> Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent.
Huh, this feels very odd to read and buying a company outright is definitely not the only way to push Bun to be excellent. Contributing to Bun from their developers, becoming a sponsor, donating through other means, buying 'consulting services' or similar, or even forking it and keeping it up to date would all be also steps towards keeping the Bun excellent.
This is vendoring a dependency on steroids, and first moment interests of community are not aligned with what Antropic needs, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. History has thought us that this will end up with claims in the blog post not holding much weight.
since Anthropic is one of the only companies using the Bun Runtime, not just the bundler like most do, they want to make sure the runtime stays the focus. This is good for both companies and us tbh since they wont switch focus to whats popular at the moment
That's a good point. Google was sleeping on AI and wasn't able to come up with a product before OpenAI and they only scrambled to come out with something when OpenAi became all the rage. Big companies are hard to budge and move in a new direction.
> Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market.
Good way of phrasing things. Kinda sad to read this, I tried to react with 'wait there is competition in the browser market', but it is not a great argument to make - without money for using Google as a default search engine, Mozilla would effectively collapse.
The main issue there is you need someway to pay the engineers in that transitional period the moment Mozilla collapses. Otherwise they leave, find new jobs, and you lose all the expertise and knowledge of the codebase.
Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free.
A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.
If they had 0 improvements over these 15 years the situation wouldn't be much different than today.
Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going to work at all.
Every few years I would try to use it for a few days, then quit in frustration at how useless it was. Accidentally activating Siri is a major frustration point of using Apple products for me.
For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs.
And furthermore - aren't there shells that will give you the --help if you try to tab-complete certain commands? Obviously there's the issue of a lack of standardization for how command-line switches work, but broadly speaking it's not difficult to have a list of common (or even uncommon) commands and how their args work.
> For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs.
"Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.
Discoverability is quite literally the textbook problem with CLIs, in that many textbooks on UI & human factors research over the last 50 years discuss the problem.
"Hunt the verb" can be alleviated to some degree for programs that require parameters by just showing the manpage when invalid or missing parameters are specified. It's highly frustrating when programs require you to go through every possible help parameter until you get lucky.
Per the thread OP, nobody pretends that CLIs do not need a manual.
Many users like myself enjoy a good manual and will lean into a CLI at every opportunity. This is absolutely counter to the value proposition of a natural language assistant.
I think this is a naming problem. CLI is usually the name for the interface to an application. A Shell is the interface to the OS. Nonetheless agree with your post but this might be part of the difficulty in the discussion
that’s the ambiguity that I think is tripping the discussion up a little. Also the idea of a CLI/Shell/Terminal is also quite coupled to a system, rather than services. Hence the whole ‘web service’ hope to normalise remote APIs that if you squint hard enough become ‘curl’ on the command line
But the point is none of that is intrinsic or interesting to the underlying idea, it’s just of annoying practical relevance to interfacing with APIs today
Yes. But I think the point is a good one. With CLI there is a recognition that there must be a method of learning what the verbs are. And there are many traditions which give us expectations and defaults. That doesn’t exist in the chat format.
Every time I try to interact with one of these llm gatekeepers I just say what I want and hope it figures out to send me to a person. The rest of the time I’m trying to convince the Taco Bell to record a customer complaint about how its existence itself is dystopian.
For older tools, sure. Newer tools eschew man pages and just offer some help flag, even though there are excellent libraries that generate manpages like https://crates.io/crates/clap_mangen or https://crates.io/crates/mandown (for Rust, but I am sure most languages have one) without requiring you to learn troff.
Newer in maturity though, I'd say, no not like 'modern' tools vs. only vintage tools have them. It's just not something people tend to consider early on I think, but popular stuff gets there. (For one thing, at some point someone points it out in the issue tracker!)
All of this is true. “Invitation to guess” is the key phrase in my comment. CLIs present as cryptic, which is a UX _advantage_ over chat wrappers because the implied call to action is “go do some reading before you touch this”.
An AI wrapper typically has few actual capabilities, concealed behind a skeuomorphic “fake person” UX. It may have a private list of capabilities but it otherwise doesn’t know if it knows something or not and will just say stuff.
