Ah, brilliant plan. Before governments there were no homeless. Maybe now we can have a for-profit corporation take care of homeless services to really squeeze all the efficiency out of the system. Just like they did for the prisons.
And that’s ok. Those are core features of the phone that absolutely must work reliably and consistently. Far better to do a few important things really well than a hundred things execrably.
However the other day I asked the Gemini assistant on my phone to check the birthdays in my calendar, get all their dates, then make a graph of how many fall in each period with a 15-day moving average. It did everything as instructed including writing a python script to generate the graph, then discussed the results with me :)
I would expect Siri to be able to do anything on the iPhone that I can - change settings, report stats, kill/launch apps, etc.
It would be nice if it could control 3rd party apps too, like GMail, but being able to control the stuff that Apple themselves have built doesn't seem a lot to ask.
Apple is somewhat privacy focused, allegedly. I would imagine that letting an unpredictable LLM read whatever system data it wants is not something they want to partake in.
Maybe there are different concerns now that Apple are apparently going to be using Google LLMs for Siri, although I'd have thought that any access to system settings or other iOS functionality would be via tool calls with user opt-in.
However, the original Siri, obtained from SRI ("Siri" = SRI) was pre-LLMs, and there should have been no more concern over accessing system settings or controlling apps than things like reading/sending messages. For some reason Apply completely dropped the ball with Siri; initially it was expected that they would expand it into revenue generating areas like restaurant reservations etc, but then nothing. I'm not sure what documentation exists, but even today it's not clear what Siri is actually capable of.
This seems like a lot of work. I just point my router at AdGuard DNS and that takes care of all ads on every device on my network. No filter lists, nothing to host, completely free.
Only caveat is it doesn’t block ads served by the content provider itself e.g. some streaming services, but from what I hear those are difficult to block with any approach.
I had never thought about the puzzle-piece solution to the 2D digestive tract problem before. That’s amazing! Maybe being 2D wouldn’t be so bad after all.
How did this make it to the top of HN? It’s an extremely facile work and reads exactly like a high school essay: “In having his character consider execution to protect his and his family’s reputation, Doyle explored the societal expectations of Victorian masculinity and how men struggled with such pressures.”
It’s an interesting topic, but the paper makes no revelatory statements and provides a very superficial analysis of Doyle’s work. Hell, it doesn’t even provide a single quote from Holmes to illustrate the mental anguish or “battles with drug addiction” which the author claims that he experiences in the books. Holmes’ 7% “solution of cocaine” usage was never presented as rising to the level of addiction in the books, by the way. Nor does the paper delve into the repressive nature of the Victorian society in which these stories were written and released to show us what was so novel about Doyle allegedly tackling these subjects and why he might have had to merely allude to them rather than discussing them frankly.
All in all, this essay is a poor showing and would have earned the author a C at best in high school English for failing to provide adequate supporting evidence for her assertions.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of those who upvoted this did so because the agree with the sentiment in principle, not because they read the article and appreciated the contents.
Perhaps it made it to the top of HN because there are a lot of Sherlock Holmes fans here who are curious about some of the nuances of the character not often cited. That the article itself may be lacking in specifics may not be a problem if it has at least whetted the curiosity of a number of us. (And we can then seek out more details, or better still, read the whole series of books with a keener eye.)
If HNer's want to talk about something, or just feel the topic is important, then a short & weak article is more than good enough to be a sort of seed crystal.
(If you know of better articles on this topic, then please provide links!)
Yes, i thought it was silly as well. revisionist analysis such as these are pretty common, though normally better written. You can probably find half a dozen essays with titles like "Sherlock holmes fought against colonial oppression, a deep dive in how Conan doyle covered unpopular and controversial topics in the victorian age". And another 50 essays arguing the opposite point.
> It’s an extremely facile work and reads exactly like a high school essay: “In having his character consider execution to protect his and his family’s reputation, Doyle explored the societal expectations of Victorian masculinity and how men struggled with such pressures.”
Not to mention that that the character in this particular story is not actually struggling with debt, he simply discovers, somewhat incredibly, whilst researching for a newspaper story, that he can earn far more money begging than in his job as a reporter. There simply is no pressure, he just lacks integrity.
Harlan Ellison also referred to “slidewalks”. They form a major plot point in “Repent, Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman”, in which the Harlequin at one point dumps millions of jellybeans on the slidewalk, jamming it and making workers late for their shift.
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