Despite being a certified Apple whore, I have never hesitated to call out their "smart voice assistant" as being stupid as shit. And even that's being generous. I wrote sometime last year that I was seriously excited that Apple Intelligence was coming to smarten Siri up and make the technology finally be consistently useful.

Well, I think we all know how that turned out.

I've been in on Apple's take on AI since the developer's beta, and Siri is stupid as ever. Absolutely nothing has changed. Basic commands fail at an alarming rate. Trying to get Siri to understand anything is a challenge. I have gotten so frustrated at times that I've been screaming at an iPod mini in the bathroom while getting ready for work... or into my iPhone in my pocket from my AirPods... or at CarPlay while driving.

Just today I asked Siri via CarPlay to get me directions to the grocery store in Big City. I knew where it was, but wanted the fastest route from where I was at. I asked, very specifically, for the store I wanted. Siri still gave me two options... one in the next city over that was farther away... which is absolute madness. After having to tap the screen for the one I wanted because I didn't know how the fuck you vocally tell Siri which option to use when you've already given it the literal city and street, Apple Maps sent me in the opposite fucking direction. So I gave up and told Siri to "cancel navigation." After a seriously long pause, Siri said that it couldn't do that right now, then proceeded to keep giving me directions to the wrong store. And it's like... what, exactly, the fuck do you have to do to just get Siri to send you to the fucking store that you asked for in the first place?

I was so fucking enraged by the time I made two taps on the screen to cancel the wrong directions that I very nearly punched my finger through the damn screen. Siri is fucking useless and Apple "Intelligence" is a fucking joke.

The problem is magnified exponentially when you're attempting to get Siri to take control of shitty fucking Apple tech like HomeKit. My God. How basic of a command is "Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights?" that Siri doesn't know what in the hell to do? How big of a fucking failure is your technology if the most rudimentary commands can't be interpreted?

And it ain't just me. This story on Daring Fireball is pathetically hilarious: Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber.

Yep. That pretty much sums it up.

The big news today is that Sonos's CEO has finally stepped down after his company forced a shitty app release in order to meet a ship date on a calendar for headphones... not giving a crap that it fucked over longtime loyal customers in the process.

But this is a rather gross simplification of events of record.

• First of all, don't go crying for the now ex-CEO. He's getting $1.9 MILLION DOLLARS in severance. That's probably slightly more than the 100 people who got laid off because of a situation the now ex-CEO was presiding over.
• The new "Interim CEO" had a good message for Sonos staff that went out today. And he's worked as an engineer for Apple, so it's assumed that he understands the importance of earning and maintaining customer loyalty. But he also was leadership at Quibi, a disaster that's so massively huge that I'm surprised he's still able to work in the tech field. So while things are likely looking up, I'm tempering my expectations.
• The Sonos app, while greatly improved over the steaming pile of shit that initially got forced on everybody (hey, you can scroll through a playlist without constantly pausing now!), is still far from perfect. It's not intuitive at all. You can't configure it in a way that makes sense to you. Want to pin your playlists so you can get to them easily? FUCK YOU! And I just don't get it. There are plenty of talented UI architects out there, why isn't Sonos hiring people who understand elegance via simplicity in design? I'd assume that people developing the app at Sonos use Sonos, but you wouldn't know it given how the app works. Or doesn't. I still fucking hate it, even though it's mostly usable for what I need now.
• People are losing sight of the fact that not only was the now-ex-CEO in charge when the whole app fiasco happened... he also presided over the Sonos Arc's "Pop of Death" that didn't allow many customers to use its hallmark feature, Dolby Atmos, for nearly TWO FUCKING YEARS. He didn't give a single shit that the entire reason I purchased the soundbar was FOR DOLBY ATMOS. At no time did Sonos ask me (or anybody?) what our setup was so the could expedite a fix. Or ask us to ship our setup so they could figure it out. The CEO had them meander around FOR TWO YEARS working on other stuff before solving the problem. TWO FUCKING YEARS. This is inexcusable. This is unforgivable.
• I don't think I will ever forgive Sonos for all they've put me through. And if I could afford to replace my Sonos gear after lighting it all on fire in the middle of the street, I would do that. Probably. Sonos has gone from being a company I loved and advocated for to a company I loathe with every fiber of my being. And their management made it happen. Whether management can swing the pendulum back before they go bankrupt is anybody's guess.

I keep a running list of cool things I find on these here internets so I can share them on Bullet Sunday.

