Such a cool guide to such a bizarre problem we live in…
Companies forcing features that nobody wants, but that are also expensive to operate and cost real money to run? Market can definitely stay irrational for long.
We've long been there. Most technology markets are supply driven. People buy what's made available on the market and learn to cope with it. That's big part of why people hate computers so much, and why feigning ignorance about basic device operations is a point of pride for many a normies.
Alternative hypothesis: people do gradually use these features, but HN became a weird anti-AI bubble for some reason.
I mean, many of the features had previous pre-AI attempts. They all sucked much more. This is the first time they have a remote chance of working (but in many cases, timidity or cheapening out is still making them barely usable).
Shitty LLM chatbots providing unhelpful (read: lies) customer service is even worse than some Phillippeens or Indian is even worse than the "do the needful" shit we had.
The LLMs will always do the worse option to customers, to extract more money. Burn'em all to the ground.
Don't pin that on LLMs, it has nothing to do with them.
Shitty chatbots became a thing a few years before LLMs. The LLM variant is an improvement for users - it's more typo-tolerant, and more likely to understand what the user actually wants, before it flat out refuses because of organizational policies.
> The LLMs will always do the worse option to customers, to extract more money. Burn'em all to the ground.
That's a ridiculous take. The models are very capable. What they actually do depends entirely on constraints set up by the companies deploying it. If the AI features on some site "always do the worse option to customers", it's not a problem with LLMs - there is a human being in the company, that choose to fuck over their customers.
Same is true about pre-LLM support. It's not people from India who are at fault for your shitty support - it's the executives in the Western company that explicitly decided to outsource their customer support to a call center on a different continent, and they're also the ones who decided that "terrible scripting and half-broken english" is the level of support they will offer to their customers.
Same with manufacturing - "Made in China" is a synonym of bad quality, but it's not because of China. The brands are free to seek out any combination of quality and price, and it's them who choose to dial quality down to minimum. Factories don't care what's in the spec, they do work to spec.
Same with LLM chatbots. Prompt them to be unhelpful and prevent them from accessing important information or paging actual people, and they will be useless. Not the fault of LLM.
Yes, it's my pet peeve, and it's been such long before LLMs. There's a pattern of blaming technology and technologists for shitty or harmful work, while actively ignoring the business side that devised and commissioned it on purpose. Stop blaming LLMs. Start blaming entrepreneurs who chose how to deploy them.
Gee, I wonder if HN became this way because of AI shaking the ground they walked on after years of dedication and study? And on top of that, doing a shit job of everything it touches, causing massive paranoia in every corner of the internet, that place we all live now? Gosh I wonder why!?!?
The pro-ai posts here have got to be 50% bots, i'm convinced. I have yet to see a single artefact of AI that was remotely impressive. Fancy markov chains do not intelligence make.
No one wants? I understand normies on Facebook saying that, but you are on HN. How do you keep that position with the evidence getting thrown at you daily?
Do you use any of the AI features listed in the article, as shipped in the app? That's not the same thing as coding agents or cobbling together something for yourself.
I’m not saying nobody wants to use AI, or AI coding and desktop apps. I’m using that daily as many others here are too.
The article refers to different AI features within other apps (e.g. search overviews in google, summarize email, summarize message) that bring no benefit to the user but only clutter.
I think everyone is fine with using their AI of choice to do their tasks of choice. It’s when I see a button that obstructs my workflow prompting me to do something I don’t need to with a shitty model that’s not good at it.
Literally every day that I browse HN I hear people complain about others' use of LLMs. How can you say "nobody wants" when it's used so much to elicit endless complaints?
Do you use summarize email function in gmail or outlook? Do you use rewrite paragraphs feature in word or google docs? Do you know anyone who wants these features?
That’s what I’m talking about, not AI use in general.
Well this is why, as an enthusiastic AI user, even I usually want to disable intrusive AI!
