I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple’s AI/ML organization.
It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.
They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
This is why I don’t believe in private sector efficiency. You go in any company and most of the employees are morons and they’ll be paying contractors £1000/day to write a hello world service in new azure WorldGreeter(tm)
Apple also cultivates "pets" who suck, but for some personal-connection or political reason have received or curried favor that results in them being retained and even promoted through Apple's organization despite high-profile and embarrassing failures. See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from experience.
Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor.
And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI" BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a different time zone.
There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?
The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other people and you had sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong time.
Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.
In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.
There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.
Exactly. I was thinking through how I would want this expressed in the UI, and
Time zone: Local
was exactly what I came up with.
The absurd thing about Apple's approach is, as you point out, that it serves the tiny minority of use cases. Who the hell looks up the time zone of everything they're going to do when they're traveling around? I just want it to use the time shown on the phone!
Edit event -> tap the time -> time zone -> type the city name.
(No need to look up the timezone.)
I agree that calendar’s UI is a bit of a tire fire. One of Apple’s core UI design tenants is that you should be continuously surprised and delighted when you use iPhone, and then share your discoveries with friends to build up an Apple user community.
I don’t want the phone to surprise and delight me, or hide major features like a 1990’s microsoft excel easter egg.
For instance, why in the hell are “magnifier” and “scan + ocr document to pdf” not in the camera app?
Thanks for the link. Apple's language on this whole mess is of no help. First there's their use of "Turn on time zone support" which is meaningless. You'd think this would be the solution: turning it off and breathing a sigh of relief. But no; this does not stop the behavior.
As far as "floating," it says: "To keep the event from moving when you view a different time zone, choose Floating."
When I VIEW a different time zone? Does this also mean when I'm IN a different time zone?
Anyway... I will have to create a dummy "floating" appointment on my Mac before my next trip and see what the phone does with it when I get there. But it sure seems like this setting needs to exist on the mobile devices too...
In the macOS version of Calendar, “Time Zone Support” is the name of a feature in the Settings window. When you check that checkbox, twi things happen:
- the event inspector adds a timezone selector the the Start and End date/time pickers
- the window titlebar gains a timezone picker.
The timezone picker in the window titlebar defaults to your system’s current timezone. When you create an event, the start and end times for that event default to the window’s current timezone.
You can use the newly-revealed picker in the inspector to change the timezone of an event. There is a single picker that alters both the start and end time. If you set this to something other than the timezone chosen in the window’s titlebar, the event will move to reflect when it will occur in the window’s timezone.
I am personally convinced this is what people want 99% of the time, and I think it’s silly that you have to check a checkbox in Calendar Settings to get it. It’s fairly common to receive details for an event in another timezone, such as a conference call or vacation. I live with Time Zone Support enabled on all my Macs, and while I rarely touch the timezone picker in the titlebar I make frequent use of the timezone picker when setting the event details window.
There’s one special option in the event details timezone picker: “Floating”. This tells Calendar to always reckon the start and end times in the timezone selected in the window’s titlebar. So if you create an event that starts at 7am and set its timezone to “Floating”, the event will always be shown to begin at 7am even if you change your system’s timezone or the timezone in the titlebar. I don’t use this feature much, but it’s useful for plotting out your daily routine. If you go for at 6am every day, regardless of where you are on the planet, you can create a floating “Daily Run” event that starts at 6am and doesn’t shift as you travel.
The iPhone version of calendar is designed differently. There is no “Time Zone Support” checkbox on iPhone. The event details view always shows time zone pickers for both the start and end times. This lets you create an event with the start and end times specified in local times in different timezones. I use this feature for every single flight I take, and I always have to enter them on my phone because the Mac doesn’t let you set the start and end timezones independently.
But the iPhone doesn’t let you choose Floating in the time zone picker, so you can’t use it to create daily-routine events. Thankfully, all versions of Calendar preserve the data and behavior of events created on any platform, so you can create your Floating events in a Mac and your timezone-spanning flights on an iPhone and they will render as expected on the other device, including the Event Details window.
Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly.
I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.
Many people enter appointments without enough detail to say it is not going to be held at your current location. e.g for a planned vacation "3pm check for concert tickets", which will indeed stay at PST and show up on your phone at 6pm in New York.
It's trivial to consider any event that did not specify a time zone to happen at local time, wherever that is, and not change its time when the phone's zone changes. Business software will set a zone, self-entered or casual appointments won't, so that matches usage. At worst, display a warning sign on the calendar entry. The default is "do no harm", not "we didn't know you didn't mean us not to do harm".
Mandatorily attaching a time zone to an event is the design defect. When a person in the real world is given the times of events, he is given those in the time local to where the event is happening. And when that person gets there, his phone will acquire that local time.
So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.
Of course. But if you want to get the investors to force a change, the stock price has to go down.
Even if it does go down, that doesn't mean the investors will blame the right person — there's a reason why the English language retains the phrase "scape-goat" — but it has to go down or the investors will say "why would I change this?"
Edit: I originally phrased this as "if you want to get kick-back from the investors", turns out "kick-back" doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
Yeah I knew throwing Ive in there invites a skeptical response, but I really detest that guy's product-degrading mania and attitude.
And while the company obviously still thrived, Ive's intellectually bankrupt (and defective) design got bad enough to embarrass Apple even in the mainstream press. I thought this WSJ article was a brilliant dig: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...
