Another Bad Apple? Is It This Shipment or a Degraded Orchard?
February 3, 2025
Yep, a dinobaby wrote this blog post. Replace me with a subscription service or a contract worker from Fiverr. See if I care.
I read “Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber.” Now Siri someone told me had some tenuous connection to the Stanford Research Institute. Then the name and possibly some technology DNA wafted to Cupertino. The juicy apple sauce company produced smart software. Someone demonstrated it to me by asking Siri to call a person named “Yankelovich” by saying the name. That just did not work.
The write up explains that my experience was “dumb” and the new Apple smart software is dumber. That is remarkable. A big company and a number of mostly useful products like the estimable science fiction headset and a system demanding that I log into Facetime, iMessage, and iCloud every time I use the computer even though I don’t use these features is mostly perceived as one of the greatest companies on earth.
The write up says:
It’s just incredible how stupid Siri is about a subject matter of such popularity.
Stupid about a popular subject? Even the even more estimable Google figured out a long time ago that one could type just about any spelling of Britney Spears into the search box and the Google would spit out a nifty but superficial report about this famous person and role model for young people.
But Apple? The write up says from a really, truly objective observer of Apple:
New Siri — powered by Apple Intelligence™ with ChatGPT integration enabled — gets the answer completely but plausibly wrong, which is the worst way to get it wrong. It’s also inconsistently wrong — I tried the same question four times, and got a different answer, all of them wrong, each time. It’s a complete failure.
The write up points out:
It’s like Siri is a special-ed student permitted to take an exam with the help of a tutor who knows the correct answers, and still flunks.
Hmmm. Consistently wrong with variations of incorrectness — Do you want to log in to iCloud?
But the killer statement in the write up in my opinion is this one:
Misery loves company they say, so perhaps Apple should, as they’ve hinted since WWDC last June, partner with Google to add Gemini as another “world knowledge” partner to power — or is it weaken? — Apple Intelligence.
Several observations are warranted even though I don’t use Apple mobile devices, but I do like the ruggedness of the Mac Air laptops. (No, I don’t want to log into Apple Media Services or Facetime, thanks.) Here we go with my perceptions:
- Skip the Sam AI-Man stuff, the really macho Zuck stuff, and the Sundar & Prabhakar stuff. Go with Deepseek. (Someone in Beijing will think positively about the iPhone. Maybe?)
- Face up to the fact that Apple does reasonably good marketing. Those M1, M2, M3 chips in more flavors than the once-yummy Baskin-Robbins offered are easy for consumers to gobble up.
- Innovation is not just marketing. The company has to make what its marketers describe in words. That leap is not working in my opinion.
So where does that leave the write up, the Siri thing, and me? Free to select another vendor and consider shorting Apple stock. The orchard is dropping fruit not fit for human consumption but a few can be converted to apple sauce. That’s a potential business. AI slop, not so much.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2025
A Failure Retrospective
February 3, 2025
Every year has tech failures, some of them will join the zeitgeist as cultural phenomenons like Windows Vista, Windows Me, Apple’s Pippin game console, chatbots, etc. PC Mag runs down the flops in: “Yikes: Breaking Down the 10 Biggest Tech Fails of 2024.” The list starts with Intel’s horrible year with its booted CEO, poor chip performance. It follows up with the Salt Typhoon hack that proved (not that we didn’t already know it with TikTok) China is spying on every US citizen with a focus on bigwigs.
National Public Data lost 272 million social security numbers to a hacker. That was a great day in summer for hacker, but the summer travel season became a nightmare when a CrowdStrike faulty kernel update grounded over 2700 flights and practically locked down the US borders. Microsoft’s Recall, an AI search tool that took snapshots of user activity that could be recalled later was a concern. What if passwords and other sensitive information were recorded?
The fabulous Internet Archive was hacked and taken down by a bad actor to protest the Israel-Gaza conflict. It makes us worry about preserving Internet and other important media history. Rabbit and Humane released AI-powered hardware that was supposed to be a hands free way to use a digital assistant, but they failed. JuiceBox ended software support on its EV car chargers, while Scarlett Johansson’s voice was stolen by OpenAI for its Voice Mode feature. She sued.