It really needs to be 100% before it’s useful and not just frustrating.
> but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual
which is basically what you're saying too? the problem with voice UIs and some LLM tools is that it's unclear which options and tools exist and there's no documentation of it.
Siri does have documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/ipha48873ed6/io.... This list (recursively) contains more things than probably 95% of users ever do with Siri. The problem really boils down to the fact that a CLI is imposing enough that someone will need a manual (or a teacher), whereas a natural language interface looks like it should support "basically any query" but in practice does not (and cannot) due to fundamental limitations. Those limitations are not obvious, especially to lay users, making it impossible in practice to know what can and cannot be done.
Well that's largely theoretical and Siri needs largely more input than is worth the trouble. It lacks context and because of Apple focus on privacy/security is largely unable to learn who you are to be able to do stuff depending on what it knows about you.
If you ask Siri about playing some music, it will go the dumb route of finding the tracks that seems to be a close linguistic match of what you said (if it correctly understood you in the first place) when in fact you may have meant another track of the same name. Which means you always need to overspecify with lots of details (like the artist and album) and that defeat the purpose of having an "assistant".
Another example would be asking it to call your father, which it will fail to do so unless you have correctly filled the contact card with a relation field linked to you. So you need to fill in all the details about everyone (and remember what name/details you used), otherwise you are stuck just relying on rigid naming like a phone book. Moderately useful and since it require upfront work the payoff potential isn't very good. If Siri would be able to figure out who's who just from the communications happening on your device, it could be better, but Apple has dug itself into a hole with their privacy marketing.
The whole point of an (human) assistant is that it knows you, your behaviors, how you think, what you like. So he/she can help you with less effort on your part because you don't have to overspecify every details that would be obvious to you and anyone who knows you well enough.
Siri is hopeless because it doesn't really know you, it only use some very simple heuristic to try to be useful. One example is how it always offer to give me the route home when I turn on the car, even when I'm only running errands and the next stop is just another shop. It is not only unhelpful but annoying because giving me the route home when I'm only a few kilometers away is not particularly useful in the first place.
If you like deleting all your files, sure. LLMs, especially small ones, have far too high a propensity for consequential mistakes to risk them on something like that.
I was thinking more in context of interactive help that will just find and display relevant manual info (to get around the problem of "it remembered wrong") rather than vibe coder favourite of "just run what you hallucinated immediately"
The lack of an advertised set of capabilities is intentional so that data can be gathered on what users want the system to do (even if it can't). Unfortunately, this is a terrible experience for the user as they are frustrated over and over again.
- almost every search field (when an end user modifies the search instead of clicking one of the results for the second time that should be a clear signal that something is off.)
- almost every chat bot (Don't even get me started about the Fisher Price toy level of interactions provided by most of them. And worse: I know they can be great, one company I interact with now has a great one and a previous company I worked for had another great one. It just seems people throw chatbots at the page like it is a checkbox that needs to be checked.)
- almost all server logs (what pages are people linking to that now return 404?)
- referer headers (you product is being discussed in an open forum and no one cares to even read it?)
We collect so much data and then we don't use it for anything that could actually delight our users. Either it is thrown away or worse it is fed back into "targeted" advertising that besides being an ugly idea also seems to be a stupid idea in many cases: years go by betweeen each time I see a "targeted" ad that actually makes me want to buy something, much less actually buy something.
Very well written, I'm wondering when current "cli haxxxor assistant" FAD will fade away and focus will move into proper, well thought out and adjusted to changed paradigm IDEs instead of wasting resources. Well, maybe not completely wasting as this is probably still part of discovery process.
I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.
> The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.
I literally just experienced this with RCS failing to activate. No failure message, dug into logs, says userinteractionrequired. Front page of HN, nobody knows, apple corp response, 'thats interesting no you cant talk to engineering'.
