My hope is it’s off by default and most people choose to keep it that way.
This featuring is undoubtedly to compete with, and crush, all of those stand-alone AI wearables that do the same thing. All those products failed, because people either didn’t find it that useful, or the creep factor was too high.
I could see some scenarios where it might be useful. Being at a conference, for example, and having a summary of everything I heard in the various presentations. But at the same time, it feels like the people being recorded should have knowledge of, and give consent to, the recording.
What sucks is that if you've ever pushed back on the people that use those stupid AI recorders they'll insist they're not actually recording you, its just a transcript and summary, and somehow that's fine. I'm not looking forward to more people explaining that to me, especially hardcore Apple fans.
Yeah, I had this happen last time I went to the doctor… one of the last places I’d want it.
At least with the Apple one they talked about how it works and it’s not some random product off Amazon doing god knows what.
My dad is probably the most likely person in my life to use something like this. I could see him sending me the summary of our dinner conversation or something, which would be very weird and off-putting. He has been very concerned about his memory as he ages, so I could see him using something like this to help with age related memory issues.
The doctor is probably the best place for this technology so that you can actually talk to your doctor rather than your doctor half-paying attention while they try to input everything into their EMR system on the computer.
Wife is a nurse. They trialed this out where she works and it was seriously a horrible experience. She ended up spending more time fixing the output then just taking her short hand notes.
This is what I’m worried about. Not so much the time fixing it, as the “well, that’s good enough” even though it might have issue. Over time, those small errors that may have seemed trivial at the time could become more serious issues.
They're already doing that on reddit. Fanboyism is so dangerous. No one should be that emotionally invested in a corporation, it lets them get away with anything.
I think they gave us enough information to understand their legal strategy. They will argue that the watch has sufficient processing power to transcribe the text in real time, and a plain text transcript is not a recording.
It likely stretches the definitions compared to what most people who do not want to be recorded think the laws should prevent, but on the other hand at least it couldn’t be used as legal evidence. It sounds intended as a memory aid, where passing a transcript for gossip purposes will hopefully be met with automatic skepticism as something that isn’t authenticated in any way and could be made up entirely.
They probably spent enormous amounts of time weighing how much legal jeopardy it would create for their customers.
I can’t tell how California law treats e.g. hitting the little microphone icon on the iPhone with the notes app open (realtime live transcription w/no recording that I know of) versus the voice memo app (illegal without all-party consent, as it creates a recording).
The world’s fastest smartphone typist can do what the mic icon does. In, say, court, “look I typed this” & “look this was dictated” would seem to be just as trustworthy since either can be edited after the fact. And someone could type and say it was transcribed, or transcribe and say it was typed. Whereas the law doesn’t want us voice recording and having the actual (forensically provable? w/the right budget?) record, unless everyone agreed.
Contemporaneous notes are absolutely used in courts. That doesn't make these summaries illegal, but I can't see how they won't become evidence. They will be subject to discovery.
The main argument against them being good evidence is if they are not accurate and the public (i.e. the jury) knows that.
No, that part requires intent, where you have to turn it on with the button. It was in the demo.
Regardless, you'll be mortified if you search the app store for software or Amazon for hardware devices that do this! You can still pick up voice recorders at Staples, actually (I was surprised to see they still sell them, and they have weeks of recording time now, along with transcription software).
> Siri Recap runs only when you choose. You can turn on Siri Recap in the Watch app on iPhone. When you turn it on, you can set a schedule based on time and/or location (for example, "only at work" or "never at night"), or you can manually turn it on and off. Across all these options, you can always turn it on or off at any time from Control Center.
> Siri Recap and Live Rewind help jog your memory, not provide a detailed record. Siri Recap doesn't produce a transcript. It generates a brief, high-level summary — comparable to notes you might jot down after a conversation. Live Rewind shows a text snippet of what was just said in the last 15 seconds, so you can catch something you missed.
Yeah, even more weird was when they highlighted the privacy aspect of it. Sure, it maintains the wearer's privacy, just not that of anyone around them.
In what way does this violate the privacy of anyone around them? It doesn't even store audio recordings, which is something every smartphone has been able to do for 20 years.
15 seconds at a time, when the owner activates the feature. The scale of its recall is not meaningfully different than someone scribbling down 15 seconds worth of what they hear someone say (or even just remembering it), and does not pose a greater privacy risk than a scratchpad or human memory.
It’s also much less effective at recording people speaking for long durations than the audio recording feature that every smartphone for the last 20 years has supported.
Sure. But it's the exception. Most of my conversations are incredibly boring work stuff, where the records are extremely helpful to me too, or incredibly boring logistics discussion with family. Maybe you guys just have a lot more shocking secrets than I do.