If it's popping up in some random product I don't pay for I can only assume it's such a shitty model that it's probably not worth talking to.
(Exception: my bank has replaced its shitty phone tree with an AI chatbot. This is faster and the model has a "transfer to a human" tool. It's perfectly capable of following its playbook, determining that I need a human, and putting me in touch with one. So actually I started with "now I've gotta debase myself by talking to a fucking 32B Chinese LLM" but ended with "oh that was great actually").
Anyone know a good way to disable the ai summary on Google results? I know I should move over to kagi, but a ublock filter or something would still be nice.
`google.com##.hdzaWe` blocks the AI summary. This is better than udm=14 because it doesn't suppress the other sometimes-useful non-AI Google answer blocks.
adding easylist - annoyances (specifically the 'ai widgets' section) to your ublock filter lists should get rid of it! it doesn't catch it 100% of the time (the AI summary escapes when there's links above it in search results), but it gets rid of it most of the time.
It's a sad state of affairs when companies are cramming this unwanted garbage into every app putting the onus on the user to block, disable, unsubscribe, delete, edit and mitigate. Nobody asked for AI slop.
I recently discovered that you need to have Siri enabled for Apple CarPlay. I expect we're going to see a lot of this where when you disable the AI functionality the devs won't have put in fallback states and you'll be effectively locked out. With CarPlay for instance there is no reason that I shouldn't be able to listen to my music or use the map without Siri. But things like responding to texts does rely on Siri, so just gate that piece. It is rather unfortunate.
Apple considers siri essential for CarPlay and I don’t really disagree. Don’t forget that a big part of the design of CarPlay tries to explicitly discourage tactile use while driving, with siri as the alternative input/output method.
Interestingly, I have Google Assistant more or less disabled on my Android phone, but it still works when I have Android Auto enabled (which is fine by me since that's the one time that I ever want to use it).
I got the email that they're burying Assistant in September...
I use it on the phone to set alarms, add tasks or calendar events, I swipe up on the home screen to launch the app, and talk. For calendar, speech ("add calendar event dentist appointment on September 22 at 4pm") is even much more convenient than scrolling to the right month/date, using the UI to pick the time.
I'm currently vibe-coding a replacement app to use on-device speech recognition and setting alarms or adding calendar events. Sadly third party apps can't add stuff to Google Tasks without further interaction (or without OAuth) like Assistant/Gemini can.
I start my music and navigation route before leaving my garage, and any other interactions (volume up/down, skip song) are buttons on my steering wheel. What do I need voice input for?
(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)
Yes, it's one of the most common usages of a phone in the car. And most people I know have exactly that workflow: find and set a navigation destination while parked, then drive there without interacting with the phone.
A bunch of reasons, in no particular order: Having my phone visibly in-use makes it easier to avoid the temptation of touching it. I have a long history of playing video games, and seeing a "mini-map" is just how I'm used to navigating, even when I know the way. Having navigation that incorporates real-time conditions helps me avoid construction, traffic jams, or other miscellaneous issues. I have a pretty bad sense of direction, and it takes multiple trips to internalize routes, which doesn't happen because I drive infrequently (typically less than weekly, because I prefer to take the bus).
I guess it didn't occur to me that people might not remember how to get places in real life.
I don't think I could stand to have any sort of lit-up screen doing something in my eyeline when I'm driving. I turn off the backlight on the dashboard when I'm driving at night because it annoys me.
Because my 15 minute drive can be a 60 minute drive depending on traffic and there are 3 viable routes I could take.
Traffic changes while I'm driving and it automatically updates. An accident can occur on a bridge I'm approaching and I can get detoured and save actual time that I can spend with loved ones instead.
If I'm driving later at night, construction may block off my normal route and I can still get wherever I'm going.
I also get notifications for hazards like objects on the road, disabled vehicles, or events that are going to cause traffic. (I use Waze)
And the cost is zero. When I get into my car it automatically syncs and off I go. There's no reason to NOT have it.