Read the RCS spec definition document to fall asleep to after the board swap and the call saying they won't work on it since issue resolved, answers exactly what that meant, Apple never implemented handling for it, my followup post: https://wt.gd/working-rcs-messaging
Bingo. My wife’s phone failed to backup to iCloud. To be fair, there’s an error message. However, the list of what takes up space does not show what’s actually taking up space. Such as videos texted to or from you (can easily be multiple gigs as they add up over a year or two)
The list didn’t show the god damn GoPro app, which was taking up 20GB of space from downloaded videos. I guessed it was the problem because it showed up in the device storage list, but literally not reported when you look at the list of data to backup.
iMessage is another great example of a failure. I changed my iMessage email and didn’t receive messages in a family group chat until I noticed — I had to text the chat before stuff started coning through. Previously sent messages were never delivered. And they all have my phone number, which has been my primary iMessage for LITERALLY over a decade. iMessage’s identity system is seriously messed up on a fundamental level. (I’ve had numerous other issues with it, but I’ll digress.)
It’s messed up, but it can be fixed by turning off iMessage and MMS in settings.app and then turning it back on. It’s an old bug. Since it hasn’t been fixed, I’m guessing the solution introduces more problems than it a solves for whatever reason.
I don't even use Photos, except in extreme situation. It was such a major UX downgrade from iPhoto that I could never get it to work without lots of mystery meat guessing, and every interaction with it was so unpleasant because of that.
Knowing that a company had competent product designers that made a good product, but then shitcanned the working product for a bunch of amateur output from people that don't understand dry very basics of UI, from the one company that made good UI its primary feature for decades... well it just felt like full on betrayal. The same thing happened with absolutely shitty Apple Music, which I never, ever use, because it's so painful to remember what could have been with iTunes...
Just think that they marketed Photos as a worthwhile replacement for Aperture as well.
I remember advising many photographs friends on using Aperture for photo library management. Now I feel so bad for ever recommending that. I mean Lightroom now has a stupid subscription, but using Apple software was kind of the point: avoiding the risk of software becoming too expensive or bad because the hardware premium funds the development of good software.
Now you get to pay more for the hardware but you have to deal with shitty or expensive software as well. Makes no sense.
My biggest pet peeve with macOS Music is that you can't go back a track in the "infinite play" mode. Not only can you not go back to the previous track, but you can't even go back to the beginning of the song - the button is just greyed out. It's a purely arbitrary limitation because the same functionality works fine in iOS.
I don't know why it bugs me so much, but I'm at the point of moving my library into a self-hosted Navidrome instance so I can stop using Music.
Photos is horrific for this. No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality.
Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.
Agree that new Photos is abysmal compared to what it was before. And that's before the macOS only features that you don't know are macOS only features (like naming photos! Seriously!)
There's a lot of arcane lore about how to get it to sync. Closing all applications, restarting, then starting photos, then hiding the photos main window, then waiting, was how I got it to work last time. It worked twice, YMMV. If there's a cli alternative, please tell me.
You're not saying it, but ugh, yeah, anything along those lines of magic incantations and this is all the very antithesis of what Apple claims to embody.
Siri does have a "Ask me some things I can do" feature, but the problem is it's way too big; most of the things are things I don't care about ("Ask me for a joke", "Ask me who won the Superbowl last night"); and a lot of times even forx things I can do, its comprehension is just poor. "Hey Siri, play me Ein Klein Nachtmusik by Mozart". "OK, here's Gonna Pump Big by Diddy Q[1]". "Hey Siri, tell Paul I'm on my way". "OK, calling Mike smith".
This is just the conversational interface issue. You need the system to be able to do most of the things you would expect a human to be able to do (e.g. if you're talking to your phone, you'd expect it to be able to do most phone things). If the conversational system can only do a small subset of those, then it just becomes a game of "discover the magical incantation that will be in the set of possibilities", and becomes an exercise in frustration.
This is why LLMs are the first conversational interface to actually have a chance of working, once you give them enough tools.
Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst driving and half the features are turned off then.