But sometimes... sometimes... something is so cool that I can't bring myself to wait. Today's YouTube video is one of those times. Except I actually found it on the 23rd, so I guess I did end up having some restraint in waiting three whole days.

This video is 35 minutes of absolute joy. It's got it all... old tech... random strangers helping across international borders... entertaining history... and something so hilarious at the 32-minute mark that I nearly choked to death. This right here is why I love the internet...

Earlier this year I posted this epic video along the same lines where a guy tracked down a McDonalds DS cartridge, which is equally fantastic...

If anybody has any recommendations for more videos like these, be sure to comment. The YouTube algorithm is pretty good, but it can't know everything.

I hope.

While having a "smart home" is cool, I would have never spent the money on it if I didn't feel I had to. I bought my home so that I could care for my mom, and part of that was making sure that I could control it remotely. As her dementia progressed, I worked at home whenever I could but still had to go into the office from time to time for a bit. While at work I needed the cameras, a security system, and remote access to everything so I could keep watch and help out if she ran into trouble.

Likely the most important piece of the smart home puzzle was smart smoke detectors.

Mom had put plastic in the oven... twice... while I was home and had the oven on to cook something, so the worry was that she would turn the oven on and do that when I wasn't home. So I bought Google Nest smoke detectors that would alert me to smoke or fire no matter where I was.

Lately the CO₂ sensors have started to fail, and so I have been replacing the detectors as needed.

Until I couldn't.

All of a sudden, nobody had the wired Nest Smoke Detectors available. Nobody. Except Google's own store. But the problem is that they will only allow you to order one of them. This is a problem when I have two detectors with dead CO₂ sensors and one which had expired.

I finally decided to chat with "Customer Support" to find out what to do.

What followed was my wasting an insane amount of time being passed around while being told to do truly insane things. Including (but not limited to) unplugging the failing detectors and removing the batteries so they'll stop beeping.

Yes, you read that right... YOU CAN SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF NOT BEING ABLE TO REPLACE YOUR SMOKE DETECTORS BY DISABLING YOUR SMOKE DETECTORS!

If I didn't have the complete chat transcript of the bizarre shit Google said from my call, I wouldn't believe it.

Note that at any point in my conversations, all the Google "Customer Support" agents had to do was tell me that they were sorry they couldn't sell me replacements for all my dead detectors and I should buy a different brand so I could stay safe. But rather than tell a customer to buy a non-Google product, they thought it was better to tell me to risk my life and illegally disable my smoke detectors.

I can only guess that wanting your customers dead rather than buying a non-Google product is company policy.

Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil?"

Artificial Intelligence created "art" is an abomination for a number of reasons. The biggest of which being that AI gets trained on the works of countless artists who have their works stolen so a computer can mimic what they've created. Without artists, generative AI models couldn't exist.

It's a serious problem because the companies behind generative AI and the people and companies utilizing generative AI are poised to make billions off the technology while the artists who made it possible receive no compensation at all. For this reason, there's been a bit of a backlash when companies use AI "art" for their packaging, advertising, or other materials... but it's not enough of a backlash to stop the trend from trending.

Nope. Generative AI is here to stay.

And now Apple has gotten in on the game with an app called "Image Playground." It's the same type of prompt-driven AI that's been around for a while now, it's just that Apple is attempting to make it easier to use.

And easy it is. You feed Image Playground some parameters that you type or select from suggestions, like so...

And you're presented with a bunch of options that have been generated based on your parameters, such as this one...

Immediately there is a problem in that this looks absolutely nothing like me, despite the fact that I fed it a literal photo of myself. Out of the dozens of friends and family that I put through Apple's generative AI, it usually comes down to the hair. For reasons unknown, Apple is adding tremendous volume and wacky styles that in no way match what was sent to them.

You're always given multiple options, but rarely do the photos of myself look much like me. And, again, it usually comes down to the hair. If they could get the hair drawn better, I think that would be half the battle...

From time to time I get something that kinda-sorta looks like it could be me...

But here's the thing. In all the photos of myself that have been generated, you can't look too close. Because the minute you do, you start to notice some horrific details. Usually with the eyes and teeth...

And once you see it, you go back to look at all the photos that have been generated and everybody looks like serial killers. It's genuinely bizarre, and I'm not really understanding why something so standard as eyes and teeth are so difficult to render.

I did have better luck with photos of my younger self...

Which gets me this...

I can sorta see me in that? It helps to add props...