Agreed on the "pets" idea. I've even seen this from former Apple tech leaders. I've been one of the "pets" and it benefitted my career tremendously and, frankly, above my capabilities at the time; yet it gave me the opportunity to step in and fill out bigger shoes.
When I was there the stance on "intelligence" was that Apple doesn't advertise itself as "AI" or "ML". It just builds good products by any means and if it happens to use particular technologies, then fine. Not so anymore.
Thanks for the anecdote. I think a lot of us have been there, promoted into roles we're not quite ready for. The responsible ones kick into high gear to meet the challenge. I remember cramming a new programming language and framework when faced with a potential high-profile (public) failure for a new employer.
But when people repeatedly demonstrate that they don't have the mindset or aptitude for the role, or important aspects of it, they need to be relieved of responsibility for those aspects. I'm griping about the individuals for whom that isn't done.
Thanks for the link, but I don't think that fixes the problem. If anything, it looks like it'll make it worse. If I'm traveling from CA to NY and I enter a bunch of meetings and flight, and then get to NY and enter some additional ones... they're going to be wrong.
Was interviewing for a role. Interviews lasted for 7 months total, 12 interviews, for 2 teams, and then they closed the roles and didn't hire anyone. Not really impressed by Apple.
I had a similar story. But it makes sense.
Because of the image and brand value they project, they get a lot of people who just want to work for them because of that. Thus, they have a lot of options and can be wasting people's time without much downside since they have the bankroll to finance all that inefficiency.
But it's really not fair for the people applying, that's for sure.
In any case, I don't think it's worth applying for a job at Apple unless you already are a well-known (semi)authority in your field so you can have a minimum amount of power to somewhat dictate the terms.
Apple treats their supplier very badly, there is no reason they would do otherwise with people they don't really need.
If Apple were to be personified it would be the narcissistic mean girl that is extremely popular because of her beauty.
One of my coworkers at Apple once wondered aloud to his manager “What does anyone actually have to do around here to get fired?!” (About a coworker who effectively only made work for other people)
There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you were likable and didn’t leak you could work there seemingly forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying the “do your life’s work” pitch.
I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you could get fired was becoming the “directly responsible individual” for something important to a senior person and dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior people didn’t trust or care about that there was ample opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me did.
Wonder if that's still the case today when seemingly every software company has now been laying people off en masse for the better part of three years.
That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest" in the late 2010s.
Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software org at large?
I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths.
Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead.
Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.
Apple is a huge organization with a lot of internal variance. Knew someone doing localization testing for Siri and reported severe understaffing issues. There are some very small teams with crucial tasks that are badly under-resourced.
To be clear, I was not in the AI/ML org but the news org so make of that what you will. I can also confirm a similar and at times even more bonkers experience.
I also think it is expected for any sufficiently large bureaucracy. Scale is hard.
That reminds me of the Microsoft of 20+ years ago, I remember reading an interview with Bill Gates where he had been frustrated with something in the new software and tried to pursue getting it fixed, but was stonewalled and diverted until he simply gave up. Contrasting this with Steve Jobs reportedly being a massive dickhead, barging into developer offices, shouting and screaming and firing people who didn't jump to do what he wanted immediately, but the Apple software worked and didn't have the cruft in the end.
Something that amuses me is that this method demonstrably works, but is unpleasant to almost everybody involved. Fundamentally, kicking people up the ass is... not nice. However, it must be done, because otherwise large organisations have a natural tendency towards disorder and indolence.
Whenever you hear people bitching about CEOs like Jobs, Bezos, or Musk, just keep in mind that most people's opinions are second-hand from people who got their arse kicked.
Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.
Haha isn't that how Americans measure happiness? Like how in Eastern Germany the news always talked about increasing grain harvests American news always talks about how many billionaires get invited to Trump's inauguration party.
You can live in a trailer park next with your meth addicted family but Musk is getting richer.
Yep and this is why many modern organizations are going to shit.
Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but also very often punished. You need to have a lot of power to get away with it.
In my opinion all of this comes from submitting from the feminine way of working. Most women get shit done from men just by asking nicely (even when it's not really in their interest). Then they wrongly assumed that is how everything should work and pushed the "asking nicely" way of working everywhere.
Here is some anecdote. In in youth, I learned/played the french horn. Most of my teachers where nice feminine men, I was making progress but very slowly. But one year I got a guy that was out of the army music, he didn't take bullshit and forced me to work in a way the others never did. This year my progress was orders of magnitude better than any other year. At the time I thought he was a bit of an asshole, but now I know that if I had to choose, I would rather have someone like him. I quit french horn 3 years after, there were many reasons but not having a strong inspiring teacher was one of them for sure.
>Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but also very often punished.
Well the pendulum is swinging back. But it is going to take at least 10-15 years. As with everything we need both, and use them when ever it is appreciate.
Based on the FHE work being done at Apple, I wouldn’t say the organization is completely ineffective as an outsider. Based on this, is it fair to say that the issue is of dead weight in the company?
> a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean
This is what a "job security fortress" looks like when management has more money and less sense than they know what to do with.
> a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
They need to rethink their entire strategy. What on earth possessed them to believe I wanted "summaries" of communications which have an average length of far less than 100 words anyways.
If "prompt engineering" and "phantom husbands" are a thing you don't have a viable mass market product.
Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI. Everyone is building out capabilities so they can quickly implement one when it arrives, while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime. Currently text summarization (as realized) isn’t the killer app, but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.