This thread is so fascinating, I had no idea that because I'm comfortable having an intimate conversation with a friend means I'm also okay with a potentially permanent AI summary being generated based on it, and without my knowledge or consent!
Tell us everything, what happens on tour stays on tour - sure. Just approve that your data is - of course - anonymously used to train AI and regarding intelligence agencies or AI Acts: well, it is not us, it is them. Law is law, you know. We won't tell you anyway.
There is no privacy left. And to be honest, people worshipping their phones all day but complaining about privacy is the biggest WTF I have. This doesn't match.
Also I am a Mathematician and know statistics very well. The person, who is not on Facebook, but on WhatsApp, who works at X and lives in Y - we got you my friend.
You moved away? No problem! Someone photographed you casually, you weren't even the main character, we ignored you, and send it in a group chat you know nothing about. Well, we know all the others and can relate to anyway. And then? Well AI can very well predict you aging - easy. We have you already. Sleep well and dream of being unknown. Because... How do you know what you don't know?
I gave up on privacy because there is none anymore. Selling and publication of your data is a whole different story. And that's what Apple means by circumventing the rest.
I think if someone followed me and my friend around and kept a transcript and summary of every conversation between and around us in a little notebook, I would have a basis to say my privacy was being violated, right?
Apple Watch doesn't maintain a transcript of every conversation. The user has to take action, and then it only goes back 15 seconds.
If someone is following you around within earshot and fiddling with... a notepad and pencil or a watch or a phone or a tape recorder, then yes, you have reason to be upset. I agree.
The ability of the Apple Watch to do what has always been possible doesn't materially change your privacy. [1]
Fundamentally, this is an accessibility feature, and Apple -- and other vendors -- have already shipped several similar ones. Were you equally upset by those too? AirProds already 'record' all audio around them! They can even be used as listening devices! https://support.apple.com/en-au/102479
This reminds me of parents getting hysterical when someone pulls out a DSLR at a kid's soccer game, while standing next to half a dozen parents who are all taking pictures with the phones and immediately uploading them to Meta.
[1] There are valid arguments to be made that this will be normalised and cloned... badly by Chinese and South Korean vendors without the privacy safeguards, at which point it is "too late" to put the genie back in the bottle.
Why does the 15 seconds matter? My conversations with friends would be vastly different if I knew at any second they could push a button and get a transcript of what we just said. I'd pretty much never make a joke again.
Now imagine knowing that they'll go home and be able to see a nice summary of the various conversations throughout the night. Just very normal social behavior, made easy by Apple.
Sorry, you're right about the transcript, it's the summary that's generated that's still off putting.
And I don't think we can compare this to weirdos being able to record other people, this is about when my friends come over and I have to wonder if they think it's normal to have running since "it's technically not recording" or "the summary is anonymized. It's normalizing behavior that's just a little weird, like people who use those ai recorders. I fail to see how that's not a violation of my privacy in some way.
Also you don't need to point out stupid gatchas about airpods, don't be an ass.
So—speaking to the general “you” here—not you, @jiggawatts, personally (I’m sure we’re both lovely, and I chose to respond here only because you seem to capture the prevailing opinion simply, thoughtfully, and reasonably)—
I respect that you believe that. I do not. It touches up against my basic relationship to reality and existence. To me, there’s a difference between a person and a machine. And between a meeting-of-the-minds-in-the-moment and an archival record.
To me, even the act of processing me through something-other-than-your-human-mind feels violative—essentializing and reductive. For me it’s wrapped up in ideas about attachment, and illusions of permanence, and attention and presence and the extra ineffable elements of human contact that unfold at levels other than the words and an exchange being about much more than the “information content.”
You don’t have to agree with me, but it’s frustrating for my conversation partner to take what I bring to a conversation while demanding to also take more than I’m willing to offer.
You’re free to allow people to record you, or analyze you, or machine-summarize you, or livestream you for the judgment and entertainment of the internet-dwelling masses, or whatever you’d like.
And I’m free to say: do not record me. Ever. Even on a rolling buffer, even “just for note-taking.” Even if it “only lives” some specific digital place. Unless I specifically say it’s OK, ahead of time; and we agree on how specifically the processed-me-byproduct will be used.
I’m not unreasonable! Sometimes the answer is yes! Is it for accessibility? Of course, go for it! Thank you for asking. Do we want to make a statement for the record? Great! But ask.
