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dinkleberg 7 hours ago [-]
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.
drdexebtjl 3 hours ago [-]
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.
MoreQARespect 4 hours ago [-]
I had a similar experience when I tried to search through reviews on amazon on the mobile website.
The search box is gone and you're supposed to ask Rufus now.
andrekandre 3 hours ago [-]
> you're supposed to ask Rufus now
completely off-topic but the names they give these dumb ai tools is so cringe
fragmede 9 minutes ago [-]
What would you call it?
goalieca 7 hours ago [-]
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.
thejosh 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, the "okay if you want to disable AI, we're going to remove non-AI features" paradigm that Gmail is also doing.
JackFr 5 hours ago [-]
I used CarPlay yesterday with Siri disabled. Am I missing something?
46 minutes ago [-]
1 hours ago [-]
fl0id 4 hours ago [-]
Is this maybe dependent on country? I have used carplay, and don't have siri enabled.
LetsGetTechnicl 3 hours ago [-]
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.
cgyvbunji 3 hours ago [-]
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.
10000truths 2 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
starkrights 3 hours ago [-]
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.
skydhash 2 hours ago [-]
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?
cgyvbunji 3 hours ago [-]
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.
starkrights 2 hours ago [-]
“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.
16 minutes ago [-]
pifgoe 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cgyvbunji 1 hours ago [-]
It's so bad I don't pair it at all and crank the volume all the way up and hope for the best.
pifgoe 1 hours ago [-]
I can't imagine a life so soft that pairing a phone is viewed as a challenging task; let alone an impossible one.
Hard to understand how you are able to get through the day unaided, tbh.
Yes, I'm being an asshole. I'm doing so because you deserve it for how you interact with people. You're a piece of shit and you deserve to be continually disrespected until you stop being a worthless cunt.
1 hours ago [-]
cgyvbunji 27 minutes ago [-]
I think that's projection.
pifgoe 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cgyvbunji 1 hours ago [-]
I don't care that it's Apple?
pifgoe 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cgyvbunji 1 hours ago [-]
Haha ok ^_^
semiquaver 6 hours ago [-]
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.
delecti 5 hours ago [-]
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)
ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago [-]
Do people really use navigation apps often enough for this to be an issue?
JoshTriplett 3 hours ago [-]
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.
totallymike 4 hours ago [-]
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
dmd 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I've seen anyone drive further than about 10 minutes away without Google Maps in the last 5 years.
Or maybe everyone's misunderstanding your question?
ErroneousBosh 1 hours ago [-]
I don't really understand why anyone would need sat nav for a ten minute drive.
eptcyka 3 hours ago [-]
Every day. Not for knowing how to get to a destination necessarily, but to get routed better.
pifgoe 1 hours ago [-]
I use navigation apps on any trip where there's a possibility of traffic, because they'll route me around it.
1 hours ago [-]
delecti 3 hours ago [-]
I use navigation via Google Maps/Android Auto almost every time I drive anywhere, easily north of 95% of the time.
ErroneousBosh 1 hours ago [-]
Why? Are you driving somewhere completely unfamiliar where you have no mental model of how to get there every time?
I just kind of don't get why people are so into it.
delecti 44 minutes ago [-]
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).
ErroneousBosh 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
rockskon 3 hours ago [-]
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.
cryzinger 6 hours ago [-]
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).
netsharc 5 hours ago [-]
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.
deepsun 5 hours ago [-]
Moreover, you cannot turn off Auto, as it will forcefully turn on WiFi even if you explicitly disable it.
mejutoco 5 hours ago [-]
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.
skinfaxi 6 hours ago [-]
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.
dataflow 6 hours ago [-]
Is every utilization of CarPlay inside a car performed "while driving"?
john_strinlai 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mrtesthah 5 hours ago [-]
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.
john_strinlai 5 hours ago [-]
it's a bit more nuanced than you are making it out to be, but that's absolutely a fine and understandable choice to make.
mark_l_watson 7 hours ago [-]
On our car I can hook up my iPhone via Bluetooth to listen to audio books and music, bypassing carplay.
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
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.
andrekandre 3 hours ago [-]
yes! i just did this today as well. the product direction at apple is completely messed up imo
6 hours ago [-]
sublinear 7 hours ago [-]
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".
encom 5 hours ago [-]
A developer made whatever tech is currently pissing me off. I don't care about the supply chain.
sublinear 3 hours ago [-]
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.
encom 52 minutes ago [-]
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.)
You choose to have that perspective and be subject to that locus of control.
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.
rad-b 8 hours ago [-]
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.
freeone3000 7 hours ago [-]
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.
michaelt 5 hours ago [-]
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.
andrekandre 2 hours ago [-]
> That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.
not for jira, that things ai is garbage and gets in the way most of the time (and same for a lot of companies imo)
marginalia_nu 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Nextgrid 6 hours ago [-]
> after a while the investors start asking where their dividends are at
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.
marginalia_nu 4 hours ago [-]
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.
freeone3000 6 hours ago [-]
Woe betide the company cursed with smart investors
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
bonoboTP 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody wants = nobody on bluesky. I don't get this crusade mentality.
The bigger problem with these apps is that they are proprietary and they have been spying on us.
uhohherewegoaga 5 hours ago [-]
we’ve reached the stage of market consolidation where corporations dictate consumer behavior, not vice versa
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
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.
whatsThisBtn4 4 hours ago [-]
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?
nancyminusone 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bluefirebrand 8 hours ago [-]
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"
graceful6800 6 hours ago [-]
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.
doug_durham 5 hours ago [-]
You can't say that. Also that isn't happening.