My favorite is when you have Siri off but CarPlay on. You can be actively navigating, but say “find me the nearest X” and it’ll say “I’m sorry, I don’t know where you are”
Yeah there should just be a global option when you're settling up the phone called "I want my shit to work and don't care that Apple has my location", and then allow all the relevant apps location access, rather than the piecemeal per-apple-app setting. I mean, as a developer I can understand the difference between the weather app always having my location and apple maps only having my location when open, but what the hell Apple? Just have a button for "make it work" vs "I'm paranoid", and let the paranoid micromanage to their hearts desire. (Not pejoratively, other people have a different threat model from me. I know people who have legitimate reason for enabling lockdown mode.)
Eeeh ... the gap between "full access for all apps" and "lockdown mode" is wide.
Casuals are in there--nontechnical folks for whom "brick breaker deluxe wants to access your contacts" might raise an eyebrow. The stalked are in there--malicious apps that track location of the install-ee are unfortunately not uncommon. The one-device-for-multiple-lives folks are in there (if your work email/contacts are on your phone, it's a good thing that your dating app has to ask permission before acquiring your phone's contacts). So are the forgetful--that periodic "hey, this app has had permissions for ages, do you still want it to have that access?" thing not only helps folks clean up their perms, it reminds lots of folks about services they forgot they paid (or worse, forgot they are still paying) for.
Their point is that Siri is not consistent with these things. If you've never had these issues yourself then good for you, not everyone is as lucky.
I have had the same issues myself. The "allow Siri when locked" toggle for my phone is set to on, yet it still often refuses to do stuff like turning my home lights on/off, giving the reason that I need to unlock my phone.
And I've also had the location issue they gave an example of, where asking "what is the weather in Berlin" does not need it to know where you are because you've told it the location you're asking about, so the answer is the same regardless of whether you're asking while in Berlin or Tokyo, yet it still sometimes gets stuck believing it needs location access.
Edit: oops the issue of having said a location in the request wasn't in the comment you replied to, but another reply to it. But the overall point of Siri being annoyingly inconsistent still stands.
Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze.
I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfaces gave up after realizing tired arms make for annoyed users.
> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case
You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while.
If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single function in a driving car should be controllable by voice, and so could a lot of phone and computer functions.
I think the utility of voice commands is marginal at best in a car. In isolation, voice commands don't make sense if you have passengers. You basically have to tell everyone to shut up to ensure the car understands your commands over any ongoing conversation. And in the context of old fashioned knobs and buttons, voice is seriously a lot of complex engineering to solve problems that have long been non-issues.
Not to mention the likely need for continuous internet connectivity and service upkeep. Car companies aren't exactly known for good software governance.
Modern cars have several microphones or directional microphones and can isolate a speaker.
I think well-done voice commands are a great addition to a car, especially for rentals. When figuring out how to do something in a new car, I have to choose between safety, interruption (stopping briefly) or not having my desires function change.
Most basic functions can be voice-controlled without Internet connectivity. You should only need that for conversational topics, not for controlling car functions.
> Not to mention the likely need for continuous internet connectivity and service upkeep. Car companies aren't exactly known for good software governance.
I don't own a car but rent them occasionally on vacation in every one I've rented that I can remember since they started having the big touch screens that connect with your phone, the voice button on the steering wheel would just launch Siri (on CarPlay), which seems optimal—just have the phone software deal with it because the car companies are bad at software.
It seems to work fine for changing music when there's no passenger to do that, subject to only the usual limitations with Siri sucking—but I don't expect a car company to do better, and honestly the worst case I've can remember with music is that played the title track of an album rather than the album, which is admittedly ambiguous. Now I just say explicitly "play the album 'foo' by 'bar' on Spotify" and it works. It's definitely a lot safer than fumbling around with the touchscreen (and Spotify's CarPlay app is very limited for browsing anyways, for safety I assume but then my partner can't browse music either, which would be fine) or trying to juggle CDs back in the day.
How I miss old fashioned knobs and buttons. The utility of voice commands goes up when all your HVAC controls and heated car elements are only accessible on a touchscreen that you can’t use with the mitts you need to wear when it’s cold.