The worst of the worst is this:
“Days after he announced plans to acquire Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk argued that the platform needed to be “politically neutral” in order for it to “deserve public trust.” This approach, he said, “effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” In March 2024, he also pledged to not donate to either US presidential candidate, but by July, he’d changed his tune dramatically, swapping neutrality for MAGA hats. “If we want to preserve freedom and a meritocracy in America, then Trump must win,” Musk tweeted in September. He seized the @America X handle to promote Trump, donated millions to his campaign, shared doctored and misleading clips of VP Kamala Harris, and is now working closely with the president-elect on an effort to cut government spending, which is most certainly a conflict of interest given his government contracts. Some have even suggested that he become Speaker of the House since you don’t have to be a member of Congress to hold that position. The shift sent many X users to alternatives like BlueSky, Threads, and Mastodon in the days after the US election.”
It doesn’t matter what Musk’s political beliefs are. He has no right to participate in politics.
Whitney Grace, February 3, 2025
AI Smart, Humans Dumb When It Comes to Circuits
February 3, 2025
Anyone who knows much about machine learning knows we don’t really understand how AI comes to its conclusions. Nevertheless, computer scientists find algorithms do some things quite nicely. For example, ZME Science reports, "AI Designs Computer Chips We Can’t Understand—But They Work Really Well." A team from Princeton University and IIT Madras decided to flip the process of chip design. Traditionally, human engineers modify existing patterns to achieve desired results. The task is difficult and time-consuming. Instead, these researchers fed their AI the end requirements and told it to take it from there. They call this an "inverse design" method. The team says the resulting chips work great! They just don’t really know how or why. Writer Mihai Andrei explains:
"Whereas the previous method was bottom-up, the new approach is top-down. You start by thinking about what kind of properties you want and then figure out how you can do it. The researchers trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) — a type of AI model — to understand the complex relationship between a circuit’s geometry and its electromagnetic behavior. These models can predict how a proposed design will perform, often operating on a completely different type of design than what we’re used to. … Perhaps the most exciting part is the new types of designs it came up with."
Yes, exciting. That is one word for it. Lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta notes:
"’We are coming up with structures that are complex and look randomly shaped, and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance,’ says Sengupta. The designs were unintuitive and very different than those made by the human mind. Yet, they frequently offered significant improvements."
But at what cost? We may never know. It is bad enough that health care systems already use opaque algorithms, with all their flaws, to render life-and-death decisions. Just wait until these chips we cannot understand underpin those calculations. New world, new trade-offs for a world with dumb humans.
Cynthia Murrell, February 3, 2025
Two Rules for Software. All Software If You Can Believe It
January 31, 2025
Did you know that there are two rules that dictate how all software is written? No, we didn’t either. FJ van Wingerde from the Ask The User blog states and explains what the rules are in his post: “The Two Rules Of Software Creation From Which Every Problem Derives.” After a bunch of jib jab about the failures of different codes, Wingerde states the questions:
“It’s the two rules that actually are behind every statement in the agile manifesto. The manifesto unfortunately doesn’t name them really; the people behind it were so steeped in the problems of software delivery—and what they thought would fix it—that they posited their statements without saying why each of these things are necessary to deliver good software. (Unfortunately, necessary but not enough for success, but that we found out in the next decades.) They are [1] Humans cannot accurately describe what they want out of a software system until it exists. and [2] Humans cannot accurately predict how long any software effort will take beyond four weeks. And after 2 weeks it is already dicey.”
The first rule is a true statement for all human activities, except the inability to accurately describe the problem. That may be true for software, however. Humans know they have a problem, but they don’t have a solution to fix. The smart humans figure out how to solve the problem and learn how to describe it with greater accuracy.
As for number two, is project management and weekly maintenance on software all a lucky guess then? Unless effort changes daily and that justifies paying software developers. Then again, someone needs to keep the systems running. Tech people are what keep businesses running, not to mention the entire world.
If software development only has these two rules, we now know why why developers cannot provide time estimates or provide assurances that their software works as leadership trained as accountants and lawyers expect. Rest easy. Software is hopefully good enough and advertising can cover the costs.
Whitney Grace, January 31, 2025
Ah, the Warmth of the Old, Friendly Internet. For Real?
January 30, 2025
I never thought I’d be looking back at the Internet of yesteryear nostalgically. I hated the sound of dial-up and the instant messaging sounds were annoying. Also AOL had the knack of clogging up machines with browsing history making everything slow. Did I mention YouTube wasn’t around? There are somethings that were better in the past, including parts of the Internet, but not all of it.