I deny it. Who wants to have a conversation with a computer that’s just stringing bullshit together in the way it thinks sounds most plausibly human? I’d rather talk to… a human.
> Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI.
There's literally millions of them. The gulf is that the current technology cannot possibly do any of those things.
> Everyone is building out capabilities
They're burning billions on a method that has already started showing diminishing returns. There's no exponential growth on the horizon with the current stack.
> while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime
If you told me this was your business plan I would short everything of yours I could.
> but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.
An infrastructure that will be outdated and unjustifiably expensive in 5 years. It's like we're pretending that the history of business for all time has nothing to do with the business of AI.
Those unwilling to stare history in the face will be eaten by it.
I am probably suffering confirmation bias. But that said, this LLM smartness continues to be impressively shit. There's a level of "yea that's cool" but it's outweighed by "that'd be wrong, and suggests you understand nothing about me or my data"
It's a little (ok a lot) like targeted ads. I'll believe it's targeted when it tries to sell me ancillary, related goods for e.g. that fridge freezer I bought, not show me ads for fridge freezer I now don't need.
Likewise, I do wonder how much of my enthusiasm is confirmation bias. Could it just be a Clever Hans? I think it has to be at least a little smarter than that, even just to get code that usually compiles, but still, I am aware that it may be more smoke and mirrors than it feels like, that I may be in the cargo cult, metaphorically putting a paper slip into the head of a clay golem shaped like Brent Spiner.
Targeted ads are a useful reference point. A decade back, everyone was horrified (or amazed) by that story of supermarkets knowing some teenager was pregnant before their father did. But today… the category in which your fridge example is, is the best it gets for me — even Facebook, for the most part, is on-par with my actual spam folder, with ads for both boob surgery and dick pills, ads for lawyers based in a country I don't live in who specialise in giving up a citizenship I never had, recommendations for sports groups focusing on a sport I don't follow in a state I've never visited of a country I haven't set foot in since 2018. Plus, very occasionally, ads for things I already have.
Yeah, framing is the key. Put LLM in autocomplete, and it is "oh wow this thing reads my mind". Present it as an expert counselor and "this stupid bot does not know we have no bridge in our city" or something.
Products no, I don't think that will happen. The market will be so small and manufacturers won't service that market due to cost. For services, maybe. I can see a bank or an ISP advertise with "No AI customer service, only real people" and especially elderly paying extra for that service.
One thing that I do wonder about is the value in adding AI and "Smartness", what if people don't use it? I know practically no one who uses their smart TV as anything but a monitor (and speakers). Everyone adds an AppleTV or a ChromeCast. My in-laws used Netflix on their Sony TV for a bit, but it was slow and two years ago Netflix stopped being supported on their TV and I gave them an old ChromeCast. Backed in AI could easily end up in the same situation. It's omni-present, but rarely used. That's a problem with the current logic behind innovation where little market research is done and companies are afraid to remove functionality as it may make them look less competitive (in the eyes of shareholders).
Someone point out that apparently Romanian online electronics retailers have a pretty nice selection of dumb TVs, at least they did a few years ago.
The OEMs don't care Netflix is no longer supported - they're OCR'ing, hashing, and selling what you're watching either way. They only need you to care enough to hook it up to the internet in the first place so they can sell what their users are watching
Yeah, exactly. Undiscerning shoppers hear "Smart" TV and either assume it's better or buy whatever's put in front of them most loudly without even wondering if it's better or not. Those same people will ensure that AI products are successful and alternatives will similarly disappear.
I am surprised the artist/handcraft community has not yet agreed on a way to signal that, given the strong sentiment.
It totally would make sense in, e.g. art or photography (or, strangely, crocheting) circles to show that this image of a mouse was not vomited by an ML that had eaten too much LAION
Photography has C2PA to have a cryptographically verifiable chain of provenance for images. That way you can see what camera took the image and which edits were done.
It's fairly new, but with the mess around stock photo sites having undeclared AI images I wouldn't be surprised if it sites eventually showcase this information
This is an excellent thing to have with a very narrow usage (e.g. journalism)
I do not see this getting into consumer phone images, screenshots or such things.
Also, c2pa as done by Adobe simply records signed list of what AI tools were used, and, since they are pushing AI into everything, good luck deriving anything useful from that list of modifications.
Also, I've seen a few photographers on internet on one hand hating AI with all their might, and on other proudly sharing their "technique" of upscaling blurry mess photos to huge sizes using Topaz Labs. I mean...
> Apple’s AI tools were built with responsible AI principles to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and systemic biases.
This is either a straight up lie or an extreme stretching of the truth.
This is from the Danish models but literally this is what it puts as autocomplete for “woman are …”
> woman we not worth as much as men
And it’s not a one off. It’s been going around social media that autocomplete for a long range of other initial phrases are just as stereotypically chauvinistic or racist. It’s pretty clear that no effort was taken at all to sanitize the models.
And no, it’s not using your chat history, though it used to do this. Which just makes things worse as there things are being spread because everyone who draws attention to it on things like Facebook are immediately accused of being a racists or chauvinist.
I want to sympathize, but also isn't that what you sign up for when you use AI products? Or is OP saying that iPhones have AI features you don't opt into? (I don't have an iPhone)
AI is not perfect (and I personally think it's all BS) but why would you use AI features and then complain that you get hallucinations? The state of the art isn't error-proof, petitioning Apple to do better than state-of-the-art seems kind of meaningless?