Again, I disagree. I almost entirely use Siri to get directions to places using Google maps with my voice when I’m on CarPlay. I also use Siri to respond to texts in my car, not as frequently but often enough.
It's great interface when your hands are doing something else so I do see the appeal.
Just that... nobody is willing to pay much for a thing that will do some basic search, dictate a recipe, or do unit conversion, or add a thing to a list.
Strong disagree. I would say 90% of the text I “write” on my phone is speech to text. I wouldn’t use ChatGPT nearly as much if I had to type out paragraph prompts every single time.
Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems like text to speech in the ChatGPT prompt window uses the context around it in the paragraph to fix what I’m saying so it is inordinately accurate compared to the rest of the iOS system.
Alexa has gotten significantly worse with the "Alexa+" AI updates. I used to be able to say stuff like "Alexa, set the lights to 5" and it would turn the lights to 5% in the room I was currently in. Now half the time it tries to start a conversation about the number 5, or the northern lights, or other random nonsense. Absolute garbage.
Telling it to find directions in CarPlay but you have to say “using Google Maps” at the end. It’s pretty good for finding directions with voice only.
It is ridiculously useless for most things though. Like I’ll ask it a question on my Apple Watch and it will do a web search and give me a bunch of useless links.
the thing I find most frustrating about the music use-case is that if you ask it to play an album, then close out Siri after the confirmation bing noise, but before it finishes reading back to you the artist and album name it's about to play, then it will treat that as a cancellation and it won't play the album.
for example I say: "play comically long album title by artist on Spotify", it thinks about that for five seconds, does the bing noise, then says "playing comically long album title [special remastered edition] by artist on Spotify", and then a few seconds later starts playing the album, and if you don't wait through that whole thing it will just decide that actually you didn't want to hear the album
For some reason this confirmation is always much louder than the music you are listening to.
If you tell Siri to play some obscure artist or title of which there seem to be about 10 possible hits, then sure, we need confirmation. If I tell you to play Riders on the Storm by the The Doors, just play it damn it.
> A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.
Also quite good for making shopping lists, with some bonus amusement when you get a weird transcription and have to try to work out that "cats and soup" is "tonkatsu sauce" several days after you added it to the list.
I'd throw in the failure to do anything meaningful with home automation, which I guess could fall under the Siri umbrella of failure. Maybe I'm still peeved big tech bought up the industry just to kill any innovation.
The tension is that there's a big chasm of utility from those things until you're compete-with-Google-Search levels of good. I feel like I heard there was an Amazon UX study that said weather, music, and alarms/timers are all people use Alexa for. And even with the best LLM, that's probably all you want out of a smart speaker.
A whole bunch of assistants have gotten way worse in the last decade by chasing features at the expense of utility. I don't care about whatever new feature my speaker has, but if it fails to play a song or check the weather, I'm PISSED.
My original HomePod has recently regressed in its ability to play songs. It can no longer play one song after another without glitching and repeating a little bit of the previous song. It boggles my mind.
Steve Jobs passed away the day after Siri’s release, and I don’t think anyone else had the confidence and internal credibility to push the hard organizational changes Siri needed, similar to when he moved Apple to a single P&L when he returned.
Until LLMs came along, there wasn’t much you could do to improve Siri’s underlying technology. You could throw a thousand monkeys at to add more phrases it could match on and improve the interface to let you know what you could do. But that’s about it.
LLMs would help a lot, but there was a lot of low hanging fruit. During my time at Apple I worked on some of the evaluation of Siri's quality and saw first hand how the org issues affected Siri's path forward.
Good question. While I had a fairly narrow view of a very large system, I'll give my personal perspective.
I worked on systems for evaluating the quality of models over time and for evaluating the quality of new models before release to understand how the new models would perform compared to current models once in the wild. It was difficult to get Siri to use these tools that were outside of their org. While this wouldn't solve the breadth of Siri's functionality issues, it would have helped improve the overall user experience with the existing Siri features to avoid the seemingly reduction of quality over time.