The cost isnt zero, previously you were exercising your brain and spatial awareness, you've now offloaded that critical thinking. Repeat this often enough in all areas of your life and you'll start to see impacts down the line on brain and memory function.
Taxi/ambulance drivers who are required to memorise large parts of their city have the lowest dementia risk out of all (studied) professions.
Because the traffic isn't known to you but it is to Google. I could take two routes, one is faster depending on circumstances, and Google knows those circumstances.
How do you know those routes have a roughly equal amounts of traffic? Or that there’s only two routes? I usually see at least three possible routes with my commute (with some forking), and at least one shortcuts in one leg. During heavy traffic one optimized route can at least save 10-15 minutes than the slower one(s).
This just isn't true. You're assuming the conclusion and saying the routes will have equal amounts of traffic and that one will be way longer and that it's unlikely you're saving time. Except people that have experience with Google Maps have watched it flag upcoming traffic congestion and explicitly reroute you and ask you to confirm and show the time difference. That's the real-time aspect, but it can also project forward in time and estimate what the traffic along routes will be at the time you want to travel, so it's also an important planning tool.
I have no idea why it's contentious that having nationwide surveillance of traffic patterns would result in better routing decisions.
Once the city you live in gets large enough, memorizing the routes just becomes a non starter. I have my route to work almost memorized but due to construction or crashes it changes so often it is hard to cement it. (Seoul)
Many years ago now I picked up a colleague (the boss's son, actually) to drive down to London from Glasgow to collect some equipment.
First thing he did was slap a massive TomTom sat nav in the middle of the screen. He got pretty indignant when I told him to take it off, because it was blocking my view out the windscreen.
"But how will you know where to go?"
Dude, it's London. London is south. We go south. We go south for like eight hours.
We can use the sat nav for the last dozen or so of the 400-odd miles we'll be driving.
Maybe he didn’t know that you knew how to get onto the motorway, or that it’s straightforward to do so. Try driving I-80 in San Francisco during rush hour and make the 4th Street exit without getting forced onto the Bay Bridge, without either having done it before or without some sort of guidance- digital or otherwise. Getting on and off a freeway is not always simple.
Not to mention, even long road trips sometimes require a few highway transitions.
I’m perplexed too, but I used to study the Hudson’s map book for my metro area for fun before I could drive and have been driving for 25 years.
I don’t use active navigation, if I don’t know where I am going I just memorize the portion of the route I don’t know and then drive there. I will occasionally see what route is recommended due to road construction, but I generally know all of the proposed routes so I don’t need GPS once I pick one.
I avoid using active GPS navigation so my mental map of the road network stays in my brain, I think orientation/navigation is an important skill to maintain and using active turn-by-turn GPS destroys it.
Yes, of course. In my case Waze to get there efficiently, OSMand App for topographic maps, and occasionally Apple Maps (works well with addresses in Calendar) and Sygic. I use them in the car, and on my bike: ruggedised CarPlay / Android Auto screens are rapidly displacing ruggedised satnavs on bikes. Playing audiobooks and podcasts is handy, as is getting text messages read out with dictation for reply, but it's navigation which is the killer app for ACP/AA.
And Google considers necessary to report (using tactile use while driving) if there are blockages in the road, construction, lane closures, an accident, etc.
The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.
Hard disagree. Checking the accelerometer to disable tactile functionality when moving would have been a more intelligent way to go about discouraging this behavior over mandating use of a historically unpopular technology (Siri) in order to use a popular one (Maps, Bluetooth music streaming).
This reeks of the metrics-gaming desperation that we've seen in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as well.
Shoehorn unpopular technology to gatekeep popular technology. Either way the consumer's quality of life goes down.
