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.
Imagine you make a widely hated product targeted at huge corporations. Workday, Jira, Oracle Financials, anything like that.
Then you find that all your users are using ChatGPT to automate their interactions with your product. Instead of your product being crucial to your customers' business and almost impossible to replace, it's turning into a dumb pipe connecting LLMs - and looking very much threatened.
After all, data lock-in is a core part of your business strategy.
Getting people to use your AI tool, though? That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.
> That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.
By then, a new fad will come in and you can just pivot to it.
We went from "engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement), through a brief period of "blockchain" and now finally AI.
Google and Meta have made billions monetizing said engagement
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").
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?
I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it. I would put money very few people are completely avoiding it. It's very hard to avoid now anyways.
Maybe the AI company strategy is really just "make it so invasive in life it's so difficult to avoid and expensive enough to revert that companies and governments will never go back anyways"
(Sadly,) many normal folks use ChatGPT in lieu of Google search. I'm continually surprised to, over and over, hear from personal friends that they planned their vacation using ChatGPT.
They were not begrudgingly using it.
It's just that another group of people absolutely hates the idea of AI and wants it to go away.
Every AI phone assistant I've talked to has been pretty terrible, even compared to modern LLMs like ChatGPT voice mode.
The simple distinction of pro vs anti ai isn't the root cause, its about individual control and choice which can span both of those stances.
> I think people like AI tools when it's their choice to engage with them and they set the terms.
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 - which is why 99% of the cases it's still much, much better to throw one of the three SOTA LLMs at the app to operate it (or on its data) from the outside).
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 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.
If I personally wanted to use generative AI, I’d query an agent app on my computer or load ChatGPT in a browser. I wouldn’t want my email client proactively spewing random words into the text area on its own. And I certainly don’t want every bit of information on my screen continuously streamed to a corporate cloud server so that I can ultimately be profiled and surveilled.
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
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.
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. Apparently Lineage is now supporting Samsung's Galaxy series: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339930>, and GrapheneOS Motorola support has previously been announced, though remains pending: <https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at...>.
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.
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! :)
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/
This is very user unfriendly.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adios-alexa-for-sho...
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.
For AI buttons that specifically bug you, content blockers like uBlock Origin are especially helpful to zap them out of the page.
I'm remarkably free of any intrusive AI.
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.
The search box is gone and you're supposed to ask Rufus now.
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.
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.
We’ve nested enough folks haha.
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.
While it may be constructive to point out and discuss that, hey CarPlay has deficiencies and really could stand to be improved in XYZ way, vaguely gesturing at CarPlay and saying “I don’t get why people love this so much” and tacitly implying they’re wrong or stupid for doing so, is just unhelpful.
If you’d have started the whole conversation with “I get why people appreciate the improvement, but CarPlay still sucks because it doesn’t work well in vehicles you don’t own”, we’d be having an entirely different conversation right now, actually discussing and commiserating the downsides and technical limitations that Apple should definitely fix.
But alas, the message implied by “why do people like this if it’s objectively bad”, is that said people are stupid- not that we should do it. And “objectively bad” is also super broad, and dismissive of the all of the things that a lot of people probably consider objectively good, like the decoupling of updates from auto manufacturers, and some of the UI/UX behavior hereto undescribed.
I wasn’t so much fervently defending “my baby” as I was: explaining “why people love it so much”, which was the question asked; bitching about the systems of yesteryear because they sucked ass more notably than CarPlay does, at least imo; and objecting to the premise of your discussion hook for being vague and (very mildly) inflammatory.
Your response is also inflammatory. Id have loved to complain about the downsides of CarPlay and where it fails, but you basically just called me a whiny fanboy for, at the core of my response, objecting to a contentless question.
It could definitely be better; but given a choice of figuring out how to pair AA/CP in a rental car, or working with the built-in nav (which has no idea about my schedule, locations, etc)... I _always_ select pairing AA/CP.
You proved my point too, in that you were unnecessarily shitty about your difference of opinion, because you're objectively a weird fucking asshole.
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.
(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)
I depend on it for road trips, navigating to unfamiliar destinations, or even just sharing ETAs with people
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 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.
Also, those notifications can likely be conveyed using audio-only warnings, anyway. Making all of this discussion a bit moot.
Finally the entire benefit of live navigation is to find alternate routes with less traffic! That is something you could literally do about.
I don't want audio alerts for anything either. It's really simple - I don't want anything in the car that beeps, flashes, lights up, makes noise, or indeed does anything that is not directly part of making the car go in the required direction at the required speed.
"I don't understand why other people would do X"
"Well, it can be because of Y, Z, or W."
"But I don't do/need/want any of those"
"..."
It's like it's a fundamental failure to understand that other minds are separate from yours and have different motives and preferences.
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.
I don’t use active navigation, if I don’t know hot go get 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.
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.
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.
The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.
It's a pet peeve of mine that we often say "devs" when we really mean "the business". It seems to be gamers who started this language. They'll even call the publisher "the devs".
My point is just to make sure we're pointing the blame at the business where it belongs. It seems very strange how we generally do that, but make exceptions for features. Developers don't control features either. Always blame the business.
This language around "devs" is so twisted and inconsistent that I'm convinced someone is seeding this every time to deflect blame. i.e. "oops just a slip up by the devs" as if features could ever be anything but a massive premeditated effort involving dozens if not hundreds of people planning at least several months ahead of any code being written.
If you want to make a difference, you look at who is running the business. It means what a lot of fanboys cannot admit to themselves. Their favorite companies and CEOs might just be assholes.
Did J. Random Hacker at Google decide to ruin Android app development[1] for everyone? No, but he made it happen. I hate that guy. (Also.)
[1] Edit: I'm referring to this nonsense: https://keepandroidopen.org/
Where do you really draw the line? How do you feel about money? How do you feel about eating to stay alive?
Ultimately, this is not a philosophy debate. If you're confused about what work is, that's your own problem. The business is still to blame.
If you're responsible for the system at Facebook that serves endless brainrot to people, starvation is too good for you.