Secondly, and admittedly farther from where I was... Apple could have started the move from ML models to LLMs much sooner. The underlying technology for LLMs started gaining popularity in papers and research quite a few years ago, and there was a real problem of each team developing their own ML models for search, similarity, recommendations, etc that were quite large and that became a problem for mobile device delivery and storage. If leadership had a way to bring the orgs together they may have landed on LLMs much sooner.
Despite my positive experience between building systems based on intent recognition and how much better LLMs are than “1000 monkeys”, it seems like the two examples we have of LLM backed assistants - Google and Amazon - that it made them worse from reports.
If someone has the resources to do this, it is Apple. For a product that can be used by billions of people, having an engineer dedicated to a single intent wouldn't be that wasteful :D
It's actually crazy how they've seemingly managed to do absolutely nothing with Siri in a decade and a half. I legitimately have no idea what features it has had added, but I still try basic things and am shocked at how useless it is.
I was excited when I recently got an iPhone 16 Pro - it comes with Apple Intelligence! Surely this is how Siri leaps into the future and starts doing things like translating for me, or responding with a photo and some basic facts when I ask who Ariana Greenblatt is, or letting me convert from Krore to USD (it gives results for rupees every time it seems?) or...
Anyways, I asked it something basic, and Siri said it would have to use Apple Intelligence. Not like, prompting me if I want to use it, just saying it's needed, then turning off. I'm pretty confused as to what Apple Intelligence is at this point, since I assumed it would be Siri. "Hey Apple Intelligence" doesn't do anything, so I ask ChatGPT. It informs me that AI is, in fact, part of Siri. I... do not know why it gave me that response.
Back to timers and alarms.
Edit - this is your daily reminder that you can NO LONGER SHUT OFF IPHONES BY HOLDING DOWN THE POWER BUTTON.
When they introduced "machine learning" it started working much worse - things that used to work 99% of the time (if you knew the incantation) now randomly fail in inexplicable ways.
And now it never gets my kids' names right. If I'm doing voice-to-text I will actually see it flash the correct spelling, and then replace it with some random phrase.
The problem was that Siri didn’t need new technology to be at least as good as Alexa, just more monkeys at the keyboard.
Classic Alexa, Gemini and Siri are all just intent based pattern matching systems where you brute force all of the phrases you want to match on (utterances), map those to intents and have “slots” for the variable parts. Like where you are coming from and where you are going.
Then you trigger an API. I’ve worked with the underlying technology behind Alexa for years on AWS - Amazon Lex - with call centers (Amazon Connect).
On the other hand, the capabilities and reliability of both Alexa and Google’s voice assistant have regressed once they moved to an LLM based system. It seems to be a hard problem and I don’t understand why.
I’ve find plenty of free text input -> LLM -> standard JSON output -> call API implementations. It seems like it would just be another LLM + brute force issue.
> A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.
When it works!
I’ve spend days where it goes wonky and says something went wrong for anything I ask. How is it that with modern phones the voice recognition and whatnot isn’t running locally?
I'm not ever going to talk to my phone. Certainly not for the slim list of things that doing so would make more efficient than just looking at it and poking the button I need.
And there's no way I'm going to enable a battery draining 24/7 surveillance microphone on my phone on the off chance I ever do come up with a reason to give it a voice command.
But Apple really wants me using it. So much that my wife's car won't enable CarPlay unless turn Siri on. Like, there's no way to get it to put a Google map on the car's screen unless I turn this unrelated other thing on. They're happy to burn all our goodwill and convince us to buy Android phones next time (which work fine in a car without their surveillance microphone turned on).
Until then, I bought a $5 phone stand for the dashboard.
Maybe you won't, but there's still value in being able to use it hands free. "Hey Siri, call (name) on speaker" is something I regularly ask it to do while I'm driving.
It's actually worse than that because Siri was MORE functional back when it had static NLP rules. Many people have used it to book movie tickets, restaurant reservations, etc. it also told pretty funny jokes. I definitely remember people having a great time with that feature.
Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.
Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:
1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.
2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.
