In the early 1980s I read an Usbourne (sp?) introduction to programming book for kids that had a picture of a robot walking through a brick wall while following its programming to ‘take a letter to the letterbox’.
At this rate, it looks like we’ll solve that problem by not having letters/letterboxes.
Funnily enough, leather tanners and pee is where the terms "piss poor" (being so poor that you need to sell your pee to tanners for cash) and "doesn't have a pot to piss in" (can't even afford a thing to hold your pee to bring to tanners) came from.
The nitrogen cycle can be short-circuited really easily at scale.
No need to wait for algal blooms to turn into oil.
Its usage in tanning is pretty wasteful in comparison as it was just used for its high pH and presumably thrown away afterwards.
Getting only the urea-rich golden liquid might require some coöperation like back in the day, but it is idiotic to synthesize ammonia from oil without recycling the vast amounts we have in our bladders; a mistake we have been committing for the past 100 years.
Polymarket and Kalshi have just been declared gambling under New Zealand law, and therefore 'investing' in them is now illegal for New Zealanders. Both companies have been ordered to stop providing services to New Zealanders [0]
Australia's 'full' name is the Commonwealth of Australia. Don't think anyone uses it outside of the region, though, much like no one calls Mexico the 'United Mexican States'.
If a weather app had access to your photos in real time (I know - stay with me here) it could deduce the local weather from what it can see in the sky in your photos, essentially crowd sourcing real-time weather updates with no effort from users.
A drip or stream from a leaky pipe isn't gonna do it. You need to get the bacteria into the respiratory tract to get legionaires disease. And even then a specific temperature water is necessary for it to grow.
A dehumidifier (or an HVAC system, which is where the name of the disease came from) is more likely to give you legionnaires disease than even the most substandard plumbing.
I don’t know about other countries, but in New Zealand there’s already recycling of leftover bits of drywall (we call it ‘gib board’ after a brand name). All the big building companies will accept leftover bits of gib board, but small bits can be thrown directly in your garden beds to help break up clay.
1Blocker for iOS and macOS (and other fruit devices?) has comment blocking. Sites can be whitelisted if you deem the comments to be of high enough quality.
Given the way current LLMs hallucinate, and given that Apple (presumably) won’t accept this behaviour in Siri, I’m skeptical that existing technology (or existing technology scaled up) can ever create the Siri Apple and its customers want.
I'll settle for "gets voice to text right most of the time". Seriously, Apple is so far behind on the cheapest table stakes at this point I highly doubt their high standards is the issue.
Oh absolutely. The amount of times I have to pause, take a deep breathe and OVER-enunciate (still with mixed success) because my voice, pulse rise and my patience decreases with every absolute butchering (like not even "close but no cigar" but "how on earth did you come up with that?") Siri does to dictated text message in CarPlay...
I don’t even bother anymore. When it reads back the text message and asks if I want to send it I just laugh heartily and say yeah. Sometimes the recipient has to read it aloud and try to phonetically guess what the original words were.
Yeah, but isn't the voice recognition (as opposed to voice comprehension) separate from the supposedly LLM powered bit of Siri? I want better voice comprehension too, but I don't think that moving to a LLM powered Siri will solve that.
I agree with the other poster and gladly converted to a paying customer of Wispr because they did this right.
Honestly, I bet your question is exactly what every team adjacent to this problem at Apple is doing. Pointing fingers at each other and saying, "This isn't my problem. This is some other team." It's so egregiously broken that obviously no one inside there considers it their problem. I think this must be rampant at Apple currently. There's just no explanation for how their software has gone so completely to shit over the last ten years.
Literally what's the difference between that and Siri now.
Siri can't understand or pronounce very well.
A few weeks ago Siri via Car Play responded to a text and sent it without me saying a word or radio on, and with the setting where it asks first before sending enabled. It responding "Why?" to a serious text was seriously inconvenient in the moment. I watched it happen in disbelief.
(Edit: Didn't see your last paragraph before writing the response below)
I think there is a distinction between Siri misunderstanding what was said (which you can see/hear), and Siri understanding what you said but hallucinating an answer. In both cases, you strictly have to check the result, but in the first case it's clear that you've been misunderstood.
The Siri experience just really really really sucks for the year being 2026. So much more frustrating than the claude and chatgpt experiences I have had in recent months.
To my Apple Watch: "Hey Siri, tell me what the time is in the central time zone right now"
"I found this on the web", watch shows a link to time.gov
The only thing I find Siri useful for is: a voice-activated timer, handy in the kitchen when my hands are full and I am juggling multiple timed process. It does that well about 80% of the time.
I don't think that's at all a safe presumption, given that AI still happily hallucinates summaries of text messages/email that is contradictory to that actual content of the message.
I remember being told that many of the spelling/grammar mistakes in (English) menus for ethnic restaurants were deliberate to make the (English native speaking) customers feel superior.
(Also not saying I believe this at all, just relating an anecdote).
At this rate, it looks like we’ll solve that problem by not having letters/letterboxes.
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