I recently discovered that you need to have Siri enabled for Apple CarPlay. I expect we're going to see a lot of this where when you disable the AI functionality the devs won't have put in fallback states and you'll be effectively locked out. With CarPlay for instance there is no reason that I shouldn't be able to listen to my music or use the map without Siri. But things like responding to texts does rely on Siri, so just gate that piece. It is rather unfortunate.
That’s an awfully persnickety correction attempt for someone that replaced an opening capital letter and period with parentheses. That’s far more grammatically lax than using slang.
Spotify on CarPlay is absolutely miserable because of this.
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 was very upset about this. I had a rental car and I needed to enter on the map where I wanted to go. Even with a damn keyboard it wanted Siri. It’s just gps and i had to dig my phone out and do the typing there instead.
I'm not excited for iOS 27. I tried out the beta and decided to reset my phone to get my back to iOS 26. I find the new Siri is far worse and slower to respond, if that's even possible. It also adds new features that are hard to remove. I only use it for timers and playing music and the current Siri is just fine for that imo.
I don't understand why anyone likes CarPlay. It has always seemed like people like it because it's better than nothing. It's just not a good system in an objective sense.
CarPlay and Android Auto aren't popular because they're good, per se. They're popular because they're good enough compared to the status quo ante, which was a sea of craptastic infotainment systems.
What does “not a good system in an objective sense” even mean? In what objective measures do you see it fail in?
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.
My old car was a Toyota Rav4 2001 and my only usage of the infotainment system was to play music and get directions from google map (voice via bluetooth). I think the only controls I used on the head unit was the volume knob and the call button (to receive a call). I've never needed anything else.
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?
See how defensive people get about CarPlay? Why so emotionally invested? It's buggy and sucks when you are driving someone else's car or a rental. You proved my point too, which is that it's liked because it's better than everything else, not because it's objectively good.
“I don’t understand why people love it so much” and “the system has friction that could be improved” are two extremely different statements with vastly different communications.
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.
He's basically _wrong_ about it being bad in cars you don't own, too.
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.
See how snide and condescending anti-Apple people get whenever somebody likes an Apple product? Why so emotionally invested? You're a weird techie who just wants to look down on people who like a product that you don't.
You proved my point too, in that you were unnecessarily shitty about your difference of opinion, because you're objectively a weird fucking asshole.
Apple considers siri essential for CarPlay and I don’t really disagree. Don’t forget that a big part of the design of CarPlay tries to explicitly discourage tactile use while driving, with siri as the alternative input/output method.
I start my music and navigation route before leaving my garage, and any other interactions (volume up/down, skip song) are buttons on my steering wheel. What do I need voice input for?
(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)
Yes, it's one of the most common usages of a phone in the car. And most people I know have exactly that workflow: find and set a navigation destination while parked, then drive there without interacting with the phone.
Yes, of course. In my case Waze to get there efficiently, OSMand App for topographic maps, and occasionally Apple Maps (works well with addresses in Calendar) and Sygic. I use them in the car, and on my bike: ruggedised CarPlay / Android Auto screens are rapidly displacing ruggedised satnavs on bikes. Playing audiobooks and podcasts is handy, as is getting text messages read out with dictation for reply, but it's navigation which is the killer app for ACP/AA.
Are you asking if people use apps to get directions? I don’t have data to back this up, but I’d guess that nav integration is one of the most popular features of CarPlay and Android Auto.
I depend on it for road trips, navigating to unfamiliar destinations, or even just sharing ETAs with people
Once the city you live in gets large enough, memorizing the routes just becomes a non starter. I have my route to work almost memorized but due to construction or crashes it changes so often it is hard to cement it. (Seoul)
Because the traffic isn't known to you but it is to Google. I could take two routes, one is faster depending on circumstances, and Google knows those circumstances.
How do you know those routes have a roughly equal amounts of traffic? Or that there’s only two routes? I usually see at least three possible routes with my commute (with some forking), and at least one shortcut. During heavy traffic one optimized route can at least save 10-15 minutes than the slower one(s).
Because my 15 minute drive can be a 60 minute drive depending on traffic and there are 3 viable routes I could take.
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.
A bunch of reasons, in no particular order: Having my phone visibly in-use makes it easier to avoid the temptation of touching it. I have a long history of playing video games, and seeing a "mini-map" is just how I'm used to navigating, even when I know the way. Having navigation that incorporates real-time conditions helps me avoid construction, traffic jams, or other miscellaneous issues. I have a pretty bad sense of direction, and it takes multiple trips to internalize routes, which doesn't happen because I drive infrequently (typically less than weekly, because I prefer to take the bus).
I guess it didn't occur to me that people might not remember how to get places in real life.
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.
The response is to “it didn't occur to me that people might not remember how to get places in real life”, which is a rather limited understanding of why people might use navigation. I am not here to preach to you the benefits of this technology, simply clarifying an additional use case. There’s no need to conflate your own needs or tastes with the rest of the driving populace, 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.
Most of the places I drive, there aren't really any practical alternative routes that don't add several hours and often things like a ferry journey to your trip.
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’m perplexed too, but I used to study the Hudson’s map book for my metro area for fun before I could drive and have been driving for 25 years, and I didn’t have a phone with GPS until 2015 or so.
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.
Hard disagree. Checking the accelerometer to disable tactile functionality when moving would have been a more intelligent way to go about discouraging this behavior over mandating use of a historically unpopular technology (Siri) in order to use a popular one (Maps, Bluetooth music streaming).
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.
Interestingly, I have Google Assistant more or less disabled on my Android phone, but it still works when I have Android Auto enabled (which is fine by me since that's the one time that I ever want to use it).
I got the email that they're burying Assistant in September...
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.
