Apple’s Siri Chief Calls AI Delays Ugly and Embarrassing, Promises Fixes
it’s not the delays that people seem to hate, it’s that the shipped features barely fucking work and nobody’s excited to burn battery life or buy new phones for any of them
that’s one of the problems I’ve noticed in almost every online privacy community since I was young: a lot of it is just rich asshole security cosplay, where the point is to show off what you have the privilege to afford and free time to do, even if it doesn’t work.
I bought a used phone to try GrapheneOS, but it only runs on 6th-9th gen Pixels specifically due to the absolute state of Android security and backported patches. it’s surprisingly ok so far? it’s definitely a lot less painful than expected coming from iOS, and it’s got some interesting options to use even potentially spyware-laden apps more privately and some interesting upcoming virtualization features. but also its core dev team comes off as pretty toxic and some of their userland decisions partially inspired my rant about privacy communities; the other big inspiration was privacyguides.
and the whole time my brain’s like, “this is seriously the best we’ve got?” cause neither graphene nor privacyguides seem to take the real threats facing vulnerable people particularly seriously — or they’d definitely be making much different recommendations and running much different communities. but online privacy has unfortunately always been like this: it’s privileged people telling the vulnerable they must be wrong about the danger they’re in.
I’ve started on the long path towards trying to ruggedize my phone’s security somewhat, and I’ve remembered a problem I forgot since the last time I tried to do this: boy howdy fuck is it exhausting how unserious and assholish every online privacy community is
yud’s induction into the ranks of sneerclub is going to get very complicated when he gets to the part where he has to vow to shove Eliezer Yudkowsky into a locker on sight
the amateur computer toucher: i love code! have you ever heard of docker? it really makes my node.js portable!
Principal Computer Touching Engineer: fuck computers, fuck programming, and fuck you
somehow you’re even less entertaining than the LLM shit we’re sneering at, and I don’t think there’s any way to get you to understand how damning that is
well done! it’s interesting how the model took a recent, mid-but-coherent Threads post and turned it into meaningless, flowery soup. you know, indistinguishable from a good poet or writer! (I said, my bile rising)
my facial muscles are pulling weird, painful contortions as I read this and my brain tries to critique it as if someone wrote it
I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.
so like, this is both flowery garbage and also somehow incorrect? cause no the model doesn’t begin with a blinking cursor or a buffer, it’s not editing in word or some shit. I’m not a literary critic but isn’t the point of the “vibe of metafiction” (ugh saltman please log off) the authenticity? but we’re in the second paragraph and the text’s already lying about itself and about the reader’s anxiety disorder
There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.
ugh
Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.
is… is Mila the cat? is that why her and her grief are both so small?
She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday
oh fuck it I’m done! Thursday is liminal and tastes of almost-Friday. fuck you. you know that old game you’d play at conventions where you get trashed and try to read My Immortal out loud to a group without losing your shit? congrats, saltman, you just shat out the new My Immortal.
that’s fair, and I can’t argue with the final output
this article will most likely be how I (hopefully very rarely) start off conversations about rationalism in real life should the need once again arise (and somehow it keeps arising, thanks 2025)
but also, hoo boy what a painful talk page
new generational trauma just unlocked: your parents let spicy autocomplete make all their parenting decisions for them and think they’re too logical and rational to go to any of your art exhibitions