> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.
Does anyone use the App Store other than to search for an already known app name? I probably have not in over a decade, and I can't see a reason I ever would.
I used to. In the "golden days" of "there's an app for that", I would peruse the App Store looking for new games. I spend hundreds of dollars on games doing that. Now, the only games you see really are shovelware or subscription garbage.
Best part of searching the App Store for something you know is that even though the hamming distance between the search term and the thing you want is 0, the thing you want will not be at the top of results anyway.
i wonder how many of them are like 100% of my requests?
- "set a timer for 14 minutes"
- "remind me to make a doctor's appointment tomorrow at noon"
- "turn off the bedroom lights"
that don't require any form of AI and have functioned perfectly well (aside from having a hard time when i mumble) for years on non-AI versions of Siri?
I suspect even some of the more "advanced" queries they demoed off, i.e., "what was that restaurant John and I talked about last week?" also not require LLMs whatsoever and could have been accomplished with a simple search.
Not necessarily. NLP is possible to do without any ML. See ELIZA [0] as an example, which used pattern matching and substitution to process natural language. A few simple rules can cover a majority of requests. It's still AI, but not ML.
Though I do agree that the ML-based NLP thst we have today is much more usable, albeit more compute-expensive.
i don't think i've ever seen a discussion about movie theaters online where people weren't complaining about preroll ads, going back a good 20 years when this started to happen :)
the argument of some hypothetical "right to burn all the books i possess" is not really the topic of discussion here. it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
> it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
When you take a pitchfork against all the libraries out there who either refuse donations, or destroy the donated books, then we'll talk.
As plenty of people have pointed out, no one has shown that anything of value has really been lost. Either the works are still available for you to obtain (i.e. they didn't destroy the last version), or they are things no one wanted.
And while it hasn't come up in this thread, it was the last time it was discussed: These companies are legally obligated to destroy the books. It is illegal to scan the book, keep the scanned copy, and sell/donate the physical books. If you don't like that, change copyright law.
completely different world, but i've seen this happen in music spaces as well.
the idea of gatekeeping is often seen as elitist or exclusionary (fairly enough in many cases) but i think this can be an exaggerated description of a culture that necessarily requires a standard of... let's say, desire to engage with material on a sufficiently deep level. many things can be for anybody, but they are not for everybody.
in the past i've seen the phenomenon of "opening up" subcultures or previously-niche intellectual/art fields described as democratization but i think that ignores a big part of what causes this, which can more accurately be described as commodification. access to difficult things was formerly measured by one's ability to expend effort in order to get there (ignoring, for now, the structural conditions that set one up for success in that effort). when these things are commodified, these efforts and identities become products to purchase, the right to which is nearly never limited; in fact, it's almost seen as evil to imply that they should not be available to any individual at any time that individual may desire access.
i know we all have to start somewhere, but there has always been some historical filtration that leads people who are not truly engaged with a subject on a deep level to disengage at some point. that's changing at a novel rate and scale across so many subcultures. it seems like a lot of us are just surprised at how many people even want access to what were once our sanctuaries and we're not capable of grappling with what it takes to adapt to these changes.
i don't think this will pass or that things will return to "the way they were" but there will always be pockets that resemble previous subcultural forms. we just have to re-learn how to identify them with a keener eye and how to better avoid or more-appropriately interact with those who have a more superficial interest in them.
While you might have access to the subculture, there is no obligation for anyone else to respond, collaborate or engage with random you. This is a common mistaken understanding about open-source software projects where users often believe they have "rights" to compel or coerce volunteer developers to listen or reply to them. Developers collaborating together isn't a conspiracy, it's just preferences getting played out. No, I don't want to collaborate with someone that I don't like.... duh?
It gets bad when the subculture inhabitants get confused and adopt the social norms of the passer bys instead of remembering the importance of well-kept gardens. And then they start to introduce "policy".. which is just a backdoor for attackers to destroy your well-kept garden by arguing policy (as if that was what the subculture was about!).
> While you might have access to the subculture, there is no obligation for anyone else to respond, collaborate or engage with random you.
true, but i think there's historically often been good-faith efforts to engage with newcomers in any field that requires intellectual or artistic curiosity or experimentation. what we're seeing played out is that this default good nature ignores the risk involved in growing a small garden beyond one's own property. there is a change in meta-social requirements at scale.
the extremes of this are super apparent in FOSS - one side of this being death-by-committee and overgovernance at the expense of the original project (requiring a support organization that outgrows the actual "work", for example, look at how many HNers view unions or internal policy committees), and the other side a harsh rejection of newcomers or calcification against new ideas at the expense of the long-term viability of a project. these issues can be imperceptible or not important in smaller projects.
but they're not limited to FOSS. i think these are probably fairly well-studied ideas in any form of organizations - business, social groups, churches, non-profits, unions, etc. i don't really know where to start to learn more about this or what the right approaches are (and i suspect they're often pretty unique to the group in question). i don't have an answer but i'm really interested in the huge grey area between fully-gatekept cultures and fully-open ones.
Gatekeeping is required in any group that wishes to maintain any kind of quality. I run a book club; if I let in any random r/books poster (as an example) the discussions would become shit and the good members would leave. Ask me how I know. Now I aggressively gatekeep things when I can. It angers people, but it's worth it.
i wonder what the venn diagram of "downvoters terminally incapable of placing themselves in a dangerous hypothetical in which they are not in control of a life-threatening situation" AND "people on hn who work on these products" looks like.
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
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