And Google considers necessary to report (using tactile use while driving) if there are blockages in the road, construction, lane closures, an accident, etc.
The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.
Would be interesting to see anti competition law applied here, too. Essentially bundling the two together, leveraging the market for car play to gain adoption for Siri.
i feel relatively comfortable with carply + basic siri, leaving apple intelligence off. basic siri is pretty limited in scope of what it has access to and what it can do.
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.
This got me mad too. And also restrictiveness of it - i can't see messages - WTH seriously? Why some tech stuff decides what is "safe"? (i guess it was the main driver)
With Apple intelligence turned on, when I take a screenshot on my iPhone, it wants me to do this search that goes to temu, instead of the text selection that it used to do. So I turned it off, but I have to turn it back on to have auto translation in iMessage.
Fallback states are generally a ton of work that don't benefit the direction that the PM or broader business would want to go anyway.
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".
How do you feel about other hot button issues like LLMs, privacy policies, Flock cameras, etc.? By your reasoning, developers "make" those things too.
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.
I don't want to Godwin this thread so early, but you know what analogy I'm thinking of. If you work as a developer for Google, Microsoft, Flock, CloudFlare, Facebook etc. etc. you are complicit in making the world a crappier place.
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.)
Such a cool guide to such a bizarre problem we live in…
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.
Nobody using it is actually the ideal outcome. AI features are added, at no additional cost to the consumer, to extract money from investors. If customers began using the product, this feature would actually start having an ongoing cost.
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.
Thing with investor money is that after a while the investors start asking where their dividends are at. If you put all that money toward building features nobody asked for, you're in for a rough time.
Eh, this is true prior to an IPO, but listed companies (like every single one doing this shit) are very much beholden to shareholders and quarterly reports.
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?
We've long been there. Most technology markets are supply driven. People buy what's made available on the market and learn to cope with it. That's big part of why people hate computers so much, and why feigning ignorance about basic device operations is a point of pride for many a normies.
I really do wonder if the market is being irrational or if we just cannot see what they are
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"
Nobody, absolutely nobody wants or likes overlapping rainbow animated "ask AI" buttons plastered over every available inch of screen space. Nobody wants or likes useful features being removed and replaced with colorful bouncing "ask AI" buttons.
> I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it.
(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.
I think people like AI tools when it's their choice to engage with them and they set the terms. I have a good experience with Claude largely because I choose when to use it and when I don't care about it's existence, its gone. But the stupid glowing, animated, overlapping Copilot button in Word is the dumbest thing imaginable. I don't want it, and I cant stop being reminded of it.
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.
Alternative hypothesis: people do gradually use these features, but HN became a weird anti-AI bubble for some reason.
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).
Shitty LLM chatbots providing unhelpful (read: lies) customer service is even worse than some Phillippeens or Indian support with terrible scripting and half-broken engrish. At least you could deal with those fucks with demanding a manager or similar.
The LLMs will always do the worse option to customers, to extract more money. Burn'em all to the ground.
No one wants? I understand normies on Facebook saying that, but you are on HN. How do you keep that position with the evidence getting thrown at you daily?
Do you use any of the AI features listed in the article, as shipped in the app? That's not the same thing as coding agents or cobbling together something for yourself.
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)
Thanks for suggesting more mainstream alt-browsers. This article isn't about avoiding all AI everywhere so much as it is for people who want to turn the intrusive AI off in the things they are already using. There are even more things that could be in this including Windows registry editing, Linux, and all the great FOSS options but it's mostly not for that. I do have an older iPhone and I agree, it's sort of great to have legacy Siri.
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.
Currently auditioning a used pixel 8 with graphene os on it. It's nice. Not strictly linux, but it's de-googled. Minimal. Not designed to suck you in. Bit of a pain to get installed, but other than that, pretty good.
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! :)
Thanks for putting this together, incredible resource.
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/
The cloud jira is such a downgrade overall. You cant have reasonable markdown or date format, but have AI "make longer" torture button. And deceiving "improve description" AI button which just ... makes it pointlessly longer.
Until 2023 I ran our on-prem Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc etc. I had an ancient 6c/6t box with about 24G of memory, and a couple 10K drives & 500G SSDs. It was fast, responsive, rock solid, and LDAP had everybody's accounts synced perfectly.
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.
Much needed list. On the browser front, I recommend giving a try to alternatives like Zen or Helium, which are Firefox and Chromium based respectively.
For AI buttons that specifically bug you, content blockers like uBlock Origin are especially helpful to zap them out of the page.
So the next iteration of surveillance features is to silently double down on users that turn off surveillance, because why would they do that unless they have something to hide? Better flag this user for extra super-secret surveillance and an immediate notification to authorities.
On Mac, you can use https://wairy.app (full disclosure, I made this) to check what you have given AI perms to do on your computer (knowingly or not), then revoke them.
Anyone know a good way to disable the ai summary on Google results? I know I should move over to kagi, but a ublock filter or something would still be nice.
`google.com##.hdzaWe` blocks the AI summary. This is better than udm=14 because it doesn't suppress the other sometimes-useful non-AI Google answer blocks.
Thanks for this. I love AI but I seriously hate the way these corporations keep forcing it into literally everything. I want to use AI on my own terms.
It's a sad state of affairs when companies are cramming this unwanted garbage into every app putting the onus on the user to block, disable, unsubscribe, delete, edit and mitigate. Nobody asked for AI slop.
The search box is gone and you're supposed to ask Rufus now.
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?
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.
(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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
The bigger problem with these apps is that they are proprietary and they have been spying on us.
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 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.
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.
Look at OpenAI revenue just over a year ago. Most of that was not for LLM coding.
Loads of non-technical people I know are paid subscribers $20/mo to ChatGPT (not API, but their actual chat product).
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.
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/
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.
Well done.