Even though props are highly problematic. I don't think any of them work as intended. For example, this is me in sunglasses, but AI makes my eyes visible through them, which is freaky as hell...

I put myself in a disco, and suddenly I'm in... suspenders?!?

And when I select "Witches Hat" as an accessory, it's like the AI didn't know what to do, so it put me in a... sombrero?!?

I thought it would be cool to see me as an astronaut, since that's what I wanted to be when I was a kid, but Apple removes the faceplate and has my chin sticking out every time? I don't think that's how spacesuit helmets work...

And it's not just one option... it's 5 out of 6. And sometimes they even give me a cleft in my chin, which is wild...

A lot of times, the variants that you get make it very clear that Apple has run out of ideas as to how to portray a scenario. For example, if I were told to draw somebody as a scientist, I'd be sure to have test tubes and science gear in the shot. But Apple thinks that a lab coat and glasses is all that's needed. Or, as in the first photo, TWO pairs of glasses...

   
Apple has a more specialized version of their Image Playground within their Messages app called "Genmoji" which will generate more simplified versions of stuff. But it's via typing to generate...

I've mainly been concentrating on pictures of me to illustrate the app (at least I can be sure that I own the photo being used as reference!), but you don't have to use photos of people. You can type just about anything.

But with wildly varying results.

When I asked for "A penguin on a polar bear" not a single image generated had the penguin on the polar bear. So I tried again with "A penguin ON TOP OF a polar bear" which gave me multiple options. Only one correct...

Like the last time, the majority of the generated images were just a penguin with a polar bear. And usually the penguin was massively huge like this...

Things get a bit disturbing when the generative AI decided to merge the penguin with the polar bear into a single creature...

But the most disturbing image that I got was a truly gigantic penguin fucking a baby polar bear? I mean, it's definitely on that polar bear, so to speak. Though they are kinda merging at the feet...

So... um... yeah... not quite ready for prime time. There's a lot more work that needs to be done. And though I will likely not use it for anything except being occasionally amused by the results, I can see where this is going to be a very big deal for people who don't want to put the time and effort into creating something themselves having the computer do the work for them.

That's going to do severe harm to a number of different art careers, but artists are getting used to that. They've already had their art stolen a zillion times over to train the AI behemoths that make AI generated images possible in the first place.

I used to take solace in the fact that I'd likely be safely dead by the time AI had fully integrated itself into our lives, but here we are. Mainstream use has not only arrived, but it's progressing so fast that I can't imagine what the future is going to look like.

I just hope it's better than that last penguin on a polar bear image, because yikes.

Before the internet was as big a thing for the public as it is now, there were bulletin board systems. Or BBSs.

You could DIAL IN with your TELEPHONE MODEM and POST TEXT-ONLY MESSAGES that other BBS users could respond to. It sounds extremely limiting... and it was... but when that's all there is, you make the best of it. While not necessarily "magic" (even by the standards of the day) it was pretty special to be able to have an online life that didn't cost money (like CompuServe and AOL did). If it was a local telephone call, then it cost you nothing but your time.

And I spent a lot of time on the local BBSs.

Oddly enough, my parents didn't have a big problem with me dialing in and tying up the phone line. Usually I was doing this after school before they got home from work, or at night when they didn't want to talk on the phone anyway. The weekend could be tricky, but even then I rarely got yelled at to get off the phone. Which means the only thing keeping me from interacting with my BBS buddies would be if one of them was dialed into the system and tying up the receiving phone line.

I still have friends that I made from those days.

And I still have a lot of good memories. Back when Coca-Cola changed their recipe to "New Coke" that everybody hated, I mentioned that I still had a six-pack of the old recipe stuff which I was saving so I could enjoy it down the line when I really needed a Coca-Cola fix. One of the other BBS users mentioned that they were going to break into my house and steal it. What happened next was something nobody expected... it turned into this massive Dungeons & Dragons style adventure game where multiple people were coming up with scenarios to steal my Coke and I was coming up with scenarios to keep them from doing so. This went on for months. And that's just one example of many I remember.

And then there were BBS Bashes which were the equivalent of Blogger Meetups which were the equivalent of Social Media Influencer Parties. Friends you only knew from their posts on the local BBS could meet-up face-to-face, which was handy to know who you were chatting with since photo-sharing wasn't easy (though it would eventually get to be easy enough that you were able to share small, low-low-low-resolution shots (assuming you had a scanner).