I'm a big fan of LLMs generally, but does anyone even want incoming texts summarized like this? Like even if they were accurate summaries, seeing "Wife expresses frustration with her husband's messiness" is a lot less fun than "Clean up your clothes, dipshit".
It’s probably my favorite of the AI features on Apple devices now.
My wife and I both have a habit of sending multiple small messages rather than a large one. Probably because we both used IRC extensively on the past and grew up on length-limited SMSes. The summaries are very very handy at letting me glance at my notification's and see if anything in her last x messages needs a reply now or whether it’s just “chat”.
I’ve found LLM summaries of stuff in general to be one of the handiest uses of it personally.
My wife loves to carpet bomb messages and the summary is often useful to glance at to see how important they are. But the inaccuracy prevents it from being useful and I'll often open the entire stream of thought even though I don't have time between meetings.
I find the whole summarization use case completely misses the mark. If a message is from someone I want to hear from, just give it to me verbatim. Otherwise, give me tools to delay/down-prioritize/ignore their messages.
I get the sense that making group chats silent by default would have a more useful impact on notification overload than AI summaries.
The entertainment value for me is in seeing these features turned in by Apple/Meta/Google and then working backwards to the real use cases they must be seeing. They simply wouldn’t do it if people didn’t want it, hence lots of people want it. You’re all weirdos.
I also find it useful for group texts when a long conversation happens. Easier to get an idea when I don’t care to join in. Another use case for me is image descriptions, particularly in carplay.
I don't want any incoming texts at all if they are trivial complaints that can wait until we see each other in person and can actually have a conversation. Now if the AI could judge "this isn't an emergency" and just present the messages at the end of the day, or at least when I'm not otherwise busy, that might be something.
Summarization model is crap, so it needs to be used for crap. Like Trump news, or latest office slack drama. I want the messages from my loved ones unabridged. Right now, Apple is unable to discern these use cases.
> If you still have problems with it, turn it off... Have I done that? No, of course not. He may be messy and lack common sense, but that’s no reason for me to kill my husband!
I know this is probably a joke but it reminds me of the moral questions that appear in the Apple TV+ show Severance. The idea of turning off a feature being compared to "killing" someone reminds me of the innie/outtie moral quandaries.
Times "back then" had the same ambiguity, because the people were the same, but they were much more constrained, due to strictness of culture, and lack of information. Someone who might not be affected by such "ambiguity" would actually encounter it in others all the same, just in a way that would manifest not so directly, but as something like lack of sex drive, constant low mood, incarceration and stigmatization due to culturally inappropriate sex expression, or unexpected violence, either towards self, or others.
Very important to understand that the people didn't change, we just understand more of how humans work more than before. The current understanding is far from perfect too - I'm sure people not 100 years later will look back to the current one as archaic, or missing something very important, that they now understand commonly. The people back then were not any better or worse, or different, than we are today.
There is nothing new about trans people --- it's just that fewer of them are in hiding now. And "pretending to be the opposite sex" is transphobic, you may want to rethink.
Since the parent has been rightfully flagged, I can’t tell if the author even considered the possibility that Joanna’s wife is a cis woman. Here’s a NY Times article announcing their wedding: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/fashion/weddings/a-spark-...
I mean its like the opposite of a western invention. Lots of places had the concept of someone changing their gender or not being a part of the male/female gender binary, before the west came along and colonised them and said that everyone is a man or a woman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history talks about instances of non-binary and transgender representations going back to the neolithic and bronze age
Doesn't that article you linked make a similar point about trans being a recent concept, and that the validity of retroactive application is disputed?
> The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.
> [...]
> A precise history of the global occurrence of transgender people is difficult to compose because the modern concept of being transgender, and of gender in general as relevant to transgender identity, did not develop until the mid-20th century. Historical understandings are thus inherently filtered through modern principles, and were largely viewed through a medical lens until the late 20th century.
> [...]
> Absence of autobiographical accounts has resulted in historians assigning identities to historical figures, which of course may be inaccurate.
I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple’s AI/ML organization.
It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.
They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
This is why I don’t believe in private sector efficiency. You go in any company and most of the employees are morons and they’ll be paying contractors £1000/day to write a hello world service in new azure WorldGreeter(tm)
Apple also cultivates "pets" who suck, but for some personal-connection or political reason have received or curried favor that results in them being retained and even promoted through Apple's organization despite high-profile and embarrassing failures. See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from experience.
Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor.
And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI" BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a different time zone.
There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?
The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other people and you had sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong time.
> The calendar thing is working correctly.
Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.
In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.
There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.
Exactly. I was thinking through how I would want this expressed in the UI, and
Time zone: Local
was exactly what I came up with.
The absurd thing about Apple's approach is, as you point out, that it serves the tiny minority of use cases. Who the hell looks up the time zone of everything they're going to do when they're traveling around? I just want it to use the time shown on the phone!
Edit event -> tap the time -> time zone -> type the city name.
(No need to look up the timezone.)
I agree that calendar’s UI is a bit of a tire fire. One of Apple’s core UI design tenants is that you should be continuously surprised and delighted when you use iPhone, and then share your discoveries with friends to build up an Apple user community.
I don’t want the phone to surprise and delight me, or hide major features like a 1990’s microsoft excel easter egg.
For instance, why in the hell are “magnifier” and “scan + ocr document to pdf” not in the camera app?