I have experienced some similar issues. I think some of it related to the "locked" state of the device. Siri needs context data to answer, particularly the mom or some destination questions. Specifically for contacts or recent places data. This context isn't remotely stored, but provided by the device to Siri each time. I think when the phone is locked it doesn't have access to the data (reading or writing). When I mean "Siri", I mean both the on device and remote parts of it.
I think this also interacts with countries and states that have (possibly misguided) strict laws forbidding the "touching" of phones "while driving". My experiences suggest that using Siri when driving and the device is locked, it just gives up - I sort of see the start of it working then, bam, it stops. If I retry, I suspect that I've somehow "looked" at the phone in frustration, it saw my attention and unlocked. I now wonder if where I have placed the device is making a difference.
It does seem to work much better (when driving) if the device is already unlocked.
I also see odd things when using Shortcuts for navigation. If I've previously asked for walking directions and then speak the shortcut while driving it won't give directions until I switch to the "car" icon in maps. I think it might be trying to calculate the 15Km walking directions, but it doesn't complete before I tell it, frustrated, to stop.
When Siri doesn't work it is usually the times when I need it to. This is definitely a multiplier in disastisfaction.
3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play <song/artists>", it asks me for access to Pandora (which I do have on my phone). I don't want to play it on Pandora. I have the song! I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change this, and neither the youtube video I found searching nor this reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/y18ioq/changing_the_de...) seems to work.
Amusingly (?) the reddit people have the opposite problem. They want to use a 3rd party music app but can't get their phones to stop preferring Apple-provided apps.
I can sometimes get this to work by saying "Play <song/artist> on Apple Music", but even that is not reliable.
I would love to know why Siri has clearly deteriorated. I assume it’s opaquely failing due to server infrastructure not keeping up. Thought device-side was supposed to help with that. That’s another thing I’d like to understand — what are the moving parts to Siri?
Hey I tried to use Siri to call my mom ~half a week ago and it said it didn't know who my mother was. I did find it weird since although I don't use Siri much, I was almost certain I've had success with that exact same request before, and haven't changed my contacts recently.
Yeah I've been having this with directions for a while too. It generally takes on the second try but a good 30% of the time I'm getting the same acknowledgement it's getting directions and then just silently failing.
Yes that's because Apple marketing is always wildly overhyping the capacities of what they are selling.
In this case the lie was that Siri could understand you just like a real human but it really can't.
AI chat bots have some similar problems (figuring out what it can actually do) but at least they are much better at communicating like a human.
"15 years ago" is funny, because Siri couldn't even do either of those functions on desktop 7 years ago [1]. It's crazy how they've managed to do nothing with a winning hand.
Ugh Google Now on my Pixel 3 was the last time I felt a genuine "wow" factor with tech. Everything since then has been between eye-rolling, uninteresting, or just worse.
Does anyone have an actual technical theory of how it’s possible for commands that used to work , say a month ago, to just stop working?
What is it about Siri’s architecture that causes “Set bedroom light to 30%”, a command that worked for years, to randomly stops working on a random Tuesday with no OS update or home change?
I mean, what on earth are they doing on the back end…?
My hypothesis is that when Siri does processing on the phone its abilities are severely diminished. Perhaps there is some heuristic it uses to pick if it processes voice to text on the phone vs on the server (e.g. possibly based on server load). That might be why you see inconsistencies day to day.
For me, the standout was a period of 6 months or so when Siri stopped understanding the world "half" (as in "lights to half"), and thne it abruptly started working again.
I know, it's lame. Over that amount of time Apple with the help of third party developers could have walked much of useful distance we now are trying to run to with LLMs for controlling devices. Unfortunately Apple neither wanted to give up the interaction point to developers nor develop it themselves, and only gave users some control super late with Shortcuts.
It also pioneered billions of other users with "hey google" and "siri" uselessness which also copied and then completely flatlined with things to do beyond calling the wrong person in your call list, setting timers, and playing the wrong song.
I'm amazed 'set a reminder for x when I leave this location' still doesn't get the 'when I leave this location'. It's clear user expectation created internally (by siri marketing) and externally (by ai tools) has far outpaced capability.