We also like to think that the Internet was “safer” and didn’t have predatory content. Wrong! Since the Internet’s inception, parents were worried about their children being the victims of online predators. Back then it was easier to remain anonymous, however. El País agrees that the Internet was just as bad as it is today: “‘The internet Hasn’t Made Us Bad, We Were Already Like That’: The Mistake Of Yearning For The ‘Friendly’ Online World Of 20 Years Ago."
It’s strange to see artists using Y2K era technology as art pieces and throwbacks. It’s a big eye-opener to aging Millennials, but it also places these items on par with the nostalgia of all past eras. All generations love the stuff from their youth and proclaim it to be superior. As the current youth culture and even those middle-aged are obsessed with retro gear, a new slang term has arisen: “cozy tech.”
“‘Cozy tech’ is the label that groups together content about users sipping from a steaming cup, browsing leisurely or playing nice, simple video games on devices with smooth, ergonomic designs. It’s a more powerful image than it seems because it conveys something we lost at some point in the last decade: a sense of control; the idea that it is possible to enjoy technology in peace again.”
They’re conflating the idea with reading a good book or listening to music on a record player. These “cozy tech” people are forgetting about the dangers of chatrooms or posting too much information on the Internet. Dare we bring up Omegle without drifting down channels of pornography?
Check out this statement:
“Mayte Gómez concludes: “We must stop this reactionary thinking and this fear of technology that arises from the idea that the internet has made us bad. That is not true: we were already like that. If the internet is unfriendly it is because we are becoming less so. We cannot perpetuate the idea that machines are entities with a will of their own; we must take responsibility for what happens on the internet.”
Sorry, Mayte, I disagree. Humans have always been unfriendly. We now have a better record of it.
Whitney Grace, January 30, 2025
Sonus, What Is That Painful Sound I Hear?
January 21, 2025
Sonos CEO Swap: Are Tech Products Only As Good As Their Apps?
Lawyers and accountants leading tech firms, please, take note: The apps customers use to manage your products actually matter. Engadget reports, “Sonos CEO Patrick Spence Falls on his Sword After Horrible App Launch.” Reporter Lawrence Bonk writes:
“Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is stepping down from the company after eight years on the job, according to reporting by Bloomberg. This follows last year’s disastrous app launch, in which a redesign was missing core features and was broken in nearly every major way. The company has tasked Tom Conrad to steer the ship as interim CEO. Conrad is a current member of the Sonos board, but was a co-founder of Pandora, VP at Snap and product chief at, wait for it, the short-lived video streaming platform Quibi. He also reportedly has a Sonos tattoo. The board has hired a firm to find a new long-term leader.”
Conrad told employees that “we” let people down with the terrible app. And no wonder. Bonk explains:
“The decision to swap leadership comes after months of turmoil at the company. It rolled out a mobile app back in May that was absolutely rife with bugs and missing key features like alarms and sleep timers. Some customers even complained that entire speaker systems would no longer work after updating to the new app. It was a whole thing.”
Indeed. And despite efforts to rekindle customer trust, the company is paying the price of its blunder. Its stock price has fallen about 13 percent, revenue tanked 16 percent in the fiscal fourth quarter, and it has laid off more than 100 workers since August. Chief Product Officer Patrick Spence is also leaving the firm. Will the CEO swap help Sonos recover? As he takes the helm, Conrad vows a return to basics. At the same time, he wants to expand Sonos’ products. Interesting combination. Meanwhile, the search continues for a more permanent replacement.
Cynthia Murrell, January 21, 2025
AI Doom: Really Smart Software Is Coming So Start Being Afraid, People
January 20, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
The essay “Prophecies of the Flood” gathers several comments about software that thinks and decides without any humans fiddling around. The “flood” metaphor evokes the streams of money about which money people fantasize. The word “flood” evokes the Hebrew Biblical idea’s presentation of a divinely initiated cataclysm intended to cleanse the Earth of widespread wickedness. Plus, one cannot overlook the image of small towns in North Carolina inundated in mud and debris from a very bad storm.
When the AI flood strikes as a form of divine retribution, will the modern arc be filled with humans? Nope. The survivors will be those smart agents infused with even smarter software. Tough luck, humanoids. Thanks, OpenAI, I knew you could deliver art that is good enough.
To sum up: A flood is bad news, people.