4 hours ago [-]
Legend2440 6 hours ago [-]
Many people do like AI tools and use them regularly. ChatGPT has nearly a billion weekly active users.
It's just that another group of people absolutely hates the idea of AI and wants it to go away.
skinfaxi 6 hours ago [-]
How many people prefer having an AI gate customer support, for instance? I don't think we are talking about two groups here.
Legend2440 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not opposed to it on principle, but it has to actually work.
Every AI phone assistant I've talked to has been pretty terrible, even compared to modern LLMs like ChatGPT voice mode.
gumby271 6 hours ago [-]
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.
andrekandre 2 hours ago [-]
> I think people like AI tools when it's their choice to engage with them and they set the terms.
exactly, stop shoving ai in my face and let me go to it when i want/need it
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
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).
doug_durham 5 hours ago [-]
This whole "nobody wants" narrative is getting tiresome. It is provably false, and is just a rhetorical tool.
mrtesthah 5 hours ago [-]
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.
VCFundedGenYer 16 minutes ago [-]
The article missed a few obvious ones:
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
kennywinker 3 hours ago [-]
Switch to linux, that's what I did.
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.
jessamyn 3 hours ago [-]
Which Linux phone do you prefer?
kennywinker 2 hours ago [-]
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! :)
2 hours ago [-]
Hackbraten 2 hours ago [-]
There are several. I’ve been daily driving one for three years.
lpcvoid 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jessamyn 3 hours ago [-]
Hello -- this is mine! There's a short URL: https://NoToAI.org If people have suggestions I'll add them.
devindotcom 3 hours ago [-]
funny to see you here rather than mefi jessamyn. thanks for everything!
happosai 6 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately doesn't tell me how make Rovo go away.
lbrito 24 minutes ago [-]
The Jira AI buttons? I block them with an adblocker
stephantul 5 hours ago [-]
My heart bleeds for Rovo’s product managers. They must also see that nobody actually wants or needs or even likes Rovo.
watwut 5 hours ago [-]
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.
yabones 4 hours ago [-]
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.
apercu 5 hours ago [-]
It's a dumpster fire now like everything else (Quickbooks... ugh, I'm migrating off at the end of my fiscal year).
astudentinearth 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jessamyn 3 hours ago [-]
Thank you, I've added these browser suggestions.
dceddia 6 hours ago [-]
Recently bothered by the Amazon Alexa for Shopping thing that slides out constantly and can’t be turned off, I found this Chrome extension.
Thank you, I've added this suggestion for Chrome/Firefox
4 hours ago [-]
geekamongus 6 hours ago [-]
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.
pseudosaid 2 hours ago [-]
its shareware and feature locked behind paywall.
mark_l_watson 6 hours ago [-]
Good list! Removing as much as possible all AI and surveillance features, then carefully adding back the very few I want is the way I roll.
Isamu 6 hours ago [-]
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.
bookofjoe 2 hours ago [-]
Oh! The joy of driving a 2010 car with 60,000 miles on it knowing it's more likely than not I've never have to experience CarPlay/Siri/etc.
netsharc 5 hours ago [-]
Hah, the app to view the file format that simulates paper documents has AI now... (PDF/Adobe Reader).
cryo32 7 hours ago [-]
The trick I use is to immediately go "fuck it I'm not using that product"
I'm remarkably free of any intrusive AI.
encom 5 hours ago [-]
This. Debian+KDE. No AI and nothing happens on my computer that I don't know about.
nemomarx 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jdub 8 hours ago [-]
Add `udm=14` to the Google search query string... e.g. I changed my browser's default search engine shortcut.
apazzolini 7 hours ago [-]
`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.
IsTom 7 hours ago [-]
For single queries adding `-fuck` works.
josefritzishere 7 hours ago [-]
I have found that Element Hider and similar extensions will also block some of the worst features in the browser.
JackSlateur 5 hours ago [-]
Switched to Qwant because of that .. (corporate laptop does not allow changing the search engine urls, only changing the engine itself)
Honestly ? Not a stressy move, the major things that changes is that the IA bullshit is gone
WolfeReader 5 hours ago [-]
Use a different search engine such as Ecosia or noai.duckduckgo.com
Jtarii 3 hours ago [-]
This is not an answer
WolfeReader 2 hours ago [-]
Actually it is. I haven't seen any Google AI summaries since I started using non-Google search engines.
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
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.
latexr 6 hours ago [-]
It would be nice to have this accessible in a repo, so we could track changes and submit corrections/new sources.
jessamyn 3 hours ago [-]
It's creative commons licensed, go nuts! (or send me updates and I'll do it)
soupspaces 5 hours ago [-]
So, like closing intrusive popups before and blockers, then.
josefritzishere 7 hours ago [-]
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.
whatsThisBtn4 4 hours ago [-]
Currently the best theory I have is that China bought a bunch of accounts from India to promote anti AI propaganda.
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.
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.
The search box is gone and you're supposed to ask Rufus now.
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.
Hard to understand how you are able to get through the day unaided, tbh.
Yes, I'm being an asshole. I'm doing so because you deserve it for how you interact with people. You're a piece of shit and you deserve to be continually disrespected until you stop being a worthless cunt.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
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).
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.
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! :)
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.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adios-alexa-for-sho...
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.