With Apple intelligence turned on, when I take a screenshot on my iPhone, it wants me to do this search that goes to temu, instead of the text selection that it used to do. So I turned it off, but I have to turn it back on to have auto translation in iMessage.
i feel relatively comfortable with carply + basic siri, leaving apple intelligence off. basic siri is pretty limited in scope of what it has access to and what it can do.
while it's an arbitrary line ive drawn, basic siri doesn't feel like "ai" in the same sense as context-aware assistants do for me.
Americans and especially corporate culture America likes to do this all the time:
The ask instead of request is an example. I just politely use the words I prefer when that happens.
Our new promotes for this year.
etc.
I read from a linguistic source that it's a feature of English and the Brits do it as well.
Spotify on CarPlay is absolutely miserable because of this.
No search, no album or artist pages, only “ask Siri”. I’m not even mad that there’s no keyboard, I will happily use voice dictation instead. Instead, what you get is essentially an “I’m feeling lucky” button that fails unless you want to listen to a specific playlist.
I agree it works terrible. If I say "I want hear album X from artist Y" it replies with "Here is 'This is Y' playlist", or worse "This is Z by D".
This is especially annoying if I drive with someone who requests music. Eventually, I always end up pulling up my phone at the stopping lights. Kind of makes me miss the Old Ways (CD player, or AUX in).
I'm not excited for iOS 27. I tried out the beta and decided to reset my phone to get my back to iOS 26. I find the new Siri is far worse and slower to respond, if that's even possible. It also adds new features that are hard to remove. I only use it for timers and playing music and the current Siri is just fine for that imo.
I don't understand why anyone likes CarPlay. It has always seemed like people like it because it's better than nothing. It's just not a good system in an objective sense.
What does “not a good system in an objective sense” even mean? In what objective measures do you see it fail in?
I and basically everyone I know love it because it and android auto are made by actual UI/UX designers that aren’t embedded systems engineers- resulting in an infotainment screen that isn’t a complete and utter piece of shit, and has actual functionality. I use my phone for everything in my car anyways, especially navigation, which historically is not included in a cars infotainment system without subscription and/or vendor lock. In that one singular regard, CarPlay is literally infinity percent better than every single built in infotainment system, because I can use my fucking cars built in screen instead of my tiny phone display to navigate using software that is infinitely more well made than whatever shit is on my cars native system (a brief note: my angry tone is not directed at you or your lack of agreement with my opinion, but at how awful I perceived the car infotainment systems of yore to be. God they were useless.)
For every objective measure I can come up with in my head and not type out, it passes with flying colors compared to the alternative- so I’d love to know where your perception differs.
My old car was a Toyota Rav4 2001 and my only usage of the infotainment system was to play music and get directions from google map (voice via bluetooth). I think the only controls I used on the head unit was the volume knob and the call button (to receive a call). I've never needed anything else.
This is not a counterpoint to your argument. It's more a context about the following question: Is the infotainment on a car actually useful?
No. The ideal infotainment "system" should be a volume knob, the minimum interface to get a secure connection, and a good modular tilt-and-swivel holder for a phone with obvious cable routing for a power cable and optional wireless charging.
Vehicles should be designed to last ten years so that the resale market can support the ridiculous prices for new. The infotainment system is the only part that is subject to external technological compatibility issues over that timespan.
Carplay is sort of interesting because the UI does generally suck less than the UI of most infotainment systems. But it is much worse than my phone UI. Various apps seem to be missing their search abilities entirely.
It isn’t as bad as most built-in over developed systems, but it has not quite reached the perfection of a cheap phone mount and a car that is dumb enough to act as a Bluetooth speaker.
CarPlay and Android Auto aren't popular because they're good, per se. They're popular because they're good enough compared to the status quo ante, which was a sea of craptastic infotainment systems.
This got me mad too. And also restrictiveness of it - i can't see messages - WTH seriously? Why some tech stuff decides what is "safe"? (i guess it was the main driver)
You know what the solution is, don't you? You need to stop using your phone for things. At least as much as you can. Apple or Google are going to build the device that makes sense for them. If you get comfortable, or find a workaround, they will change things in the future -- in their favor, and against your interests.