The essay states:
the researchers and engineers inside AI labs appear genuinely convinced they’re witnessing the emergence of something unprecedented. Their certainty alone wouldn’t matter – except that increasingly public benchmarks and demonstrations are beginning to hint at why they might believe we’re approaching a fundamental shift in AI capabilities. The water, as it were, seems to be rising faster than expected.
The signs of darkness, according to the essay, include:
- Rising water in the generally predictable technology stream in the park populated with ducks
- Agents that “do” something for the human user or another smart software system. To humans with MBAs, art history degrees, and programming skills honed at a boot camp, the smart software is magical. Merlin wears a gray T shirt, sneakers, and faded denims
- Nifty art output in the form of images and — gasp! — videos.
The essay concludes:
The flood of intelligence that may be coming isn’t inherently good or bad – but how we prepare for it, how we adapt to it, and most importantly, how we choose to use it, will determine whether it becomes a force for progress or disruption. The time to start having these conversations isn’t after the water starts rising – it’s now.
Let’s assume that I buy this analysis and agree with the notion “prepare now.” How realistic is it that the United Nations, a couple of super powers, or a motivated individual can have an impact? Gentle reader, doom sells. Examples include The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, The Shifts and Shocks: What We’ve Learned – and Have Still to Learn – from the Financial Crisis, and Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis – and Themselves, and others, many others.
Have these dissections of problems had a material effect on regulators, elected officials, or the people in the bank down the street from your residence? Answer: Nope.
Several observations:
- Technology doom works because innovations have positive and negative impacts. To make technology exciting, no one is exactly sure what the knock on effects will be. Therefore, doom is coming along with the good parts
- Taking a contrary point of view creates opportunities to engage with those who want to hear something different. Insecurity is a powerful sales tool.
- Sending messages about future impacts pulls clicks. Clicks are important.
Net net: The AI revolution is a trope. Never mind that after decades of researchers’ work, a revolution has arrived. Lionel Messi allegedly said, “It took me 17 years to become an overnight success.” (Mr. Messi is a highly regarded professional soccer player.)
Will the ill-defined technology kill humans? Answer: Who knows. Will humans using ill-defined technology like smart software kill humans? Answer: Absolutely. Can “anyone” or “anything” take an action to prevent AI technology from rippling through society. Answer: Nope.
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2025
IBM Tells Google, Mine Is Bigger! But Can the Kookaburra Eat the Reptile Googzilla?
January 17, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
The “who has the biggest nose” contest is in gear for 2025. I read “IBM Will Release the Largest Ever Quantum Computer in 2025.” Forget the Nvidia wizard’s pushing usable quantum computing into the far future. Forget the Intel Horse Features — sorry, horse collar — statements. Forget the challenge of making a programming language which makes it possible to create an application for a Oura smart ring. Bigger is where it is at in the quantum marketing world.
The write up reports with the repeatability of most research projects:
… The company’s largest quantum chip, called Condor, has 1121 qubits, though IBM’s Jay Gambetta says the average user of its quantum computing services only works with 100 qubits… The only way to get quantum advantage is to combine different components.” This is an issue of engineering as much as it is of quantum physics – as the number of qubits increases it becomes more practically difficult to fit all of them and the quantum computer’s input and output wires onto a single chip.
So what is IBM doing? Bolting stuff together, thank you very much.
But IBM is thinking beyond the Condor. The next innovation from IBM is Kookaburra. (This is a bird whose call is the sound of human laughter. I must come clean. When I read about this quantum achievement from IBM I did laugh. When I learned that chip’s name, I chuckled again. To be fair, I laughed more whenever I encountered the cognitive whiz kid Watson. But Kookaburra is hoot, especially for those who grew up in Australia or New Guinea.)
The write up says:
The task now is to increase that total number while making sure the qubits don’t make more errors than when the chips are kept separate.
Yep, bolting stuff together works great.
I am eagerly awaiting Google’s response because it perceives itself an quantumly supreme. I think when I laugh at the content marketing these big technology outfits output, I sound like a Kookaburra. (Did you know that a Kookaburra can weigh up to a half a pound plus they are carnivorous. This was an attribute when IBM was a much more significant player in the computer market. Kookaburras eat mice and snakes. Yeah, the Kookaburra.
Stephen E Arnold, January 17, 2025
Beating on Quantum: Thump, Clang
January 13, 2025
A dinobaby produced this post. Sorry. No smart software was able to help the 80 year old this time around.