It is possible on macOS with the Floating time zone: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/calendar/icl1035/mac#i...
This doesn’t look possible on the iOS/iPadOS Calendar apps.
Thanks for the link. Apple's language on this whole mess is of no help. First there's their use of "Turn on time zone support" which is meaningless. You'd think this would be the solution: turning it off and breathing a sigh of relief. But no; this does not stop the behavior.
As far as "floating," it says: "To keep the event from moving when you view a different time zone, choose Floating."
When I VIEW a different time zone? Does this also mean when I'm IN a different time zone?
Anyway... I will have to create a dummy "floating" appointment on my Mac before my next trip and see what the phone does with it when I get there. But it sure seems like this setting needs to exist on the mobile devices too...
In the macOS version of Calendar, “Time Zone Support” is the name of a feature in the Settings window. When you check that checkbox, twi things happen: - the event inspector adds a timezone selector the the Start and End date/time pickers - the window titlebar gains a timezone picker.
The timezone picker in the window titlebar defaults to your system’s current timezone. When you create an event, the start and end times for that event default to the window’s current timezone.
You can use the newly-revealed picker in the inspector to change the timezone of an event. There is a single picker that alters both the start and end time. If you set this to something other than the timezone chosen in the window’s titlebar, the event will move to reflect when it will occur in the window’s timezone.
I am personally convinced this is what people want 99% of the time, and I think it’s silly that you have to check a checkbox in Calendar Settings to get it. It’s fairly common to receive details for an event in another timezone, such as a conference call or vacation. I live with Time Zone Support enabled on all my Macs, and while I rarely touch the timezone picker in the titlebar I make frequent use of the timezone picker when setting the event details window.
There’s one special option in the event details timezone picker: “Floating”. This tells Calendar to always reckon the start and end times in the timezone selected in the window’s titlebar. So if you create an event that starts at 7am and set its timezone to “Floating”, the event will always be shown to begin at 7am even if you change your system’s timezone or the timezone in the titlebar. I don’t use this feature much, but it’s useful for plotting out your daily routine. If you go for at 6am every day, regardless of where you are on the planet, you can create a floating “Daily Run” event that starts at 6am and doesn’t shift as you travel.
The iPhone version of calendar is designed differently. There is no “Time Zone Support” checkbox on iPhone. The event details view always shows time zone pickers for both the start and end times. This lets you create an event with the start and end times specified in local times in different timezones. I use this feature for every single flight I take, and I always have to enter them on my phone because the Mac doesn’t let you set the start and end timezones independently.
But the iPhone doesn’t let you choose Floating in the time zone picker, so you can’t use it to create daily-routine events. Thankfully, all versions of Calendar preserve the data and behavior of events created on any platform, so you can create your Floating events in a Mac and your timezone-spanning flights on an iPhone and they will render as expected on the other device, including the Event Details window.
Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly.
I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.
Many people enter appointments without enough detail to say it is not going to be held at your current location. e.g for a planned vacation "3pm check for concert tickets", which will indeed stay at PST and show up on your phone at 6pm in New York.
It's trivial to consider any event that did not specify a time zone to happen at local time, wherever that is, and not change its time when the phone's zone changes. Business software will set a zone, self-entered or casual appointments won't, so that matches usage. At worst, display a warning sign on the calendar entry. The default is "do no harm", not "we didn't know you didn't mean us not to do harm".
What if I have two devices in different time zones? Should such an event show up at different times on each?
Yes. It stands to reason that you'll only see the ones where you actually are.
Yeah, probably. That's how time zones work.
It could theoretically use the location field to show a warning like "Which time zone, current or event location?"
Mandatorily attaching a time zone to an event is the design defect. When a person in the real world is given the times of events, he is given those in the time local to where the event is happening. And when that person gets there, his phone will acquire that local time.
So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.
> See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
> When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry?
For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
It would take a lot to upset the investors, given the overall win rate.
> For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe.
Of course. But if you want to get the investors to force a change, the stock price has to go down.
Even if it does go down, that doesn't mean the investors will blame the right person — there's a reason why the English language retains the phrase "scape-goat" — but it has to go down or the investors will say "why would I change this?"
Edit: I originally phrased this as "if you want to get kick-back from the investors", turns out "kick-back" doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
Yeah I knew throwing Ive in there invites a skeptical response, but I really detest that guy's product-degrading mania and attitude.
And while the company obviously still thrived, Ive's intellectually bankrupt (and defective) design got bad enough to embarrass Apple even in the mainstream press. I thought this WSJ article was a brilliant dig: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...
Agreed on the "pets" idea. I've even seen this from former Apple tech leaders. I've been one of the "pets" and it benefitted my career tremendously and, frankly, above my capabilities at the time; yet it gave me the opportunity to step in and fill out bigger shoes.
When I was there the stance on "intelligence" was that Apple doesn't advertise itself as "AI" or "ML". It just builds good products by any means and if it happens to use particular technologies, then fine. Not so anymore.
Thanks for the anecdote. I think a lot of us have been there, promoted into roles we're not quite ready for. The responsible ones kick into high gear to meet the challenge. I remember cramming a new programming language and framework when faced with a potential high-profile (public) failure for a new employer.
But when people repeatedly demonstrate that they don't have the mindset or aptitude for the role, or important aspects of it, they need to be relieved of responsibility for those aspects. I'm griping about the individuals for whom that isn't done.
That does seem like it would be confusing, especially the first time around.
