotten enured to with Windows. It's not to say that that's a good thing, but at this point, I have known bugs and annoyances with all of the computers I work with, no matter the platform.
Some of it is also that Apple has a "real" integrated ecosystem. To what you say, you can easily move things between iOS and OS X. If you're watching stuff on your Mac, you can throw it to an Apple TV or your Airpods. Windows doesn't have a version of that that "just works". The closest you get is opting into Google's ecosystem and going Chromecast/Android, but I'd rather not trust Google with even more of my info.
The MBP was the first laptop I'd used that 1) had a trackpad good enough that I didn't feel like I needed to carry a mouse around to use it for more than 10min at a time, and 2) had battery life good enough that I didn't feel like I needed to take my power supply with me if I'd be away from my desk for more than an hour. It had every port I was likely to need for most tasks. In short, it was the first time I'd used a laptop that was actually usefully portable as a self-contained device. They kinda ruined that appeal by going all-USB-C and The Great Endongling, but that's another story.
It was also very stable, and over time I came to really appreciate the built-in software. Preview's amazing (seriously, never would have thought a preview app would make a whole computing platform "sticky" for me, but here we are, it's that good), Safari's the only browser that seems to really care about power use, terminal's light and has very low input latency, it comes with a decent video editor, an office suite I prefer over anything I've used on Linux, and so on. In short it's full of good-enough productivity software that's also light enough on resources that I don't hesitate to open them, and often forget they're still open in the background.
These days I like having a base OS that's decent, includes the GUI and basic productivity tools, and that's distinctly separate from my user-managed packages (homebrew) rather than having them all mixed up together (yes, I could achieve this on Linux, if it had a core, consolidated GUI/windowing system so various apps weren't targeting totally different windowing toolkits, but it doesn't, so separating a capable and complete GUI "base OS" from the rest of one's packages gets tricky). There are quite a few little nice-to-haves littered around the settings and UI. Most of the software is generally better polished UX wise than Linux or Windows, and that doesn't just mean it's pretty—it performs well and, most importantly, consistently. There are problems and exceptions to "well and consistently" but there are so many more issues on competing platforms that even if it's gotten worse, it's still much nicer to use.
Given the premium on hardware (that's come and gone—at times there almost wasn't one if you actually compared apples to apples [haha], but right now it's large) I'd rather use Linux (or, well, probably a BSD, but that'd mean even more fiddling most likely) but the only times that's seemed to function genuinely well and stably compared to its competition was when I either kept tight control over every aspect of the system (time-consuming, meant figuring out how to do any new thing I needed to do that other systems might do automatically, which wasn't always a great use of time to put it mildly) or in the early days of Ubuntu (talking pre-Pulse Audio, so quite a while ago) which was really sensible, light, and polished for a time.
I do still run Windows only for gaming, and Linux on servers or in GUI-equipped VMs for certain purposes.
Calendar / Todos depends on the backend. If you’re using Exchange, check the settings to confirm that it’s not set to poll every hour or something like that.
The devices are so complicated now that they cant do their most basic functions right.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22957573
But yes, Siri is the worst.
Well, maybe some things are worse.
Screenshot: https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1252232170237640706/photo...
This is supposed to be a personal assistant. And I have a whole list of what it could do for me, personally. But it doesn't.
I've been trying to figure out how to hook Google's speech recognition and voice into other apps, since they're great and it's 99% of what I need, hands-free control and feedback. Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something.
Microsoft OneDrive tags my photos. It's mostly useless. For instance, I have some pictures of squirrels on the tree outside my window. Squirrels can really do the most amazing things on trees, but they are small compared to the tree.
Microsoft with all its AI muscle will invariably tag those images as something like #Outdoor #Grass #Plant #Tree.
It's the same problem with all of those benchmark beating AIs. They have no clue what's special about the picture and what just happens to be in them as well.
Like they would ever do that. Then you would no longer be their "corporate bitch".
Seriously, the one thing that stands between home assistants and being useful is opening the software up and letting it be used by regular OSS devs. Alas, every one of the four big providers (Apple, Google, MS and Amazon) treat them as their moat; they want control over the ecosystem. It's the same in many other places in the industry - we're technologically way behind where we could be, because everyone wants to be the platform and commoditize everyone else, which necessitates having total control.
