mithr

> I really don’t understand people who use these?

> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?

> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality

Ok, but then...

> I use Amazon fresh frequently

So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...

I'm mostly hoping this doesn't end up affecting Costco delivery, which works reasonably well and uses Instacart behind the scenes.

Are they really “addressed”?

They are mentioned as things the union is unhappy with. The city has said they’ll come up with a transition plan by next year, but there are no details and that doesn’t mean people won’t lose jobs. The bill prohibits the horses from being sold to slaughter or other rides, but doesn’t say where they’d go instead.

I think it’s reasonable to raise concerns about both.

One I’d add, from unfortunate experience: don’t procrastinate, even out of fear.

If you think something’s wrong, get it diagnosed asap. Everything depends on cancer type, but with some, a few months in either direction can be the difference between no chemo at all and months of chemo. Biting that bullet earlier can drastically improve what’s going to be a terrible experience.

Yes… because places like Amazon mean I don’t have to :) that’s the point!

> In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option

But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?

I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.

You couldn't have, though. Market share was a part of that Microsoft decision. At the time, they had 90-95% of the global market share — there were very few competitors. Apple has a higher though still in the 50s percentage-wise market share in the US, but a 20-30% share globally. Alternatives are much more viable in Apple's case, and often cheaper. You have to want an Apple device to get one, and it's very easy to get an Android instead and not lose out on any important software or functional ability.

In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.

I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.

I can't believe they haven't redesigned the Home app interface! I've always thought it was pretty terrible UX-wise and looked like they just threw together a very basic UI to have some support for home automation. I always expected they'd get around to formulating an actual design perspective for what a good-looking smart home control interface may look like, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity for that. I guess not.

That being said, I still think this is cool, and I'm glad Apple's spending more effort in this area. I won't replace my custom HA dashboard with it at this point, but may get my parents one.

I don't know. AI is certainly the cause of a lot of anxiety for me about the profession as well as society and the world at large. I also enjoyed my job quite a bit when I had to/could write all the code by hand. I'd been doing it for a few decades, and don't appreciate that the future of this path is now in question. For these reasons, if I had a lever to make it so LLMs never happened, I'd probably pull it.

That being said, similar to OP, I've used AI to create some things I've been thinking about for a long time, and realistically might never have gotten to otherwise. One of them is an app to wean off of Blue Apron for meal prep: it has a (high-quality) scraped database of a few thousand recipes, it works and looks just the way I wanted it to, and it has a lot of functionality I haven't seen anywhere else, that I came up with over time. This morning, I had a feature idea, and before heading out for some errands I outlined its system design to the AI. It wrote a spec, got it reviewed, and built a v1 before I came back home. That's a lot of fun, for me, too: to be able to mostly focus on the higher-level design of a system, and still get where you want to go.

Developing for HA with Claude has been great. Not only can it make all of those yaml changes based on natural language goals, but it's so easy now to create a custom dashboard or configure various apps. I was struggling with both the ChoreOps docs and its fairly cumbersome interface until I pointed Claude at it and told it what I was trying to do.

As a father of two young children, LLMs have been kind of amazing. I’ve historically been someone who has project ideas and has fun building them. But for a few years now I just haven’t had the headspace for it — all I’ve wanted to do in the evening is relax for a bit.

In the past month I’ve completed a home dashboard idea I’ve had for years, I’ve built a house management system, a travel planning tool, a guitar chord annotator… it’s been very liberating. I’m not doing the coding, which was fun, but I am doing all of the system design and iteration, which I also really enjoy.

> An LLM isn't human. I don't really understand this thread of "humans do it so of course an AI does"... Why is it not reasonable to expect it to adhere to rules better than a human does?

Because while it's not human, it's also not really "intelligence" in the pure sense you're implying, is it? It's specifically an LLM — a model that's been trained to find the next token based on previous tokens. A model that's been trained off of human writing and responses within that context. If almost every time someone online asked "do you want ice cream?" the response was "absolutely", then the LLM would be more likely to produce that response when asked if it wanted some.

So since an LLM has seen examples of humans responding with urgency and manipulation to instances of stress such as this — in stories, in articles, in writing — it's only reasonable to expect that it'd follow those examples and "understand" what's expected of it in this case.

> Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest

And I believe that if it were that above-board then many fewer people would complain. But it's not.

Because the professional will host a fancy dinner that you're invited to. Or they'll make an entirely legal contribution to your re-election fund.

And even if you think all of the above is totally fine, you have to consider whose voices are more loudly heard in this kind of system. Do you, or your neighborhood, or even your city in most cases, have as much money as a megacorporation, to fund all of these activities at a similar scale? Do you think it's right for the richest companies and people to have the most say in how the country is run?

> no lobbying or money in politics legally ... there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so

You could speak your mind at a meeting with a policy maker, rather than at a $500 a plate dinner you've invited them to free of charge. You could pay someone to advocate for your interests in a smart way, without also contributing a million dollars to someone's re-election campaign. If there was less money flowing into politics, it would be more difficult to sway public opinion at large through expensive campaigns.