When talking about Jev, people love to bring up the whole "bitter lesson" idea that generalization will win out. Maybe it will in the end, but I tried most of the recent Jev-likes on my own not-very-complex use case and they weren't competitive with domain-specific classification at all.
There has always been a divide between people who learned programming because it was the best way to accomplish other tasks, and people who enjoyed programming. It was just never relevant before now, because this is the first time there has been a better way to accomplish those tasks. Lots of people find vibe coding fun, because they're using it as a tool and not as an end in itself.
The skill of programming isn't eliminated and it's fine to still enjoy it. I think it will end up like carpentry or metalworking, or maybe ham radio.
The economic impact of this shift is a separate, much more problematic issue.
Also, the assistants are not recording, they're analyzing sound wave for the trigger word. This isn't recording, it's been explained countless times already.
This whole conversation is about taking it to next level.
I do see your point, but what the assistants are doing is recording. It's only a second or two, on-device, and not stored, but it is already a recording. Apple is just changing the duration and retention.
I think as soon as the original capability launched the game was over. People don't understand technical distinctions like that and they've already accepted it.
If there's nothing left and it's deleted, then it's not recorded.
I am talking about the recording that lasts. Recording people's voice without their consent, on your behalf, and transcribing the text for your later use. It's not volatile 2s analyzed by the DSP, it's an actual record of conversation.
This is not the same recording.
But yes, I see your point, too, maybe back then we got used to it at an even less intrusive level. So it progresses, slowly, but surely, like a frog in a pot.
A lot of those cons are advantages for at least one target market, the elderly. It's much better for them if the device can't move and can't install new software.
Every 65+ person I know has one of those alexa-speaker things. Nobody I know under 65 has one. I wonder if there's just some generational expectation for a fixed household object, like phones and televisions were for people in the twentieth century.
I still have them. I use them for kitchen timers, alarm clocks, a quick weather forecast, random maths and unit conversions, and whatever I want to activate with Home Assistant. There's one on the night stand with a clock on the front that I never need to set, that adjusts its brightness automatically based on ambient light, and which gets used as a Bluetooth speaker for the tablet that I watch dumb shit on YouTube with sometimes.
So, like: The light switch in the garage is very inconveniently-located, and it's dark AF in there both at night and when I walk in from a bright sunny day. The lights can be activated by voice and that's pretty nice to have.
They're also good when I want background music that's actually-in-the-background: I've got some very nice audio systems for when I want focus on listening to music, but they are much more successful at being involving than at being being ignored. The kinda-meh-sounding Alexa-type widget on the table over there does a better job for background noise.
I'm not anywhere near 60 yet. I just find that stuff like this is useful.
(Yeah, yeah. I could build or buy voice-controlled speaker-widgets that integrate with Home Assistant in an open-source way, and even use them with a local LLM if I wanted to. I'm disinterested in that kind of effort at this time.)
Getting wakeword stuff to work 1. reliably and 2. very low latency has been what has held back local fixed point hardware assistants. I've taken a couple stabs at this myself but custom wakeword is a weirdly hard nut to crack for the open source community.
Fair but I also know plenty of people who give their elderly folks their old iPads. If you fit all the important apps on the home screen and tweak a couple things, I can't imagine the UX could be any more complex than for this device. Mobility and screen size is even more important for the elderly. They don't want to stand in their kitchen staring down at a little computer to talk to their grandchild on a tiny screen.
And finally, when they do have issues and ask you questions: now it's questions about an unfamiliar device you may not own yourself!
Old iPad still seems optimal for this demographic.
Screen size is a good point. For the other things, I suppose I was thinking of my own grandparents, who had memory issues and would've benefited from a device that can't be misplaced.
iPad OS still has a zillion failure modes for the elderly. Long press, split screen and the other multitasking paradigms, multi-finger gestures, touch id, background audio from some tab in Safari... there's just no end of features that can throw them off. And it isn't multi-user.
Not sure if HomeView is the answer, but some aspects of the video were interesting. eg super-fast user switching with no explicit login; and how it puts Siri forward as the primary UI in a way that the iPad doesn't, even if the iPad technically has the same capabilities.
That they drilled a hole through the kitchen island table top for the power cord was hilarious. Exactly zero people in the real world are going to do that.
You are wrong! I was redoing my kitchen recently and there’s a huge variety of accessories that kitchen worktop suppliers offer that have to do with using electronics on a worktop. A round hole with a lid to thread the power cable through is a very common thing that kitchen planner software includes nowadays, especially for kitchen islands. You can even have a completely flush wireless charging pad on your kitchen worktop if you want.
The screen is too small for the elderly. You're not going to get much information on there if you have to show large text, assuming that's even possible.
I think the idea is in the ballpark but the form factor is not ideal. The screen should be much bigger so notes can be left for others - maybe from scribbles rather than voice - and calendars and shopping lists can be seen from across the room.
This looks like someone at Apple took a recent Alexa and said "We should do one of those" instead of something more adventurous.
That depends on what they want to use it for, but we got an Echo Show 8 for my elderly mother in law years ago for video conferencing and she loves it. Other than video conferencing she mostly uses for voice tasks like checking the weather, setting a timer or playing music so the screen doesn't need to display any text.
If not for the need for video conferencing, she'd have been fine with an audio only device.
Seconding KDE, I hope it overtakes Gnome as the main Linux DE. It had some rough teething problems with Wayland, but it's very good now. It has a much less... opinionated interface than Gnome, and it doesn't eat as many resources either. It also doesn't try to stop you from customizing things if you want. I finally switched my main PC off of Windows for it last month.
"you can already build [Dropbox] yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
For all the complaints, it's nice to see HN hasn't changed that much.
Yes, you're right. It's almost impossible to purchase from a physical store or from competitors to Amazon (who many times are much bigger than Amazon in their country).
On the next episode of Oppressed Hackers: We get a load of a guy who had the nerve to say that it was possible to drink a glass of water.
The point wasn't that there are no alternatives, but that calling Amazon "only an interface to purchase products made by other companies" is reductive to the point of being completely wrong.
This is (still) never going to happen. A more realistic outcome is a deal between Meta and Amazon to enable access in exchange for invisibly integrating advertisements into the agents' decisions.I don't know exactly what that will look like, but I'd bet we will see a version of it soon.
It can only be this. And it will fail the same reason Alexa failed.
Nobody will blindly trust Amazon to buy products when they know Amazon cannot and will not truly suggest the best product for the consumer.
Alexa was supposed to be the voice gateway to purchasing. But nobody trusts the result Alexa picks because it will not default to the best value to the user - only the best value to Amazon.
That section is so biased it reads like satire. The current US government is not safer or more responsible than China, nor is it a democracy. I can't tell for sure if this is a clumsy attempt to ingratiate Anthropic with the administration, or if he actually believes it, but given the "I agree with Secretary Bessent" name dropping I lean towards the former.
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