Maybe there's already something like that in the works, with all the talk and investment in AI, we should be seeing some real world results...
For a while, it randomly decided that “call my wife” meant to “call my mom.” It clearly said call my wife on the screen and then switched to “mom”.
Set a timer for fifty-one minutes or fourty-nine minutes.
Even siri can hear that
You can't reply with "no Siri, not that London" and have it remember. It doesn't learn your voice among the people who normally use your Siri in your household.
"Artificial intelligence" is always going to make mistakes, as do real humans. Humans can perform unsupervised learning - in fact it's one of the key skills that employers like to select on! Until AI can learn in context it's going to be very limited.
I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri.
I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.
At least that's what I heard about how iirc Alexa works.
Siri is easy enough so we never looked much into it, but “OK Google” for instance looked like a real PITA, so we did some research before buying an assistant.
It appears a ton of people just intentionally say “Ok GooGoo”, “Ok Boogle” etc., whatever is easier for them to pronounce and it works perfectly fine.
It’s a genuinely hard problem to solve, and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Apple for instance when they have humans reviewing samples. There may be other motivations, there’s ton of people in any of these companies, any given feature must be seen from a different angle depending on the department looking at it.
But I think a lot of what we see as privacy violating is primarily an effect of the flaws and all the hacks needed to make the feature work at all (when it works).
My Nokia 1320 with Windows Phone 8.1 come with a very basic VA that was capable of understand Polish but only if I drop all grammar and talk like a robot. The "call mum" is "zadzwoń do mamy" in its proper form, but I had to do "zadzwoń do mama" which sounds unnatural; not mention that stuff is also being read without proper Polish grammar; "calling mum" is synthesized as "dzwonię do mama", not "dzwonię do mamy". The grammar complexity is a problem for VA technology and probably that's why neither Siri nor Cortana supports Polish or other Slavic languages, not mention dozen of other languages.
And maybe I'm the exception here, but I have refrained from buying an Apple Homepod specifically because of how bad Siri is. If it was on the same level as Google Assistant I would have bought one by now.
Now it randomly activates multiple times a week and really struggles to even pick up me talking to it right next to it.
Convinced they've switched to a less capable microphone system because assistants were all the rage in the 7 era but now I think people have realized it's not really that important.
I think Apple should have been more honest about it in their privacy messaging -
"Hey guys, pretty please can we listen to your Siri recordings? We know it's not the privacy style you're used to from Apple, but if you want Siri to ever not be a piece of crap, this is really the only way."
Apple knows a ton about me, they have realtime access to my email, calendar, contacts etc. If they have guarded access, then I would accept a toggle. A lot of Siri processing happens locally on the device nowadays, which could be why the Watch, Mac, iPhone and Homepod all can give wildly different results.
Also, Apple could train it themselves, they possibly do, except we haven't gotten an update yet. A large portion of my personal training data could be stored in iCloud, I mean my passwords, mail, documents and my photos are there, right? The analysis of my voice data is sent to Apple anyway.
Siri is like that nice employe who was hired by way of nepotism, and she's attractive, but she sucks at most things, but the organization won't fire her because of aforementioned nepotism in the organization and the only reason you put up with her is cause she's attractive and she, at the very least, makes coffee and makes photocopies just good enough, but you can't trust her with more advanced tasks.
What's worse is that the organization also won't hire her more talented and equally attractive contemporary Google Assistant because of aforementioned nepotism. The boss thinks there's only room for one assistant.
lol.
In the last year or so it's gone from correctly handling "add red salsa to the shopping list" to consistently adding two items "red" and "salsa". (It also fails on "buttermilk" and others.)
And around the time this started happening, Siri went from acting after a short pause to saying "just a sec" after a short pause.
Perhaps it's time to file a feature request to Apple to allow us to plug in alternative digital assistants in place of Siri.
However, are you planning to visit your parents in London, Canada this weekend? Then an assistant who would still answer with the time of London, UK would maybe also not be the smartest?