I still remember the main three BBSs that I frequented most. Two were from people that became friends... one was from the local library (which was run by the guy who would become my best friend). I can remember the login screen for each (carefully constructed out of ASCII characters to make something cool-looking), and I can even think back and remember the navigation to get through the boards to see new posts in different sections.

It was such a huge part of my life for such an important time in my life that it's all forever burned into my brain.

And that's something I have been thinking about a lot today when it was announced that Ward Christensen, the guy who invented the BBS along with Randy Suess, died at age 78.

If you want to see an interview with Ward (and get a feeling for what things were like back in those days!), I highly recommend watching this great documentary. It's a long one, but it's fantastic and well-worth your time...

The documentary has some names that are very familiar to me. Some of these people I even interacted with back in the day. It was easy, because the community of people using BBSs was so very small.

Rest in Peace, Ward Christensen. You were a pioneer that definded my high school years!

Just when I think I couldn't hate Sonos more than I already do... this happens...

Sonos laying off 100 people amid expensive app problems.

These employees aren't at fault for MANAGEMENT'S stupid fucking decisions that screwed customers and fucked the company. But of course they're the ones losing their jobs. Not management.

MANAGEMENT didn't give a shit that the app wasn't ready.

MANAGEMENT decided to fuck their customers so their headphones could ship by some date on a calendar.

MANAGEMENT sat on their asses as the company imploded when they could have just brought back the old app.

But MANAGEMENT wasn't the ones who would lose their jobs over their decisions causing customers to abandon Sonos... so why should they care?

Last week I spent three fucking hours trying to get my bedroom speakers working again after they randomly stopped the night before. Right in the middle of a song, they died and never came back. No amount of power cycling... no amount of resetting and re-adding them... no amount rebooting my fucking routers or taking down the entire system and bringing it back up again... will get them to work again.

I am told that resetting them and adding them to a different system before resetting and adding them back to mine might help. Who the fuck knows. I don't have time right now to deal with that. If I had money to burn, I would take every fucking stick of Sonos gear I own, throw it in the middle of the street, and take a flamethrower to it.

Management firing 100 employees over their idiotic decisions only makes me want to burn it faster.

Yeah, Sonos put us through all this shitty "new app" bullshit to sell some headphones before a date on a calendar. They unleashed an app that doesn't work, is missing features, and causes endless fucking problems because they just don't give a shit. Which is not surprising because they let their "Pop of Death" fault plague their Arc soundbar for years before they addressed it.

All I can do is hope that once management has destroyed Sonos to the point where it's dead that somebody finds a way of hacking their crap so it doesn't become worthless.

Mac users like to think that the many viruses and problems which plague Windows users doesn't effect them, but they're wrong. The fact that the world runs on Windows means that existing in the world means that Windows problems can affect you. There couldn't be a better example of this than today's "CrowdStrike" disaster.

CrowdStrike is a cyber security company whose products protect your computers from going down due to external attacks and protect your data from data breaches. Today they sent out a security update to their Windows host customers which, alas, ended up being defective. This caused all the computers which received the update to crash. Hard. A global IT outage occurred. Which means everything from airports and airlines to banking and health care were hopelessly fucked. All you saw anywhere and everywhere was the dreaded Windows Blue Screen of Death™...

So whether you are a Mac user, Linux user, or Windows user... you were hopelessly fucked by consequence. Like these people in what I'm thinking must be Berlin Brandenburg Airport (I've only flown into Berlin a handful of times... so while "Ankunft" is definitely German, I can only be positive that this is not Cologne-Bonn's airport, which I am very familiar with)...

Photo by Liesa Johannssen/Getty Images

Now, given how much travel I've done in my life, I've been in situations just like this. Mostly as a consequence of weather, but sometimes it was technical. I've definitely seen the Windows Blue Screen of Death™ in more than one airport. I do not envy these people trying to deal with the clusterfuck that's become their life. I can't even remember all the places I've been stuck over the years. But it's happened many, many times. In the beginning when I hadn't traveled so much, it was both frustrating and terrifying. But as the number of trips I took went up, my anxiety went down when problems popped up. It'll all work out, no matter what happened, I knew that I'll get to where I'm going eventually. Accommodations to my situation will be made. Which is not to say that sadness didn't occur. I missed a Christmas back when my mom and grandmother were still alive and, given how important that holiday was to them, I was understandably upset about it.

But technology happens.