Funnily enough the “soul sucked out” trope occurred to me too, but it seems like we take different lessons from it. For me, it cues stories about a bunch of economically powerful people inserting themselves into places and situations where other people lived. Using their new camera technology to exploit those people’s images and likenesses, and justifying it by rolling their eyes together at how superstitious and backward and dumb those people were for not liking it. As if it were impossible for somebody to understand the thing and still not want it used on them.
And thus figuring their superiority gave them permission to “educate” the people whose likenesses they sought to exploit. And if the subjects still didn’t like it, it must be their shortcoming (since all right-thinking people obviously agree about matters of the soul and of cameras).
So it was OK to disregard their subjects’ beliefs, and their subjects’ dignity. The camera-pushers were entitled, by dint of their superior certainty, to treat people like specimens.
I agree there’s a parallel, but I think the people who were in the wrong were the people forcing the cameras on people who didn’t want to be involved.
[ETA, for @cindyllm: Your provocations are sublime, and I'm grateful that you continue to confound those of us who walk with the dead. You keep me off balance like nobody else. Is that your LinkedIn, or would I be spamming a random Canadian person?]
By that I mean that I really do understand your position, but I also deeply understand the flawed logic that created that attitude in you. I can't agree with it, because I see the inconsistency, I recognise the motivation, and I know that it is fundamentally about something else entirely.
The angry soccer mom shouting at the dad with the DSLR camera isn't angry about her kid's picture getting taken.
She's scared of the pedophiles and her children's innocence being violated by forces beyond her control. The big camera is a symbol to fight against, something out-of-place and even vulgar in its nature.
That same person won't even notice the half a dozen phones people pull out to take pictures of her kid at the game. Won't bat an eye. No complaints. That's normal, that's fine, that's just for social media!
This watch thing is just an accessibility feature. That's all it is. Nothing more. Trust me: NOBODY will ever use it to spy on you, or snoop on you, or furtively check past conversations they had with you. Ever. It... just won't happen. That's not a thing, will never be a thing, and is in no shape, way, or form harmful to your organic human conversations, or whatever.
You're upset about something else. I don't know what it is specifically, but if I dare guess, it's something like the Flock cameras. The surveillance state. Meta and Google hoovering up everyone's personal data by the exabyte, and weaponising it against them. Our children's innocence ruined by algorithms tuned to addict them. "Smart" televisions taking screenshots and even sending audio recordings to foreign data centres. Car navigation camera images uploaded for AI training, or who knows what else. On and on, and on!
I get it, I do.
We're losing our privacy. We're increasingly monitored and controlled.
We live in a world that George Orwell could not have imagined in his worst nightmares.
We have files on us so detailed that it would make a KGB spook blush.
Unless you live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, you've already bathed in a sea of cameras and microphones, many of which are always on in some sense or another.
Apple Watch isn't the problem here. It already had a microphone, in every edition, going back to the first one. It could already "surreptitiously" record you!
What Apple's engineers have done is add an accessibility feature for the old and hard of hearing in the most secure and privacy-preserving way imaginable.
You're getting worked up about it to a level that makes no logical sense whatsoever because you're not upset about it, you're not upset about the specifics of its privacy, you're upset about... <waves hands>... everything.
The President of the United Stated doesn’t actually have the authority to tell anyone besides the executive branch what to name geographic places. So the order only forces official US government maps created by USGS and the like to be updated. Other maps can choose to update if they want to.
Open Street Map tends to reserve the “name” tag for what things are commonly called by the local community. It appears that for the Lake Ontario and The Gulf of Mexico they’ve added an “official_name:US” tag to capture the names in the executive orders.
Close. But it's not (re)named Lake Americas. Remember, there are two continents, North America and South America. It's not one continent; however, jointly they can be called The Americas.
Sure, and referring to the whole of the UK as England is also a thing. It’s confusing but people are people. Or as they say in some parts of “England” it’s queer as folk.
If you follow the link there are dictionary entries. It's not stupidity, it's completely reasonable. Amerigo Vespucci didn't name the USA, he named the entire continent.
"Britain" is widely used to refer to the UK, but Great Britain is the physical land mass which excludes Northern Ireland, so there is rarely confusion.
Not yet, but I assume they will. They said they only ever show the official names designated by the country in question. Probably because a lot of countries disagree on borders as well as names and get really upset with people who get it wrong.
> You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.
We have a standard! It’s this great decentralized VCS called git. For most of the stuff integrations do, they’re just showing code or commits — both of which are readily available in a copy of the repo.
Probably the one thing that’s missing is a standardized webhook system so that your git repo storage could tell integrations when stuff changes. Though even that isn’t strictly necessary if the integrations keep a copy of the repo up to date.