So really context is everything and making broad statements that if an assistant was to answer with anything but London, UK should get fired is something that someone would say, who IMHO should get fired. shrug
Also, IMHO, if someone doesn't know that machines don't have human context and therefore doesn't know to ask their digital assistant "What is the time in London, UK" when they want to know the time in London, UK, then maybe they should get fired from their tech job. shrug
However you spin it, someone will find a reason to find the answer "stupid", so the only one who is really stupid is the person who fails to ask a concrete question if they expect a concrete answer.
I think the most damning part is how, at the bottom, he list a handful of other "smart" assistants which correctly list London UK's time... for now.
But, his point about consistency and slowness is exactly why I never use these shitty voice assistants. If I'm going to be interacting with some pedantic robot, I generally want to be able to edit the text of my request.
TLDR; voice assistants suck.
It's only correct if that is what you secretly asked for. If I have never travelled to Europe and I am planning a trip to London, Canada then in my subjective world I would kind of be disappointed when my digital assistant told me the time of London, UK. That person would have equally zero understanding, like "WTF SIRI, why would I want to know some city somewhere I don't even know where it is located on the map when you (know) that I often go and visit Canada. Gosh you stupid idiot assistant!"
You actually need to imagine additional context to make any other answer plausible.
If you hear the sound of hooves clip-clopping nearby, you think horses, not zebras.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
sigh why do people always feel the need to redefine words?
By any definition of the word, "best" is correct term to use here.
Here's a few definitions of the word "best", please and in all honesty, tell me why the use is wrong given the following:
• best: "In the most excellent or most suitable manner; with most advantage or success: as, he who runs best gets the prize; the best-behaved boy in the school; the best-cultivated fields."
• best: "In or to the highest degree; to the fullest extent; most fully: as, those who know him best speak highly of him; those best informed say so; the best-abused man in town."
• best: "Of the highest quality, excellence, or standing: said of both persons and things in regard to mental, moral, or physical qualities, whether inherent or acquired: as, the best writers and speakers; the best families; the best judgment; the best years of one's life; a house built of the best materials."
So if there is a finite set of possible answers and a set of criteria that establish a metric to turn this set into an ordered set, there is by definition a non-empty set of best answers. The context-free metric for ranking cities is global relevance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city
And now please look at the number 1 spot of this list.
Thanks for reading.
> The context-free metric for ranking cities is global relevance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city
There is no context whatsoever in global relevance.
If you ask someone what time it is, you don't get asked "where?" in return - the current location is implied. Same with cities - if you mention London, it is implied that you mean the most globally relevant London, not the one that was named after it.
I do not find the word context-free in that page. That's even ignoring that there are different rankings on that page, each with different outcomes, once again showing that without context there is no "best".
> If you ask someone what time it is, you don't get asked "where?" in return - the current location is implied.
Just because it's implied doesn't mean it's not context.
So you're that guy who people should never ask for directions then, because instead of explaining how to get to a place from where you stand, you'd ask for the exact date and time of travel, and the starting location (including continent, country, city, and street address)?
> I do not find the word context-free in that page.
Of course you don't, why would you even? "Context-free" is specific to the issue at hand, e.g. given no additional information (e.g. where are you right know and in what context do you ask the question) and a list of possible answers, what would be the most likely?
Have you ever watched "Family Feud"? It's an entire show based around that concept. It sounds like you are one of those guys who, when given "We asked 100 people what you would find in a kitchen" would expect the top answer to be "DEA agents", because "kitchen" could refer to a drug lab...
> That's even ignoring that there are different rankings on that page, each with different outcomes, once again showing that without context there is no "best".
Are you shitting me? The point is, that in none of those lists - regardless of relative ordering - other cities besides London, UK, and the rest of the well-known global cities are listed.
It doesn't matter whether London, UK takes the #1 spot based on some set of metrics, or the 3rd based on another - the point is that it's ALWAYS London, UK and NEVER London, Ontario.
In Western PA, if I hear someone talk about Indiana or Washington, I'm inclined to think of the counties/boroughs first, because they're closer. If someone says they're going to college at Cal, I'd think of California University of Pennsylvania before the University of California, because that's one of the more popular state schools in the region and a lot of people go there.
London, Ontario is a weird case because it is closer, but not close enough to be the better answer.
I've got no idea about Siri, but the android one ties into your Google account to get your calendar and mail so it can get context about up coming travel etc.
Probably going to get labelled as a mental disorder for feeling like this, in the coming decades.