Apple seems weird about that and I'm not sure why, maybe accuracy or creepiness factor?
A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.
Apple Reminders has a feature to remind you when you are leaving or arriving at a location. It's super useful! But it's not super low friction to add to a Reminder via UI (it's buried at the bottom of the edit screen), so it's a feature ideally suited for a voice-based reminder. Nevertheless, nobody implemented it.
It's a great feature! I was demoing it to my parents over Thanksgiving and forgot about the lack of Siri support, and of course it failed. Parents were excited when I mentioned it but now won't be using it. Ah well.
I can set location-based alerts manually. For me, or for those who voluntarily already share their location with me. No reason Siri can’t drive those same notifications.
Edit: to be clear, Siri doesn’t. Still no reason it shouldn’t be able to.
Apple never wargamed the Siri dialogue tree for iPhone `lost and found' recovery safely return to owner the one time first time I tried to use it seriously.
I used it exactly so (timers and alarm clocks) until after some updates it wouldn’t react to my voice even half the time. I haven’t tried it since in 10 years.
Because almost no one (outside of accessibility needs) truly needs or wants to use voice to control their device. It’s one of the few UX fetishes that refuses to die.
So now can we all agree that voice interfaces are mostly useless? Other than "Siri, set a timer for ten minutes" while your hands are full in the kitchen. Siri could never work because voice interfaces are not good.
Seems like a 'you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain' type of behaviour, which is not uncommon to see in projects like these. Let's hope Codeberg doesn't end up in the same bucket.
That's the reason I don't want to jump on the Codeberg bandwagon just yet, although I'm very interested into self-hosting Forgejo.
I'd love to see something else though, a way to have repositories discoverable across all possible centralized or self-hosted services out there. What I actually do love about GitHub is that from time to time it manages to find for me some quite interesting projects and people to check out.
To note, Codeberg is set up as an _eingetragener Verein_ and has the charitable status, so it's a non profit and the leadership must be elected by the members.
KDE has a similar structure with KDE e.V.
The vibe from the first video reminds me of Warcraft 3 and DotA.
DotA was effectively a simple map that changed online gaming, e-sports, and I am sure there are millions/billions of hours spent by players in a very simple looking landscape.
Compared to what we have today, on-demand, unique, and significantly better looking. It is amazing to see how relatively small these, objectively amazing, achievements seem, compared to a simple map we had 20 years ago.
Some do, and it depends on what layer the attacks are coming in on.
Low-level attacks most or all providers have some protection against (to protect their network itself) but that may include black holing your IP at the border routers.
Few offer higher level DDoS protection that isn't rewrapped cloud flare or competitor.
a little niche cuz they're primarily a game server provider but nuclearfallout is the most proactive provider i've seen to do this, on vps or dedicated hardware. there has been many times they've worked with upstream bw providers and automatically holed incoming ddos, noticed packet loss and abnormal routing etc, before even reaching end user interfaces-
been using them for decades and they've been incredible for this, at least for the US options (prem/internap)
Thanks.. Trying to understand the issue bit better if you can bear with me..
Let's say you manage to install some cloudfare equivalent in your Vps so your hands are clean. That still exposes the provider systems up to that point, eating up resources?
Or they'll still knock you off and ban your IP at the first point of entry itself..
Cos where that leads us is subscribing to cloudfare type service almost becomes inevitable.. You can't get around it with some free software running in your own box.
> You think someone would DDoS you because you made a comment like this on HN?
Yes. Welcome to the internet! I don't just think someone would do this. I've seen these things happen. It just takes one person to be pissed off who has got nothing better to do and a few bucks to spare to buy DDoS as a service.
Huh, this feels very odd to read and buying a company outright is definitely not the only way to push Bun to be excellent. Contributing to Bun from their developers, becoming a sponsor, donating through other means, buying 'consulting services' or similar, or even forking it and keeping it up to date would all be also steps towards keeping the Bun excellent.
This is vendoring a dependency on steroids, and first moment interests of community are not aligned with what Antropic needs, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. History has thought us that this will end up with claims in the blog post not holding much weight.