You have other options right now: use an aux cable, play music over bluetooth, listen to the radio, purchase $30 MP3 player, pay attention to your thoughts rather than music, etc.
So the next iteration of surveillance features is to silently double down on users that turn off surveillance, because why would they do that unless they have something to hide? Better flag this user for extra super-secret surveillance and an immediate notification to authorities.
The cloud jira is such a downgrade overall. You cant have reasonable markdown or date format, but have AI "make longer" torture button. And deceiving "improve description" AI button which just ... makes it pointlessly longer.
Until 2023 I ran our on-prem Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc etc. I had an ancient 6c/6t box with about 24G of memory, and a couple 10K drives & 500G SSDs. It was fast, responsive, rock solid, and LDAP had everybody's accounts synced perfectly.
Then they strong-armed everybody but the largest enterprises onto their cloud. The alternative was painful (exporting/munging/importing to an alternative) so most of us went along for the ride. It took less than a year for them to start enshittifying their core product. Now it's basically unrecognizable from the product we used on-prem only three years ago.
I'll always be salty that my box of spare parts was superior to their cloud service in nearly every way.
On Mac, you can use https://wairy.app (full disclosure, I made this) to check what you have given AI perms to do on your computer (knowingly or not), then revoke them.
I use Adobe to send proofs of designs to clients and the AI toolbar has popped up every time for the last month or so. I have ZERO idea why anyone would want AI inside a program used to view documents.
Do people use Adobe reader for things other than opening .pdf files?
Thanks for this. I love AI but I seriously hate the way these corporations keep forcing it into literally everything. I want to use AI on my own terms.
Much needed list. On the browser front, I recommend giving a try to alternatives like Zen or Helium, which are Firefox and Chromium based respectively.
For AI buttons that specifically bug you, content blockers like uBlock Origin are especially helpful to zap them out of the page.
Thanks for putting this together, incredible resource.
Wanted to suggest &udm=14 added to Google search URLs to omit the AI overview and other frills. Personally, I use Chrome's search engine settings to add that param automatically when searching from the browser url bar. I also came across this: https://udm14.com/
Literally. The endless waves of companies forcing LLMs down our throats and into our workflows drove me off the mac. And windows is worse, which leaves linux.
Currently auditioning a used pixel 8 with graphene os on it. It's nice. Not strictly linux, but it's de-googled. Minimal. Not designed to suck you in. Bit of a pain to get installed, but other than that, pretty good.
My iPhone is the last tie i have to the apple ecosystem, so it's been much harder to untangle than my mac was - but I'm getting close! :)
If you want pure-play Linux, there's Purism (PureOS), Pine (PineOS), SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch (33 supported devices, including Fairphone, Xiaomi, Google Pixel, and Lenovo, amongst others), Tizen, Mobian (based on Debian), and postMarketOS (based on Alpine Linux).
If you want an alternative to the iOS / Android duopoly, and will accept AOSP (Android Open Source Project) or de-Googled Android, there are AOSP devices (including KaiOS), GrapheneOS, LineageOS, /e/OS, LightOS (Light Phone), and a number of feature phone / dumbphone OSes including System30+ (S30+), OpenHarmony, and a few others, see Wikipedia's list: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system>.
Practically, I'd suggest a feature-phone plus either a small laptop (far more capable than iOS/Android), or a tablet/phone running GrapheneOS or LineageOS, possibly one of the full-featured Linux OSes above. Google Pixel is ironically amongst the most viable non-Android hardware devices, with Fairphone and Purism being my next-strongest options.
I'm not sure which of these include bundled AI, though I suspect that that's going to be coming to more platforms, absent AI backlash which seems to be swelling presently.
I’ve never had an issue accessing necessary services from Linux. Once, literally, I had to use a Chromium browser — but presumably that would have been the case off Linux, as well.
