Comment by hnav
21 hours ago
Apple literally has automatic commute notifications that tell you the optimal route (15 minutes via Easy St.), in this hypothetical world where your agent knows enough about you to suggest today's route, why doesn't your digital panopticon purveyor (be it Apple, Google, your car manufacturer) automatically pull that info the second you get into your car?
I don't know how many different ways there are to say that I do not want "the optimal route" according to Apple or Google.
I think this is coming across as glib or crabby but there's something more significant I'm trying to communicate. This subthread is in one of the classic software developer problem solving modes: pose a question or a problem, respond with "what are you really trying to do", argue that the problem was misconceived to begin with.
Eric Raymond wrote a whole giant piece about this.
But the world in which nerds could congratulate themselves about knowing what the real questions were and separating them from the dumb questions being asked by noobs who aren't holding things right is gone. Why do I care whether a software developer thinks I'm holding the tool right? Why do I care that someone familiar with Apple's fixed-function prefab software ecosystem believes there's a better way to handle my commute than what I'm trying to do?
OK? You use those tools. I'm just going to have my computer do the thing the way I want it to work. It's my commute, and my computer, this is the very specific tool I want, and all it took to get it on my screen and working reliably was for me to ask an agent, which didn't lecture me about the proper way to ask the question or what question I should have asked instead, but instead just fucking did the thing I asked for.
It's wild to me that software nerds believe they're going to win this argument.
I think there's some irony of this reply. You're a software developer, I think you're vastly overestimating the general public's interest in product and software development. Almost like https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
What even is "product and software development" anymore?
You might as well just say "I think you're overestimating the general public's interest in using computers", because that's what it's going to mean to use a computer in a couple years, and way sooner than we think --- asking it to do arbitrary, random things, whatever we want in the moment, and then having that happen.
We don't even need to get better than Opus 5.5 to reach that moment. We just need Opus 5.5 to get significantly cheaper and faster. You can bet against that if you want, but I'm glad to be on the other side of that bet.
I don't mean to be snippy, but I think this is a really important feature of the discussion about personal apps, and it's worth being clear about it.
1 reply →
we could spend time answering that question or, as tptacek proposes, diy the solution because the app making app is right there, and answers to your input not Apple/Google's