The Column
Siri Apologist
Siri is unfairly maligned. People love to dunk on Siri - putting out articles about it being useless, making head to head comparison videos showing how far behind it is compared to its competitors. I’m not here to say it’s better than the Google Assistant, or even that it’s as good as it should be, but…
As someone who uses Siri dozens of times a day, it's pretty great!
See the Top 5 for more.
Apple Intelligence
It’s not new news to say Apple is behind on AI. Apple Intelligence, like Siri itself, has become a punchline. Like Siri, I’m not here to say it’s better than the competition or even as good as it should be, but the main failing of Apple Intelligence was Apple not appreciating “the last mile” of the AI problem.
Apple, please do not give up on introducing casual consumers to Local LLMs.
Take your time. Get it right. Don’t give into the pull of “do it in the cloud”. Stick to your principles.
Borrowing from my note on local-first software:
People are realizing that Mac hardware can run AI locally just fine. I’ve dabbled with self-hosting AI1 using Ollama on my bottom-of-the-line Mac Mini. It’s not hard - and it works pretty well!
Ads on ChatGPT
I got an email from ChatGPT informing me about its updated terms and conditions, letting me know there will soon be ads alongside my chats with ChatGPT. This change makes a ton of sense. It’s something everyone should have seen coming. I’m not saying they shouldn’t. The AI bubble will pop unless someone can figure out how to slow the bleeding of the money being burned up by me vibe coding. According to the T&Cs, it will be rolled out in a relatively harmless way. I feared it would subtly integrated into the chat itself - businesses would pay to have the bot recommend them rather than competitors - but OpenAI says the ads will be separate from (and crucially not effect) the chats.
We need other options to stay in the market.
Local = Durable. Local = Freedom.
Free means two things. ChatGPT is “free” in that it doesn’t cost money… but you aren’t free to take it with you. You can’t do anything with it that OpenAI doesn’t make available to you. If OpenAI (or any other AI vendor) decides they no longer want to2 continue paying the bills for their operational expenses, you won’t have the freedom to do anything with their product. While Apple Intelligence will not resolve the “closed-source” problem of ChatGPT, but at least it will be yours in some sense. You can take it with you.
Top 5: Aaron’s Uses for Siri
5. “Navigate to…”
Google Maps is typically my preferred navigation service - but Apple Maps, like Siri itself, is unfairly thought of as “being useless”. It’s good!
4. “Wake me up in 25 minutes”
Timers. You don’t need Alexa to set them.
3. “Resume podcast”
I’ve set up a shortcut that auto-plays my queue of downloaded podcasts. For other folks, this could be Apple Music instead. 3
2. “Remind me when I get home to…“
1. “Track…”
Siri & Apple Shortcuts is my main mechanism for getting data into my Data Journal. This alone is hugely valuable to me.
Quote:
It’s long. Which means “fell down tall”. - My 5 year old
Perhaps unsurprisingly “chungus mungus” wasn’t right. - a rare self-quote here
Wait you’re saying a guy offering no basketball strategy on the sideline but yelling seemingly motivational things at his team of adults who don’t listen to him is not an effective strategy? - Eric
Footnotes
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I hesitated to jump into using AI for things, fearing I’d grow dependent on a tool that could be rug-pulled from under me (looking at you, Google). Learning how to self-host my own instances of LLMs has largely removed this fear. I know I’ll always have access to something at least decently capable, so I’m okay starting to incorporate LLMs into my core toolchain. ↩
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or can’t ↩
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now it is a real shame that Siri & Spotify can’t seem to get along for reasons they mutually blame on each other. ↩