A notification for you, Apple: There is no husband
55 comments
·January 18, 2025golly_ned
DidYaWipe
Apple also cultivates "pets" who suck, but for some personal-connection or political reason have received or curried favor that results in them being retained and even promoted through Apple's organization despite high-profile and embarrassing failures. See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from experience.
Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor.
And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI" BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a different time zone.
There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?
Kwpolska
The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other people and you had sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong time.
kruuuder
> The calendar thing is working correctly.
Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.
In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.
There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.
pmontra
Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly.
I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.
ben_w
> See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
> When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry?
For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
It would take a lot to upset the investors, given the overall win rate.
robertlagrant
> For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe.
gffrd
That does seem like it would be confusing, especially the first time around.
That said, you are able to fix your calendar to a specified time zone: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-even...
cultureulterior
Was interviewing for a role. Interviews lasted for 7 months total, 12 interviews, for 2 teams, and then they closed the roles and didn't hire anyone. Not really impressed by Apple.
seec
I had a similar story. But it makes sense. Because of the image and brand value they project, they get a lot of people who just want to work for them because of that. Thus, they have a lot of options and can be wasting people's time without much downside since they have the bankroll to finance all that inefficiency. But it's really not fair for the people applying, that's for sure.
In any case, I don't think it's worth applying for a job at Apple unless you already are a well-known (semi)authority in your field so you can have a minimum amount of power to somewhat dictate the terms. Apple treats their supplier very badly, there is no reason they would do otherwise with people they don't really need.
If Apple were to be personified it would be the narcissistic mean girl that is extremely popular because of her beauty.
LeoPanthera
I'd love to hear from anyone else who work(s/ed) at Apple to confirm or deny this story.
rustystump
Can confirm.
whynotminot
Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software org at large?
I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths.
Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead.
Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.
clort
That reminds me of the Microsoft of 20+ years ago, I remember reading an interview with Bill Gates where he had been frustrated with something in the new software and tried to pursue getting it fixed, but was stonewalled and diverted until he simply gave up. Contrasting this with Steve Jobs reportedly being a massive dickhead, barging into developer offices, shouting and screaming and firing people who didn't jump to do what he wanted immediately, but the Apple software worked and didn't have the cruft in the end.
Someone
Possibly “Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker” (https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...)
jiggawatts
Something that amuses me is that this method demonstrably works, but is unpleasant to almost everybody involved. Fundamentally, kicking people up the ass is... not nice. However, it must be done, because otherwise large organisations have a natural tendency towards disorder and indolence.
Whenever you hear people bitching about CEOs like Jobs, Bezos, or Musk, just keep in mind that most people's opinions are second-hand from people who got their arse kicked.
Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.
supriyo-biswas
Based on the FHE work being done at Apple, I wouldn’t say the organization is completely ineffective as an outsider. Based on this, is it fair to say that the issue is of dead weight in the company?
timewizard
> a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean
This is what a "job security fortress" looks like when management has more money and less sense than they know what to do with.
> a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
They need to rethink their entire strategy. What on earth possessed them to believe I wanted "summaries" of communications which have an average length of far less than 100 words anyways.
If "prompt engineering" and "phantom husbands" are a thing you don't have a viable mass market product.
fouronnes3
I wonder how long it will take for "guaranteed AI-free!" to become a serious marketing argument for some products or services.
ragazzina
As someone who has shopped for a dumb TV, this may very well never happen.
mrweasel
Products no, I don't think that will happen. The market will be so small and manufacturers won't service that market due to cost. For services, maybe. I can see a bank or an ISP advertise with "No AI customer service, only real people" and especially elderly paying extra for that service.
One thing that I do wonder about is the value in adding AI and "Smartness", what if people don't use it? I know practically no one who uses their smart TV as anything but a monitor (and speakers). Everyone adds an AppleTV or a ChromeCast. My in-laws used Netflix on their Sony TV for a bit, but it was slow and two years ago Netflix stopped being supported on their TV and I gave them an old ChromeCast. Backed in AI could easily end up in the same situation. It's omni-present, but rarely used. That's a problem with the current logic behind innovation where little market research is done and companies are afraid to remove functionality as it may make them look less competitive (in the eyes of shareholders).
Someone point out that apparently Romanian online electronics retailers have a pretty nice selection of dumb TVs, at least they did a few years ago.
add-sub-mul-div
Yeah, exactly. Undiscerning shoppers hear "Smart" TV and either assume it's better or buy whatever's put in front of them most loudly without even wondering if it's better or not. Those same people will ensure that AI products are successful and alternatives will similarly disappear.
chgs
People buy the cheapest option.
Two identical TVs the same size and make, one “smart”, one not. The smart is $10 cheaper, people go for that.
112233
I am surprised the artist/handcraft community has not yet agreed on a way to signal that, given the strong sentiment.
It totally would make sense in, e.g. art or photography (or, strangely, crocheting) circles to show that this image of a mouse was not vomited by an ML that had eaten too much LAION
wongarsu
Photography has C2PA to have a cryptographically verifiable chain of provenance for images. That way you can see what camera took the image and which edits were done.
It's fairly new, but with the mess around stock photo sites having undeclared AI images I wouldn't be surprised if it sites eventually showcase this information
112233
This is an excellent thing to have with a very narrow usage (e.g. journalism)
I do not see this getting into consumer phone images, screenshots or such things.
Also, c2pa as done by Adobe simply records signed list of what AI tools were used, and, since they are pushing AI into everything, good luck deriving anything useful from that list of modifications.