What services are you thinking of that gate at an OS level?
LibreWolf and Waterfox rip out the AI features with prejudice. I don't know anyone who uses Zen or Helium (and haven't heard of the latter).
If you have an iPhone 14 or older, you're safe from any AI features and have legacy Siri.
LibreOffice instead of Office
Linux instead of Windows (and I will not be entertaining "but end users won't do that" - because that is false. Linux market share is growing year over year)
Thanks for suggesting more mainstream alt-browsers. This article isn't about avoiding all AI everywhere so much as it is for people who want to turn the intrusive AI off in the things they are already using. There are even more things that could be in this including Windows registry editing, Linux, and all the great FOSS options but it's mostly not for that. I do have an older iPhone and I agree, it's sort of great to have legacy Siri.
> go to System Settings – Apple Intelligence & Siri. Select About Siri, Dictation & Privacy… near the end of the page, turn off apps you don’t want Siri to learn from
This reminds me of the ole days of cleaning up preinstalled Windows of bloatware. Some clean Linux distro on desktop is the only path open to human-first tech.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 19.1 ms ] threadCompanies forcing features that nobody wants, but that are also expensive to operate and cost real money to run? Market can definitely stay irrational for long.
It's just that another group of people absolutely hates the idea of AI and wants it to go away.
I mean, many of the features had previous pre-AI attempts. They all sucked much more. This is the first time they have a remote chance of working (but in many cases, timidity or cheapening out is still making them barely usable).
The LLMs will always do the worse option to customers, to extract more money. Burn'em all to the ground.
Shitty chatbots became a thing a few years before LLMs. The LLM variant is an improvement for users - it's more typo-tolerant, and more likely to understand what the user actually wants, before it flat out refuses because of organizational policies.
> The LLMs will always do the worse option to customers, to extract more money. Burn'em all to the ground.
That's a ridiculous take. The models are very capable. What they actually do depends entirely on constraints set up by the companies deploying it. If the AI features on some site "always do the worse option to customers", it's not a problem with LLMs - there is a human being in the company, that choose to fuck over their customers.
Same is true about pre-LLM support. It's not people from India who are at fault for your shitty support - it's the executives in the Western company that explicitly decided to outsource their customer support to a call center on a different continent, and they're also the ones who decided that "terrible scripting and half-broken english" is the level of support they will offer to their customers.
Same with manufacturing - "Made in China" is a synonym of bad quality, but it's not because of China. The brands are free to seek out any combination of quality and price, and it's them who choose to dial quality down to minimum. Factories don't care what's in the spec, they do work to spec.
Same with LLM chatbots. Prompt them to be unhelpful and prevent them from accessing important information or paging actual people, and they will be useless. Not the fault of LLM.
Yes, it's my pet peeve, and it's been such long before LLMs. There's a pattern of blaming technology and technologists for shitty or harmful work, while actively ignoring the business side that devised and commissioned it on purpose. Stop blaming LLMs. Start blaming entrepreneurs who chose how to deploy them.
The pro-ai posts here have got to be 50% bots, i'm convinced. I have yet to see a single artefact of AI that was remotely impressive. Fancy markov chains do not intelligence make.
The bigger problem with these apps is that they are proprietary and they have been spying on us.
The article refers to different AI features within other apps (e.g. search overviews in google, summarize email, summarize message) that bring no benefit to the user but only clutter.
I think everyone is fine with using their AI of choice to do their tasks of choice. It’s when I see a button that obstructs my workflow prompting me to do something I don’t need to with a shitty model that’s not good at it.
Literally every day that I browse HN I hear people complain about others' use of LLMs. How can you say "nobody wants" when it's used so much to elicit endless complaints?
That’s what I’m talking about, not AI use in general.
If it's popping up in some random product I don't pay for I can only assume it's such a shitty model that it's probably not worth talking to.
