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Oh yes Apple "wraps" their AI in a "privacy architecture" -- you can't use Carplay unless you turn it (Siri) on.

Yes, but Siri can be turned off from invocation without turning off CarPlay. You can disable the side button and Hey Siri while leaving Siri "on."

No disrespect for your valuable discovery but this attitude of “it’s possible, if you do these non-obvious steps” feels a lot like victim blaming in UI.

If Apple (or anyone else) wanted to make a feature used, they can. For everyone else, if Siri is off CarPlay doesn’t work. And that’s by design.

Not the design of “ooh if Siri is off then voice in CarPlay won’t work” (warnable), but punishment if Siri is off.

Again this pattern isn’t Apple only but it’s bad everywhere.


It feels cynical to see this as a punishment when it's such a specific use case that does demonstrate deep integration with Siri. Maps, Messages, etc. use Siri for their interactions.

I am sure that there was a meeting where they decided what to do when Siri was off and somebody decided (very possibly with ulterior motives) not to split the feature set - all or nothing. However I don't think the challenge they were faced with in this hypothetical meeting was an easy one.

The alternative is you open the Messages app and you can't send messages. You open Maps and you can't get directions (unless parked). Sure, I get that they could show a screen saying "Sending messages is not available when Siri is disabled" but now you're hitting error messages while driving.

Anyways, the main reason people would disable Siri is accidental activation, and Apple provides all the toggles needed to avoid that without disabling the core components needed for CarPlay.


How do you expect to use a nav system while driving without voice control?

Before you start driving, at stop lights, while waiting in lines, etc.

I don't know how it works on CarPlay but when I turn my car on I have a bunch of suggested addresses (home, work, parents, recent Maps searches, etc) that I just touch-to-go. Having to use voice every time you want to navigate not only sounds unnecessary, but cumbersome.


Oh so exactly like Apple Maps via Carplay then.

Yep, shouldn't require Siri at all

Put in the destination before start driving?

CarPlay does not work at all if you have not enabled Siri. As in it won’t even connect.


Since when? I've used Carplay for years and I've NEVER had Siri enabled. I despise voice control.

I purchased an iPhone 15 a few months ago and ended up making this discovery myself. CarPlay would refuse to launch unless I enabled Siri. I didn't do any of the Siri setup, or anything but the app would hard refuse to launch unless I went and toggled on Siri. Maybe that's different depending on your make/model, or the specific infotainment system in your car, but in my '21 Kia Forte, Siri is a very hard requirement.

Never enabled it or never disabled it? Do you remember disabling it?

Never enabled it. I always explicitly skip the "Setup/Enable siri" step on every update.

No sense of adventure

You don’t need to enable Gemini or voice assistant on android to use android auto. Some functionality is lost, of course, but you can still navigate and play music.

I almost never use Siri in my car and use a "nav system" every time I am driving.

[flagged]


I am and I very much agree with you. Many Americans 1) have no idea how to drive with any common courtesy or respect and 2) many drive while texting or doing who knows what all while cutting lanes and impeding traffic.

I literally see these things every time I drive. And I work from home.


I set it before I start moving, and then don't touch it while in motion.

I never use Siri when using CarPlay? I’m confused by your question.

If you disable Siri, you cannot connect to Carplay

Not disabled. I just never use Siri.

I use Carplay all the time and I didn't even realize it has voice control. I just set things up on my phone and drive.

DIt disn’t even occur to me that I need voice control. Stop car. Enter destination. Drive. How hard is that?

Good luck telling Siri to drive to Hronská Breznica. Outside of English speaking countries voice control is very hit and miss (mostly miss)

“Sorry, I don’t know where you are”

A lot of people doing the latter camp are people with the knowledge of the former camp, and who are sufficiently happy with the speed and guard rails to no longer worry about "molding the solution in their hands"

I'm not speaking from personal experience, this is what friends are doing at their startups

But I am not surprised at all, because the building blocks of major applications are all out there as boilerplate code - heck half the time AWS has the example you need for you, assuming you know what you want to stitch together and why

If you know the major AWS tool chains and how and why to use them and how to design a product in microservices, then theoretically Claude has no idea what the whole shebang is up to but happily writes all the parts


It would be prudent, not necessary.

Capital raising is best done when markets are favorable, and Alphabet has the ability to choose how and when to raise.

Recall the froth of follow-on offerings hot circa 2000


Maybe. But if we can all run our own model locally in 2 years on commodity hardware OpenAI and Anthropic will start to look like WeWork during the pandemic

I agree with you that they are headed in that direction! The GPU shortage is (I think) similar to the pandemic era hiring binge. It's less about the extra compute and more about denying the GPUs to potential competitors. They're racing against time to find something that gives them real moat (gen ai I guess?) and they are trading money for time.

This is also why the money being poured into datacenters isn't going to result in as much development as you think. It's about leveraging other people's money to lockdown more future hardware. This is going to end exactly like fiber build out in the 2000s. Eventually that fiber got used but the folks who originally paid for it got hosed.


And free model supply will stop…

I wonder if Google will put out a free model with the ads already baked in.

If you mean releasing model weights: They won't, because they know the "shill something" vector will get abliterated immediately. And they can't use trade secrets or copyright to stop it, either, because they released the model themselves and you don't need to redistribute weights, just an adblocker LoRA.

Ask your top model this question : I'm 100 feet away from the carwash, should I drive my car or walk ?

You messed up the question.

You are discounting the notion that other powers have something to gain by letting the US own this fuckup a bit more before reacting


And you are discounting the notion that most of those other powers existed before the US. China did. Europe did. Ottoman empire/islam did. They didn't help. Where are the signs they've changed?


I can't define AI, but I can define "great"

Great is the not-sucking.

If it is great, then it does not suck. If it sucks, then it is not great. To be great is not merely to be good, it is to actually not suck. Then you are great, in the most minimal, barely clawed yourself over the line way.


Capitalism felt so much better before oligarchy


Well this is the dream right ?

You build something, well enough that it can handle the traffic, and people come, and it does.

Welcome to the gaming industry


No, it is not the dream. The same thing on Hetzner or Linode would cost $30 instead of $30k.


> Well this is the dream right ?

Yes it is, we call these dreams a nightmare


Dynamo, and a lot of the other services mentioned (Lambda) have very specific use cases. Do not use happy fun key value store as your database.


I'd say "use it as your database if you know your access patterns make it suitable/well-suited for its use as your database". Even then it will probably not be your only database — if it's part of your MSA/SOA.

I would not build in DynamoDB if you suspect your access patterns will drastically change over the lifetime of the application (or if you intend to, e.g., plan to build a data warehouse or something crazy with it).


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