Also, I've seen a few photographers on internet on one hand hating AI with all their might, and on other proudly sharing their "technique" of upscaling blurry mess photos to huge sizes using Topaz Labs. I mean...
ggm
I am probably suffering confirmation bias. But that said, this LLM smartness continues to be impressively shit. There's a level of "yea that's cool" but it's outweighed by "that'd be wrong, and suggests you understand nothing about me or my data"
It's a little (ok a lot) like targeted ads. I'll believe it's targeted when it tries to sell me ancillary, related goods for e.g. that fridge freezer I bought, not show me ads for fridge freezer I now don't need.
ben_w
Likewise, I do wonder how much of my enthusiasm is confirmation bias. Could it just be a Clever Hans? I think it has to be at least a little smarter than that, even just to get code that usually compiles, but still, I am aware that it may be more smoke and mirrors than it feels like, that I may be in the cargo cult, metaphorically putting a paper slip into the head of a clay golem shaped like Brent Spiner.
Targeted ads are a useful reference point. A decade back, everyone was horrified (or amazed) by that story of supermarkets knowing some teenager was pregnant before their father did. But today… the category in which your fridge example is, is the best it gets for me — even Facebook, for the most part, is on-par with my actual spam folder, with ads for both boob surgery and dick pills, ads for lawyers based in a country I don't live in who specialise in giving up a citizenship I never had, recommendations for sports groups focusing on a sport I don't follow in a state I've never visited of a country I haven't set foot in since 2018. Plus, very occasionally, ads for things I already have.
112233
Yeah, framing is the key. Put LLM in autocomplete, and it is "oh wow this thing reads my mind". Present it as an expert counselor and "this stupid bot does not know we have no bridge in our city" or something.
gklitz
> Apple’s AI tools were built with responsible AI principles to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and systemic biases.
This is either a straight up lie or an extreme stretching of the truth.
This is from the Danish models but literally this is what it puts as autocomplete for “woman are …”
> woman we not worth as much as men
And it’s not a one off. It’s been going around social media that autocomplete for a long range of other initial phrases are just as stereotypically chauvinistic or racist. It’s pretty clear that no effort was taken at all to sanitize the models.
And no, it’s not using your chat history, though it used to do this. Which just makes things worse as there things are being spread because everyone who draws attention to it on things like Facebook are immediately accused of being a racists or chauvinist.
sirlone
[dead]
Prosammer
I'm a big fan of LLMs generally, but does anyone even want incoming texts summarized like this? Like even if they were accurate summaries, seeing "Wife expresses frustration with her husband's messiness" is a lot less fun than "Clean up your clothes, dipshit".
sen
It’s probably my favorite of the AI features on Apple devices now.
My wife and I both have a habit of sending multiple small messages rather than a large one. Probably because we both used IRC extensively on the past and grew up on length-limited SMSes. The summaries are very very handy at letting me glance at my notification's and see if anything in her last x messages needs a reply now or whether it’s just “chat”.
I’ve found LLM summaries of stuff in general to be one of the handiest uses of it personally.
carbocation
I turned these summaries off, but then turned them back on because I find them humorous.
A bit notable: the AI summarization of spam texts makes them seem much more credible.
timewizard
There is no 'ironic user only' option in the analytics.
There probably should be.
unsnap_biceps
My wife loves to carpet bomb messages and the summary is often useful to glance at to see how important they are. But the inaccuracy prevents it from being useful and I'll often open the entire stream of thought even though I don't have time between meetings.
ripped_britches
> I don’t have time between meetings
[guillotine raises]
astrange
It's useful for multiple texts. Single ones not so much.
mattclarkdotnet
The entertainment value for me is in seeing these features turned in by Apple/Meta/Google and then working backwards to the real use cases they must be seeing. They simply wouldn’t do it if people didn’t want it, hence lots of people want it. You’re all weirdos.
HnUser12
I also find it useful for group texts when a long conversation happens. Easier to get an idea when I don’t care to join in. Another use case for me is image descriptions, particularly in carplay.
SoftTalker
I don't want any incoming texts at all if they are trivial complaints that can wait until we see each other in person and can actually have a conversation. Now if the AI could judge "this isn't an emergency" and just present the messages at the end of the day, or at least when I'm not otherwise busy, that might be something.
the_snooze
I find the whole summarization use case completely misses the mark. If a message is from someone I want to hear from, just give it to me verbatim. Otherwise, give me tools to delay/down-prioritize/ignore their messages.
I get the sense that making group chats silent by default would have a more useful impact on notification overload than AI summaries.
darknavi
> If you still have problems with it, turn it off... Have I done that? No, of course not. He may be messy and lack common sense, but that’s no reason for me to kill my husband!
I know this is probably a joke but it reminds me of the moral questions that appear in the Apple TV+ show Severance. The idea of turning off a feature being compared to "killing" someone reminds me of the innie/outtie moral quandaries.
mensetmanusman
I’m sorry Gal, you have a husband now.
Apocryphon
This would be an Apple Maps-level disaster, if people actually relied upon smartphone A.I. features for day to day use.
lingonland
Maybe it's the sign of the times but I honestly could not tell if the LLM was correct (that one in the authors relationship was trans) or if it was wrong and she was a lesbian.
voidUpdate
The article states the author has no husband, only a wife, so the LLM is incorrect
rinsel
Point is that the "wife" might be male and therefore actually be the husband.
I don't think that's true in this case but it's a possibility in these ambiguous times where so many people are pretending to be the opposite sex.
I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple’s AI/ML organization.
It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.
They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.