In other news... after watching Jason Statham in the incredible action flick The Beekeeper, I've made it my mission in life to watch all of his films that I haven't yet seen. There's not a lot because I'm a huge fan of the kinds of films he makes. The best of the films I watched this week was Safe...

Is there anything brilliantly new to be had? No. But there were a number of interesting bits in-between the fighting. Can't ask for more than that!

Another day another way Sonos is screwing their customers. I am so fucking sick and tired of this shit.

First Sonos forces you to upgrade to a new piece of shit controller app that's missing features and is badly unintuitive. But they dumped it on us before it was ready so they could release a new pair of headphones that requires it. And while I can forgive a lot, having to constantly wait for playlists to load is driving me up the fucking wall. This is what I see ALL THE FUCKING TIME NOW...

And it gets worse. Playlists constantly, unrelentingly pause to buffer. If you've got a lot of songs in a list, scrolling is absolute agony...

I'm guessing this is because you can no longer control your speakers locally, and have to go out on the internet through the shitty fucking Sonos servers to access the shitty fucking speaker sitting in the same room with you.

Then today it was revealed that Sonos removed the line from their user agreement saying that they won't sell your data. It's still in the agreements outside of the USA but, because this fucking country cares more about corporations than people, Americans get fucked by Sonos. Again.

So what's next? Sonos starts charging you a subscription fee to use their idiotic fucking app that's required to control the speakers you bought? At this rate, it seems not only possible, but expected.

Sonos should be forced to allow local control of their gear by consumer protections... because that's how it was when we bought it. Now it's just an internet device that puts you at the whim of Sonos's fucking stupidity, and I would have never signed up for that.

For only the third time in my life, I've changed my mobile company.

I've considered it many, many times, but the effort to switch over something I don't care that much about was never worth it to me. If I can make calls and access the internet, I'm good. But eventually the reasons to switch are far more than the reasons to not switch, so here we are.

My first cellular carrier was Verizon. I liked everything about them and stuck with the company for a little over a decade. Right up until the Summer of 2007. And why did I switch from a mobile carrier that I had been so loyal to? The first iPhone was released, and it was exclusive to AT&T. Had Verizon been able to sell me an iPhone, I would have stayed.

Switching to AT&T was okay. I didn't love them. I didn't hate them. I just went along with them out of sheer momentum for nearly fourteen years. Their coverage was never as good as I had with Verizon, but it was good enough. What was horrific about AT&T was their billing. I have no fucking idea why it was so shitty, but in my last four years it kept building and building until I couldn't take it any more. After I changed plans I spent hours on the phone trying to get my bill straightened out. It never worked. The next month I'd just have to start all over again. The minute I was eligible for T-Mobile's Magenta 55+ plan, I bailed.

The nice thing about T-Mobile was the price. $50 a month. Total. Taxes and fees included. But that price came at a cost... 1) The signal was terrible so many places despite the fact that my handset was showing good bars and 5G. 2) They discriminate against single people, because single-line customers didn't get the perks (like free Netflix) that multi-line customers get, even though single-line customers pay more per line than anybody! 3) They keep changing the game from when I signed up. First I couldn't pay with a credit card any more or they'd take away my auto-pay discount, then they decided to raise the price $5 a month. With no perks, poor quality service, and a price increase, I was done.

And now I've come full circle. I'm back to Verizon. I was going to go with a pre-paid plan just to get the best price, but ultimately went with a regular phone plan because... GET THIS: VERIZON DOESN'T DISCRIMINATE AGAINST SINGLE PEOPLE! Single-line subscribers get all the perks that multi-line subscribers get! So when I factored in an auto-pay discount, a bring-your-own-phone discount, plus the money I would save on stuff I was already paying for by taking advantage of the choose-your-own-perks, I would be paying the same $55 that T-Mobile was charging. Except taxes and fees were not included, so I am paying $8 more. But I was willing to pay it to get Verizon's better service... and to support the fact that VERIZON DOESN'T DISCRIMINATE AGAINST SINGLE PEOPLE! Interesting to note that when I take advantage of other perk savings that are available when my current subscriptions lapse, I can likely recoup the $8, and maybe more...

In three years my "bring your own phone" discount will end. I don't know if Verizon will make an offer to keep me... or if I'll have to switch again... but I think I'm to the point where I'd rather switch for a fourth time than pay more for what I was already getting, so maybe I'll jump to a pre-paid plan then. Or switch carriers. Or give up on a mobile phone altogether.

You can do that, can't you?