That said, you are able to fix your calendar to a specified time zone: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-even...
Thanks for the link, but I don't think that fixes the problem. If anything, it looks like it'll make it worse. If I'm traveling from CA to NY and I enter a bunch of meetings and flight, and then get to NY and enter some additional ones... they're going to be wrong.
Was interviewing for a role. Interviews lasted for 7 months total, 12 interviews, for 2 teams, and then they closed the roles and didn't hire anyone. Not really impressed by Apple.
I had a similar story. But it makes sense. Because of the image and brand value they project, they get a lot of people who just want to work for them because of that. Thus, they have a lot of options and can be wasting people's time without much downside since they have the bankroll to finance all that inefficiency. But it's really not fair for the people applying, that's for sure.
In any case, I don't think it's worth applying for a job at Apple unless you already are a well-known (semi)authority in your field so you can have a minimum amount of power to somewhat dictate the terms. Apple treats their supplier very badly, there is no reason they would do otherwise with people they don't really need.
If Apple were to be personified it would be the narcissistic mean girl that is extremely popular because of her beauty.
I'd love to hear from anyone else who work(s/ed) at Apple to confirm or deny this story.
One of my coworkers at Apple once wondered aloud to his manager “What does anyone actually have to do around here to get fired?!” (About a coworker who effectively only made work for other people)
There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you were likable and didn’t leak you could work there seemingly forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying the “do your life’s work” pitch.
I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you could get fired was becoming the “directly responsible individual” for something important to a senior person and dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior people didn’t trust or care about that there was ample opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me did.
Wonder if that's still the case today when seemingly every software company has now been laying people off en masse for the better part of three years.
That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest" in the late 2010s.
Can confirm. I was a Technology Evangelist (adjacent t,o but not the same as, Developer Relations) for certain web and app technologies.
The dept I reported to was laid-off en mass in late-2015/early-2016.
I interviewed for the iOS design team later that year and after several months and two interviews was ghosted and never heard from them again.
Can confirm.
Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software org at large?
I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths.
Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead.
Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.
Apple is a huge organization with a lot of internal variance. Knew someone doing localization testing for Siri and reported severe understaffing issues. There are some very small teams with crucial tasks that are badly under-resourced.
These happen to be the Xcode and macOS-parts-not-copied-from-iOS teams?
To be clear, I was not in the AI/ML org but the news org so make of that what you will. I can also confirm a similar and at times even more bonkers experience.
I also think it is expected for any sufficiently large bureaucracy. Scale is hard.
That reminds me of the Microsoft of 20+ years ago, I remember reading an interview with Bill Gates where he had been frustrated with something in the new software and tried to pursue getting it fixed, but was stonewalled and diverted until he simply gave up. Contrasting this with Steve Jobs reportedly being a massive dickhead, barging into developer offices, shouting and screaming and firing people who didn't jump to do what he wanted immediately, but the Apple software worked and didn't have the cruft in the end.
Possibly “Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker” (https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...)
Something that amuses me is that this method demonstrably works, but is unpleasant to almost everybody involved. Fundamentally, kicking people up the ass is... not nice. However, it must be done, because otherwise large organisations have a natural tendency towards disorder and indolence.
Whenever you hear people bitching about CEOs like Jobs, Bezos, or Musk, just keep in mind that most people's opinions are second-hand from people who got their arse kicked.
Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.
> Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.
Everything is permitted if someone gets fabulously rich in the end. Got it.
Why is this a surprise? Do people really drink the democracy equality kool aid
Haha isn't that how Americans measure happiness? Like how in Eastern Germany the news always talked about increasing grain harvests American news always talks about how many billionaires get invited to Trump's inauguration party.
You can live in a trailer park next with your meth addicted family but Musk is getting richer.
Oxy, not meth. Get your facts straight. That’s just hurtful:
After their recent legal troubles, the Sacklers only have $10B left. They need all our support to get through these trying times.
Yep and this is why many modern organizations are going to shit. Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but also very often punished. You need to have a lot of power to get away with it. In my opinion all of this comes from submitting from the feminine way of working. Most women get shit done from men just by asking nicely (even when it's not really in their interest). Then they wrongly assumed that is how everything should work and pushed the "asking nicely" way of working everywhere.
Here is some anecdote. In in youth, I learned/played the french horn. Most of my teachers where nice feminine men, I was making progress but very slowly. But one year I got a guy that was out of the army music, he didn't take bullshit and forced me to work in a way the others never did. This year my progress was orders of magnitude better than any other year. At the time I thought he was a bit of an asshole, but now I know that if I had to choose, I would rather have someone like him. I quit french horn 3 years after, there were many reasons but not having a strong inspiring teacher was one of them for sure.
>Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but also very often punished.
Well the pendulum is swinging back. But it is going to take at least 10-15 years. As with everything we need both, and use them when ever it is appreciate.
Based on the FHE work being done at Apple, I wouldn’t say the organization is completely ineffective as an outsider. Based on this, is it fair to say that the issue is of dead weight in the company?
FHE as in fully-homomorphic encryption ?
> a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean
This is what a "job security fortress" looks like when management has more money and less sense than they know what to do with.
> a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
They need to rethink their entire strategy. What on earth possessed them to believe I wanted "summaries" of communications which have an average length of far less than 100 words anyways.
If "prompt engineering" and "phantom husbands" are a thing you don't have a viable mass market product.
Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI. Everyone is building out capabilities so they can quickly implement one when it arrives, while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime. Currently text summarization (as realized) isn’t the killer app, but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.
chatgpt is undeniably the killer app for LLMs
I deny it. Who wants to have a conversation with a computer that’s just stringing bullshit together in the way it thinks sounds most plausibly human? I’d rather talk to… a human.
> Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI.
There's literally millions of them. The gulf is that the current technology cannot possibly do any of those things.
> Everyone is building out capabilities
They're burning billions on a method that has already started showing diminishing returns. There's no exponential growth on the horizon with the current stack.
> while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime
If you told me this was your business plan I would short everything of yours I could.
> but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.
An infrastructure that will be outdated and unjustifiably expensive in 5 years. It's like we're pretending that the history of business for all time has nothing to do with the business of AI.
Those unwilling to stare history in the face will be eaten by it.
I am probably suffering confirmation bias. But that said, this LLM smartness continues to be impressively shit. There's a level of "yea that's cool" but it's outweighed by "that'd be wrong, and suggests you understand nothing about me or my data"
It's a little (ok a lot) like targeted ads. I'll believe it's targeted when it tries to sell me ancillary, related goods for e.g. that fridge freezer I bought, not show me ads for fridge freezer I now don't need.
Likewise, I do wonder how much of my enthusiasm is confirmation bias. Could it just be a Clever Hans? I think it has to be at least a little smarter than that, even just to get code that usually compiles, but still, I am aware that it may be more smoke and mirrors than it feels like, that I may be in the cargo cult, metaphorically putting a paper slip into the head of a clay golem shaped like Brent Spiner.
Targeted ads are a useful reference point. A decade back, everyone was horrified (or amazed) by that story of supermarkets knowing some teenager was pregnant before their father did. But today… the category in which your fridge example is, is the best it gets for me — even Facebook, for the most part, is on-par with my actual spam folder, with ads for both boob surgery and dick pills, ads for lawyers based in a country I don't live in who specialise in giving up a citizenship I never had, recommendations for sports groups focusing on a sport I don't follow in a state I've never visited of a country I haven't set foot in since 2018. Plus, very occasionally, ads for things I already have.
Yeah, framing is the key. Put LLM in autocomplete, and it is "oh wow this thing reads my mind". Present it as an expert counselor and "this stupid bot does not know we have no bridge in our city" or something.
I wonder how long it will take for "guaranteed AI-free!" to become a serious marketing argument for some products or services.
As someone who has shopped for a dumb TV, this may very well never happen.
Products no, I don't think that will happen. The market will be so small and manufacturers won't service that market due to cost. For services, maybe. I can see a bank or an ISP advertise with "No AI customer service, only real people" and especially elderly paying extra for that service.
One thing that I do wonder about is the value in adding AI and "Smartness", what if people don't use it? I know practically no one who uses their smart TV as anything but a monitor (and speakers). Everyone adds an AppleTV or a ChromeCast. My in-laws used Netflix on their Sony TV for a bit, but it was slow and two years ago Netflix stopped being supported on their TV and I gave them an old ChromeCast. Backed in AI could easily end up in the same situation. It's omni-present, but rarely used. That's a problem with the current logic behind innovation where little market research is done and companies are afraid to remove functionality as it may make them look less competitive (in the eyes of shareholders).
Someone point out that apparently Romanian online electronics retailers have a pretty nice selection of dumb TVs, at least they did a few years ago.
The OEMs don't care Netflix is no longer supported - they're OCR'ing, hashing, and selling what you're watching either way. They only need you to care enough to hook it up to the internet in the first place so they can sell what their users are watching
Yeah, exactly. Undiscerning shoppers hear "Smart" TV and either assume it's better or buy whatever's put in front of them most loudly without even wondering if it's better or not. Those same people will ensure that AI products are successful and alternatives will similarly disappear.
People buy the cheapest option.
Two identical TVs the same size and make, one “smart”, one not. The smart is $10 cheaper, people go for that.
This. And the smart one is cheaper because it's a collection device for data on you that they can sell.
I am surprised the artist/handcraft community has not yet agreed on a way to signal that, given the strong sentiment.
It totally would make sense in, e.g. art or photography (or, strangely, crocheting) circles to show that this image of a mouse was not vomited by an ML that had eaten too much LAION
Photography has C2PA to have a cryptographically verifiable chain of provenance for images. That way you can see what camera took the image and which edits were done.
It's fairly new, but with the mess around stock photo sites having undeclared AI images I wouldn't be surprised if it sites eventually showcase this information
https://c2pa.org/
This is an excellent thing to have with a very narrow usage (e.g. journalism)
I do not see this getting into consumer phone images, screenshots or such things.
Also, c2pa as done by Adobe simply records signed list of what AI tools were used, and, since they are pushing AI into everything, good luck deriving anything useful from that list of modifications.
Also, I've seen a few photographers on internet on one hand hating AI with all their might, and on other proudly sharing their "technique" of upscaling blurry mess photos to huge sizes using Topaz Labs. I mean...
> Apple’s AI tools were built with responsible AI principles to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and systemic biases.
This is either a straight up lie or an extreme stretching of the truth.
This is from the Danish models but literally this is what it puts as autocomplete for “woman are …”
> woman we not worth as much as men
And it’s not a one off. It’s been going around social media that autocomplete for a long range of other initial phrases are just as stereotypically chauvinistic or racist. It’s pretty clear that no effort was taken at all to sanitize the models.