The is it new or is it PR service Benzinga published on January 13, 2025, “Quantum Computing Stocks Tumble after Mark Zuckerberg Backs Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Practical Comments.” I love the “practical.” Quantum computing is similar to the modular home nuclear reactor from my point of view. These are interesting topics to discuss, but when it comes to convincing a home owners’ association to allow the installation of a modular nuclear reactor or squeezing the gizmos required to make quantum computing sort of go in a relatively reliable way, un uh.
Is this a practical point of view? No. The reason is that most people have zero idea of what is required to get a quantum computer or a quantum anything to work. The room for the demonstration is usually a stage set. The cooling, the electronics, and the assorted support equipment is — how shall I phrase it — bulky. That generator outside the quantum lab is not for handling a power outage. The trailer-sized box is pumping volts into the quantum set up.
The write up explains:
comments made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang, who both expressed caution regarding the timeline for quantum computing advancements.
Caution. Good word.
The remarks by Zuckerberg and Huang have intensified concerns about the future of quantum computing. Earlier, during Nvidia’s analyst day, Huang expressed optimism about quantum computing’s potential but cautioned that practical applications might take 15 to 30 years to materialize. This outlook has led to a sharp decline in quantum computing stocks. Despite the cautious projections, some industry insiders have countered Huang’s views, arguing that quantum-based innovations are already being integrated into the tech ecosystem. Retail investors have shown optimism, with several quantum computing stocks experiencing significant growth in recent weeks.
I know of a person who lectures about quantum. I have heard that the theme of these presentations is that quantum computing is just around the corner. Okay. Google is quantumly supreme. Intel has its super technology called Horse Ridge or Horse Features. IBM makes quantum squeaks.
I want research to continue, but it is interesting to me that two big technology wizards want to talk about practical quantum computing. One does the social media thing unencumbered by expensive content moderation and the other is pushing smart software enabling technology forward.
Neither wants the quantum hype to supersede the marketing of either of these wizards’ money machines. I love “real news”, particularly when it presents itself as practical. May I suggest you place your order for a D-Wave or an Enron egg nuclear reactor. Practical.
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2025
The Brain Rot Thing: The 78 Wax Record Is Stuck Again
January 10, 2025
This is an official dinobaby post.
I read again about brain rot. I get it. Young kids play with a mobile phone. They get into social media. They watch TikTok. The discover the rich, rewarding world of Telegram online gambling. These folks don’t care about reading. Period. I get it.
But the Financial Times wants me to really get it. “Social Media, Brain Rot and the Slow Death of Reading” says:
Social media is designed to hijack our attention with stimulation and validation in a way that makes it hard for the technology of the page to compete.
This is news? Well, what about this statement:
The easy dopamine hit of social media can make reading feel more effortful by comparison. But the rewards are worth the extra effort: regular readers report higher wellbeing and life satisfaction, benefiting from improved sleep, focus, connection and creativity. While just six minutes of reading has been shown to reduce stress levels by two-thirds, deep reading offers additional cognitive rewards of critical thinking, empathy and self-reflection.
Okay, now tell that to the people in line at the grocery store or the kids in a high school class. Guess what? The joy of reading is not part of the warp and woof of 2025 life.
The news flash is that traditional media like the Financial Times long for the time when everyone read. Excuse me. When was that time? People read in school so they can get out of school and not read. Books still sell, but the avid readers are becoming dinobabies. Most of the dinobabies I know don’t read too much. My wife’s bridge club reads popular novels but non fiction is a non starter.
What does the FT want people to do? Here’s a clue:
Even if the TikTok ban goes ahead in the US, other platforms will pop up to replace it. So in 2025, why not replace the phone on your bedside table with a book? Just an hour a day clawed back from screen time adds up to about a book a week, placing you among an elite top one per cent of readers. Melville (and a Hula-Hoop) are optional.
Lamenting and recommending is not going to change what the flows of electronic information have done. There are more insidious effects racing down the information highway. Those who will be happiest will be those who live in ignorance. People with some knowledge will be deeply unhappy.
Will the FT want dinosaurs to roam again? Sure. Will the FT write about them? Of course. Will the impassioned words change what’s happened and will happen? Nope. Get over it, please. You may as well long for the days when Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum and you were part of the same company.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2025
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