(Exception: my bank has replaced its shitty phone tree with an AI chatbot. This is faster and the model has a "transfer to a human" tool. It's perfectly capable of following its playbook, determining that I need a human, and putting me in touch with one. So actually I started with "now I've gotta debase myself by talking to a fucking 32B Chinese LLM" but ended with "oh that was great actually").
Honestly ? Not a stressy move, the major things that changes is that the IA bullshit is gone
The people not corrupted by this are loving AI.
From concerns about AI taking jobs to people upvoting memes made by AI, it's getting obvious the slop is getting smaller.
And anyone who knew how LLMs worked in 2023 were fine with the slop. It was only normies who didn't understand how it worked.
Well done.
I use it on the phone to set alarms, add tasks or calendar events, I swipe up on the home screen to launch the app, and talk. For calendar, speech ("add calendar event dentist appointment on September 22 at 4pm") is even much more convenient than scrolling to the right month/date, using the UI to pick the time.
I'm currently vibe-coding a replacement app to use on-device speech recognition and setting alarms or adding calendar events. Sadly third party apps can't add stuff to Google Tasks without further interaction (or without OAuth) like Assistant/Gemini can.
(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)
I just kind of don't get why people are so into it.
I don't think I could stand to have any sort of lit-up screen doing something in my eyeline when I'm driving. I turn off the backlight on the dashboard when I'm driving at night because it annoys me.
Why would I care about speed traps or road obstacles? "Poor traffic conditions" isn't really something I can do much about, either.
Traffic changes while I'm driving and it automatically updates. An accident can occur on a bridge I'm approaching and I can get detoured and save actual time that I can spend with loved ones instead.
If I'm driving later at night, construction may block off my normal route and I can still get wherever I'm going.
I also get notifications for hazards like objects on the road, disabled vehicles, or events that are going to cause traffic. (I use Waze)
And the cost is zero. When I get into my car it automatically syncs and off I go. There's no reason to NOT have it.
Taxi/ambulance drivers who are required to memorise large parts of their city have the lowest dementia risk out of all (studied) professions.
Or maybe everyone's misunderstanding your question?
All you have now is two routes with a roughly equal amount of traffic on.
One of those routes will be a massive detour.
I have no idea why it's contentious that having nationwide surveillance of traffic patterns would result in better routing decisions.
First thing he did was slap a massive TomTom sat nav in the middle of the screen. He got pretty indignant when I told him to take it off, because it was blocking my view out the windscreen.
"But how will you know where to go?"
Dude, it's London. London is south. We go south. We go south for like eight hours.
We can use the sat nav for the last dozen or so of the 400-odd miles we'll be driving.
Not to mention, even long road trips sometimes require a few highway transitions.
I don’t use active navigation, if I don’t know where I am going I just memorize the portion of the route I don’t know and then drive there. I will occasionally see what route is recommended due to road construction, but I generally know all of the proposed routes so I don’t need GPS once I pick one.
I avoid using active GPS navigation so my mental map of the road network stays in my brain, I think orientation/navigation is an important skill to maintain and using active turn-by-turn GPS destroys it.
The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.
This reeks of the metrics-gaming desperation that we've seen in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as well.
Shoehorn unpopular technology to gatekeep popular technology. Either way the consumer's quality of life goes down.
while it's an arbitrary line ive drawn, basic siri doesn't feel like "ai" in the same sense as context-aware assistants do for me.
The search box is gone and you're supposed to ask Rufus now.
Cambridge dictionary lists cringe as adjective.
Merriam-Webster lists cringe as adjective.
Might need to update your understanding.
MW has it as slang. Cambridge has it as informal. OED I don't have access to.
Our new promotes for this year. etc.
I read from a linguistic source that it's a feature of English and the Brits do it as well.
No search, no album or artist pages, only “ask Siri”. I’m not even mad that there’s no keyboard, I will happily use voice dictation instead. Instead, what you get is essentially an “I’m feeling lucky” button that fails unless you want to listen to a specific playlist.