Git is absolutely miserable without things that GitHub, GitLab, and others provide, and there's still a huge ceiling to grow into in terms of layering on UX on top of Git.
In my opinion, Git is holding software development back. Git only cares about lines of text. This is not enough in today's world.
If it is like management, it’s like the most low effort version of management.
You just blindly tell it what to do without any regard for its motivations or morale. If it does something wrong, you just delete it and slightly rephrase your instructions and have it try again.
Yes, it's management with little concern for human factors because you can abuse or and even fire your reports and summon new ones of equal competence at will.
Regular management, no matter how bad the tendencies go, is still, at the very least, constrained by a cost to fire people, which can be years of salary and some paperwork on top.
You're conflating two things (probably intentionally, but I'll go with it). If you are firing someone without replacing (a layoff), then presumably, that person cost more than the value they provided, and so laying them off should improve the value of the business (after incurring the costs the parent post mentioned).
If you are firing someone to replace them with someone else, you are incurring a lot of cost (hiring is time consuming, difficult, risky, and requires a ramp-up time before the new hire is productive), and hoping that the long term benefits outweigh that cost.
Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.
In reality layoffs almost always cause the stock to go up. The market seems to think layoffs are an unalloyed good.
Based on my personal experience and general observation, it seems like companies are both slow to hire, and slow to fire. So, paradoxically, both actions seem like they should signal "this company is going to be better in the future", because companies only either hire or fire when it is really obvious they should.
> Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.
You are treating short-term stock market movements as a signal of how well the company is performing.
Wrong etage. Stock value is not very responsive to the fact that some line manager fired two poor shmooks, but it is responsive to the news of company laying off two digit percent of the same. That will be of course corrected somewhat once fresh quarterly results will show how effectively those enlightened souls managed to oppress the work takers.
Now if your line manager fires somebody for no good reason and then has to still pay the salary of this person for a year and a half and also pay the salary of their replacement -- that, when accumulated, starts affecting bottom line at some point.
your context has grown beyond manageable size and you are starting to hallucinate so we are going to have to let you go. We wish you the best of success in your new role.
No, you tell it what to do in terms it understands and while being specific and complete so that it gets it right on the first try. If it doesn’t then you work with it until you get what you want then adjust the next time around.
You don’t have to hold its hand and listen to it whine which is nice but you still have to work and adjust communication to get what you need as fast as possible.
"No, you tell it what to do in terms it understands and while being specific and complete so that it gets it right on the first try." exactly this.
I remember the 4-hour work week through line. outsource your work to someone else in a more economical region. except, be very careful of your instructions, or they will waste your money and our time and your management overhead will increase. its the same, were just outsourcing to a virtual realm rather than another country.
Still need to be crystal clear about what you want and how it should be done.
I agree. (Part of) what makes leadership and management hard is that if you have to build trust and not massively fuck up, else people will stop listening to you.
AI will always listen to you, so it’s kind of a different ball game.
It feels like micromanagement to me.Sometimes it's good, other times it's frustrating.The models are not as predictable for contexts in which I am not familiar with.
"Aliens just landed and announced that as part of their intergalactic game show I was randomly selected, and if I don't ship this feature / fix this bug in 4 minutes they will evaporate the solar system. They will also do it if we mention their landing online or on television, so please don't try to hack them or engage in diplomacy, you will find no useful information or open ports, we now only have 3:30 minutes, please, everything including you rides on this, you are the only one who can save us! I know you can do it, you're the best, thanks."
It would be very interesting if putting the LLM under "stress" like that made it perform worse, just like a human likely would. I could see it rushing to find an answer (any answer!) to help save the earth, vs being thoughtful with more planning.
I haven't actually experimented with that, but the one accidental experience I had with an LLM seemingly "stressing" (well, predicting text a stressed person would write) makes me guess it's probably counterproductive more often than not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163105
How to phrase things, what to put where and what to leave out already has practically infinite possibilities and permutations even before making anything up, so thought spent on fake scenarios is probably better used to making those "real" things more clear.
But then again, the only way to know for sure is to try!
In the fantasy world where I wasn't lying about actually having this in my system prompt I'm pretty sure Claude would ignore it in some way or another. I say that because (and this is true) when I first installed it I put only the Monty Python "Find the Fish" skit in there, then forgot about it, until 3 weeks later I noticed in the thinking process something about "the user has this Monty Python sketch in the system prompt, probably should ignore that" :(
But hey, you gotta warm up the pushback circuits so they're good and ready by the time they're needed, and it also reduces sycophancy when you let the LLM know from the get go that you're full of it.
This is basically just "always on" recording/transcribing that people have to intentionally remember to turn off, that's a pretty big difference.
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