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  > you're supposed to ask Rufus now

I agree it works terrible. If I say "I want hear album X from artist Y" it replies with "Here is 'This is Y' playlist", or worse "This is Z by D". This is especially annoying if I drive with someone who requests music. Eventually, I always end up pulling up my phone at the stopping lights. Kind of makes me miss the Old Ways (CD player, or AUX in).

This only happens (should happen?) when you're moving, when stationary there is a keyboard that appears; which feels like a reasonable safety precaution for me.

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.

I’ve never once been able to use CarPlay because I objected to Siri uploading information about my contacts list unencrypted to Apple’s servers.

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)

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).

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.

Is every utilization of CarPlay inside a car performed "while driving"?

yes! i just did this today as well. the product direction at apple is completely messed up imo

A developer made whatever tech is currently pissing me off. I don't care about the supply chain.

I suspect it's also a defensive move.

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.

Do you use summarize email function in gmail or outlook? Do you use rewrite paragraphs feature in word or google docs? Do you know anyone who wants these features?

That’s what I’m talking about, not AI use in general.

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.

Been there for a long time. A lot of stuff, especially tech, is not bought because of an existing need, but because marketing made you want it.

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.

Choosing to visit (or use the app) ChatGPT or Claude is very different from having terribly integrated and usually useless AI in every single app and website.

> 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.

They were not begrudgingly using it.

How many people prefer having an AI gate customer support, for instance? I don't think we are talking about two groups here.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not saying nobody wants to use AI, or AI coding and desktop apps. I’m using that daily as many others here are too.

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.

Prove that they do want them, then.

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.

If you want pure-play Linux, there's Purism (PureOS), Pine (PineOS), SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch (33 supported devices, including Fairphone, Xiaomi, Google Pixel, and Lenovo, amongst others), Tizen, Mobian (based on Debian), and postMarketOS (based on Alpine 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.

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! :)

There are several. I’ve been daily driving one for three years.

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.

You make a reasonable argument. I will take my chances and more people I talk with now seem more concerned about privacy.

This is unfortunately common among the Mac crowd.

This is not an answer

Today’s winner of Poe’s Law of the Day goes to your comment.

Well done.