I and basically everyone I know love it because it and android auto are made by actual UI/UX designers that aren’t embedded systems engineers- resulting in an infotainment screen that isn’t a complete and utter piece of shit, and has actual functionality. I use my phone for everything in my car anyways, especially navigation, which historically is not included in a cars infotainment system without subscription and/or vendor lock. In that one singular regard, CarPlay is literally infinity percent better than every single built in infotainment system, because I can use my fucking cars built in screen instead of my tiny phone display to navigate using software that is infinitely more well made than whatever shit is on my cars native system (a brief note: my angry tone is not directed at you or your lack of agreement with my opinion, but at how awful I perceived the car infotainment systems of yore to be. God they were useless.)
For every objective measure I can come up with in my head and not type out, it passes with flying colors compared to the alternative- so I’d love to know where your perception differs.
This is not a counterpoint to your argument. It's more a context about the following question: Is the infotainment on a car actually useful?
Vehicles should be designed to last ten years so that the resale market can support the ridiculous prices for new. The infotainment system is the only part that is subject to external technological compatibility issues over that timespan.
It isn’t as bad as most built-in over developed systems, but it has not quite reached the perfection of a cheap phone mount and a car that is dumb enough to act as a Bluetooth speaker.
You have other options right now: use an aux cable, play music over bluetooth, listen to the radio, purchase $30 MP3 player, pay attention to your thoughts rather than music, etc.
I'm remarkably free of any intrusive AI.
Then they strong-armed everybody but the largest enterprises onto their cloud. The alternative was painful (exporting/munging/importing to an alternative) so most of us went along for the ride. It took less than a year for them to start enshittifying their core product. Now it's basically unrecognizable from the product we used on-prem only three years ago.
I'll always be salty that my box of spare parts was superior to their cloud service in nearly every way.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adios-alexa-for-sho...
Do people use Adobe reader for things other than opening .pdf files?
For AI buttons that specifically bug you, content blockers like uBlock Origin are especially helpful to zap them out of the page.
Wanted to suggest &udm=14 added to Google search URLs to omit the AI overview and other frills. Personally, I use Chrome's search engine settings to add that param automatically when searching from the browser url bar. I also came across this: https://udm14.com/
Literally. The endless waves of companies forcing LLMs down our throats and into our workflows drove me off the mac. And windows is worse, which leaves linux.
My iPhone is the last tie i have to the apple ecosystem, so it's been much harder to untangle than my mac was - but I'm getting close! :)
If you want an alternative to the iOS / Android duopoly, and will accept AOSP (Android Open Source Project) or de-Googled Android, there are AOSP devices (including KaiOS), GrapheneOS, LineageOS, /e/OS, LightOS (Light Phone), and a number of feature phone / dumbphone OSes including System30+ (S30+), OpenHarmony, and a few others, see Wikipedia's list: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system>.
Practically, I'd suggest a feature-phone plus either a small laptop (far more capable than iOS/Android), or a tablet/phone running GrapheneOS or LineageOS, possibly one of the full-featured Linux OSes above. Google Pixel is ironically amongst the most viable non-Android hardware devices, with Fairphone and Purism being my next-strongest options.
I'm not sure which of these include bundled AI, though I suspect that that's going to be coming to more platforms, absent AI backlash which seems to be swelling presently.
What services are you thinking of that gate at an OS level?
LibreWolf and Waterfox rip out the AI features with prejudice. I don't know anyone who uses Zen or Helium (and haven't heard of the latter).
If you have an iPhone 14 or older, you're safe from any AI features and have legacy Siri.
LibreOffice instead of Office
Linux instead of Windows (and I will not be entertaining "but end users won't do that" - because that is false. Linux market share is growing year over year)
Codeberg instead of GitHub
VSCodium instead of VSCode
This is very user unfriendly.