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Comment by pftburger | Hacker News Reader

Seconded. I get way too many "Im sorry Dave, I just can't do that" moments

I've given up asking her arbitrary questions - the other day I asked what the weather was like in Sydney. (I live in Australia, so the context is really obvious). She told me what the weather was like at "Sidney's tool shed" - wherever that is.

But I use siri daily for things like:

- Setting and stopping alarms and timers: ("Hey siri - set alarm for tomorrow morning at 9:25" / when the alarm goes off: "Hey siri stop")

- Turning on and off my lights. Its a delight every time to say "hey siri goodnight" when I go to bed and see all the lights in the house turn off.

Siri handles this fine on my new phone from the opposite end of the globe. This seems to support my suspicion that they ship increasingly less sophisticated Siris to increasingly older phones. Siri on my 6S Plus before this became almost useless once they switched to on-device processing. It's also much better at identifying objects in photos for searches.

I'm querying siri on a homepod, not a phone. And I just checked - she still answers with a weather report near "Sidney Tools". (Its currently raining and 17 degrees C, if you're wondering.)

I have a running theory that you can tell how long any FAANG bug will stick around by just imagining a 25 year old tech dude in the bay area. If Dave the bay area tech dude will never encounter the bug, you're in for a bad time.

For example, google maps used to give terrible directions at roundabouts (traffic circles). That makes sense because there's no traffic circles in the bay area. All the people who could fix the problem weren't aware there was a problem at all. Dave is terrified of roundabouts, so of course it took about a decade for directions at roundabouts to improve.

A corollary of this is that modern software works well proportionally to how closely your setup matches that of the average bay area tech dude. Everything works best if you have a new phone (preferably an iPhone), fast computer and you speak english. Woe be to you if your computer is old and slow, or you use a right-to-left language, if you're blind or you have a bad internet connection.

Macos feels laggy and slow on a slow internet connection because of course it does. Bay area tech bros are never in that situation! What would Dave know about slow internet?

I run into some things like this in Georgia. I wanted to know when the humidity and temperature were low enough to be safe. It's always nice in that part of California, so Siri has no concept of humidity and temperature. It just throws out a general weather report. The weather app at least has graphs for UV index, humidity, and temperature now. I think it must have come by way of Dark Sky.

This isn't just a SV thing, though. I downloaded a well-regarded weather app from a country in Europe that has pretty consistent humidity. The app didn't even show humidity. People have trouble seeing outside their bubble. SV just happens to have outsized influence, for now.

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