And no, it’s not using your chat history, though it used to do this. Which just makes things worse as there things are being spread because everyone who draws attention to it on things like Facebook are immediately accused of being a racists or chauvinist.
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I want to sympathize, but also isn't that what you sign up for when you use AI products? Or is OP saying that iPhones have AI features you don't opt into? (I don't have an iPhone)
AI is not perfect (and I personally think it's all BS) but why would you use AI features and then complain that you get hallucinations? The state of the art isn't error-proof, petitioning Apple to do better than state-of-the-art seems kind of meaningless?
I'm a big fan of LLMs generally, but does anyone even want incoming texts summarized like this? Like even if they were accurate summaries, seeing "Wife expresses frustration with her husband's messiness" is a lot less fun than "Clean up your clothes, dipshit".
It’s probably my favorite of the AI features on Apple devices now.
My wife and I both have a habit of sending multiple small messages rather than a large one. Probably because we both used IRC extensively on the past and grew up on length-limited SMSes. The summaries are very very handy at letting me glance at my notification's and see if anything in her last x messages needs a reply now or whether it’s just “chat”.
I’ve found LLM summaries of stuff in general to be one of the handiest uses of it personally.
My wife loves to carpet bomb messages and the summary is often useful to glance at to see how important they are. But the inaccuracy prevents it from being useful and I'll often open the entire stream of thought even though I don't have time between meetings.
> I don’t have time between meetings
[guillotine raises]
I turned these summaries off, but then turned them back on because I find them humorous.
A bit notable: the AI summarization of spam texts makes them seem much more credible.
There is no 'ironic user only' option in the analytics.
There probably should be.
It's useful for multiple texts. Single ones not so much.
I find the whole summarization use case completely misses the mark. If a message is from someone I want to hear from, just give it to me verbatim. Otherwise, give me tools to delay/down-prioritize/ignore their messages.
I get the sense that making group chats silent by default would have a more useful impact on notification overload than AI summaries.
The entertainment value for me is in seeing these features turned in by Apple/Meta/Google and then working backwards to the real use cases they must be seeing. They simply wouldn’t do it if people didn’t want it, hence lots of people want it. You’re all weirdos.
I also find it useful for group texts when a long conversation happens. Easier to get an idea when I don’t care to join in. Another use case for me is image descriptions, particularly in carplay.
I don't want any incoming texts at all if they are trivial complaints that can wait until we see each other in person and can actually have a conversation. Now if the AI could judge "this isn't an emergency" and just present the messages at the end of the day, or at least when I'm not otherwise busy, that might be something.
Summarization model is crap, so it needs to be used for crap. Like Trump news, or latest office slack drama. I want the messages from my loved ones unabridged. Right now, Apple is unable to discern these use cases.
I’m sorry Gal, you have a husband now.
> If you still have problems with it, turn it off... Have I done that? No, of course not. He may be messy and lack common sense, but that’s no reason for me to kill my husband!
I know this is probably a joke but it reminds me of the moral questions that appear in the Apple TV+ show Severance. The idea of turning off a feature being compared to "killing" someone reminds me of the innie/outtie moral quandaries.
As I said a while back Apple is also dying.
So am I would be cool to have billions while doing so lol
Having some problems is not dying. Also, in what way would Apple be dying? What quality of it do you see as in being in an irrecoverable decline?
I think you mean beleaguered/doomed.
Who isn't, these days?
Microsoft
This would be an Apple Maps-level disaster, if people actually relied upon smartphone A.I. features for day to day use.
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The article states the author has no husband, only a wife, so the LLM is incorrect
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Times "back then" had the same ambiguity, because the people were the same, but they were much more constrained, due to strictness of culture, and lack of information. Someone who might not be affected by such "ambiguity" would actually encounter it in others all the same, just in a way that would manifest not so directly, but as something like lack of sex drive, constant low mood, incarceration and stigmatization due to culturally inappropriate sex expression, or unexpected violence, either towards self, or others.
Very important to understand that the people didn't change, we just understand more of how humans work more than before. The current understanding is far from perfect too - I'm sure people not 100 years later will look back to the current one as archaic, or missing something very important, that they now understand commonly. The people back then were not any better or worse, or different, than we are today.
There is nothing new about trans people --- it's just that fewer of them are in hiding now. And "pretending to be the opposite sex" is transphobic, you may want to rethink.
Since the parent has been rightfully flagged, I can’t tell if the author even considered the possibility that Joanna’s wife is a cis woman. Here’s a NY Times article announcing their wedding: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/fashion/weddings/a-spark-...
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I mean its like the opposite of a western invention. Lots of places had the concept of someone changing their gender or not being a part of the male/female gender binary, before the west came along and colonised them and said that everyone is a man or a woman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history talks about instances of non-binary and transgender representations going back to the neolithic and bronze age
Doesn't that article you linked make a similar point about trans being a recent concept, and that the validity of retroactive application is disputed?
> The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.
> [...]
> A precise history of the global occurrence of transgender people is difficult to compose because the modern concept of being transgender, and of gender in general as relevant to transgender identity, did not develop until the mid-20th century. Historical understandings are thus inherently filtered through modern principles, and were largely viewed through a medical lens until the late 20th century.
> [...]
> Absence of autobiographical accounts has resulted in historians assigning identities to historical figures, which of course may be inaccurate.
The term may not have existed at the time in all cultures, but the concept of living as a gender different to that when you were born is very old