You're right that to deploy an app to Apple's app store you have to pay them. The $100/yr access ransom is unavoidable if you want to have the option of making money there.
But I've gone to great lengths to avoid the rest of the stuff that genuinely sucks about building for Apple: I use Flutter to avoid most of the iOS nonsense. I use Android Studio on Linux for the vast majority of my development. I target Android/web/iOS and test mainly on the first two. I use codemagic.io to avoid having to have a mac to run ios builds.
I did have to borrow a mac and use xcode to set up my project, I wish that weren't the case.
I'd love to tell iOS users to just use the web version, but in-app purchases on web are a real headache compared to mobile and I haven't set up Stripe or equivalent. And Apple has crippled the web experience on iOS anyway with Safari.
Does any of my approach "vote with my wallet"? No. It's just for me, to avoid the horrible experience of Apple to the extent possible while also reaching users that choose to use iOS.
I don't particularly care about Android Auto (I generally prefer standard bluetooth for audio, and directly setting the phone up for navigation), but if a manufacturer supports CarPlay and not Android Auto, they can get lost. I hate how Apple stuff is an assumed default.
Effectively no one does that. I think there might be one or two ultra luxury cars that do, but in general no one does. Because they don’t wanna cut off any of their audience.
And at this point it seems like 80% of car manufacturers just ship android automotive anyway. You really think they’re gonna do that and turn off android auto support?
I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
That is something that AI is not giving us today. By design. Companies are not switching to AI customer service because it's better or cheaper for the same service. They are choosing to replace customer service with AI chat bots that simulate the customer service experience without actually providing the service part.
> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
Every time a business tries to make a "connection" its really just an avenue to exploit or manipulate me. I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).
I'm not asking for altruism but I am asking for them to drop the pretense and quit bullshitting me.
Then they’re doing it wrong. That’s a faux “connection” that just serves the business and not you. I would bet that if you experienced true connection, you’d love it, but you’ve been scammed by fraudsters so many times that you are suspicious of anything that doesn’t feel strictly transactional.
Even the first story in the article sounds gross and creepy to me "The team became mini-concierges. Every guest walked in to find someone who knew them — not in a creepy, surveillance-state way, but in the way a good friend remembers what you’re going through."
I'm not going through anything. I just want some dinner.
And to be clear, the only reason they are doing this is strictly transactional. Good friends don't ask you to pay the bill at the end of dinner.
My parents used to go to the same restaurant every Friday night, for many many years. A little chit chat at the register each visit, it doesn't take long before you actually enjoy seeing that person. I began to suspect they continued going just so they had an excuse to see their friends.
You can't engineer these relationships, but you can encourage your staff to be open to a little chit chat. Make sure your team has the time and energy to be friendly. Your team has to be happy, and its needs to show.
I have no problem with the idea that you are going fill your place with good vibes so people actually want to go and hang out there!
I also had an older relative who took me to a nice restaurant several years ago. He had gone to that same restaurant since the 1970s and even though it had changed names over the years, he usually asked for the same waiter, an older man who had worked there for decades. They had chatted about their kids and other things in life. Maybe they weren't the most intimate of friends, but I've felt this same desire in some coffee shops and restaurants, where I want to talk to the same employee again and catch up on at least a couple of things we've discussed before. Maybe we don't do that with every business transaction, but it's nice to experience every now and then.
We used to have a holiday home in Cornwall when I was young. My father used to have a pint or two at the local pub most evenings when we were there, and we were there 3-4 weeks every year. Eventually we sold the house and stopped going.
My father happened to go back there about 15 years later, randomly on a road trip through Cornwall and thought he'd stop in for a pint for old times' sake. On walking through the door, the barman said "hello Simon, good to see you again, pint of the usual?".
I wonder how many people call in to have a pint at the pub purely because of that barman. I wonder if that pub has survived the cull of British pubs purely because of that barman.
My parents go to a kitbar (wine bar with open kitchen and waiters/bartenders who cook) every Wednesday night and have for a decade. They know the staff and have friendly chats with most of the people who work that shift, and it's a nice break in the week for them to get to chat with some young people who aren't their descendants. I come along when I'm in town, and everybody seems happy and cheerful. People work that kind of job, as opposed to, say, data center technician (a big career in that area) because they don't mind making connections with strangers.
Unless you can give a specific example of a "true connection", I don't think they would.
To "go beyond their expectations" requires understanding what they expected to begin with. They just told you that they want a transaction, not a sales pitch or series of intrusions. Things are considered trivial when they do not fit that person's lifestyle. Doing a whole lot of "yes and", rough personality profiling, or goal guessing isn't going to cut it either.
Many people just want to be left the hell alone. Many people have even shouted from the rooftops they'd pay absurd money to be left the hell alone. I guess nobody wants to make money, nor provide a "true connection".
> I’ll take “No true Scotsman” for $800 thank you Alex.
One valid use of "true" means "genuine", "loyal", and/or "faithful". Thus making the sentence fragment "if you experienced true connection" tantamount to "if you experienced genuine connection."
There are many businesses I frequent where I have a "true connection" with the people representing same, from well-known national chains to sole proprietorships.
Asserting the existence of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy in this context is inapplicable.
Businesses say they're trying to build "connection", but all they care about is getting customers to spend more and remain loyal to them. They don't care about connecting, which is why they will always fail.
You remind me of a hotel stay in Asia I had. After 10 minutes in the room, I get a WhatsApp message: "Welcome Mr. netsharc. How do you find the room?" (it was more verbose than this). It's from a business account which is the hotel (it's part of an international chain). I wanted to reply "Fine, but I don't want to talk to a bot. Leave me the hell alone." but thought it would upset the person on the other side since the country runs on politeness.
I imagine if I did reply like that there'd be some profuse apologizing, to which I'd think "Yeah, yeah, whatever, just leave me alone.".
All the businesses asking for a rating after I interacted with them also piss me off. Or worse, apps. I give them a bad rating on the play store with the text that the low score is due to the "Spam begging for app store ratings."
It is particularly bad when they use their workers as human shields. "If you are satisfied with my service please leave a 5star review, my name is Samantha, we get in trouble for less than 5 stars".
> I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).
I have. Go to a car place, build a rapport and the guy will likely apply discounts to your order. Go to the same place, make sure they know you and they'll give you discounts or extras because they know you're a repeat customer.
Many retail workers have some discretion. They're the front line workers. If you tell a manager at McDonalds that he's gotta listen to you yell for 15m to make the company an extra $10, that's not a trade they're willing to make. Hell he would even take it out of his own wallet if he had to (I would).
The whole "businesses do everything for their bottom line" is just some MBA bs and not at all how real businesses work.
I feel bad for all the people in this thread that apparently have never had a business do something nice for them for the sake of doing something nice.
I've had waiters throw in dessert because we had a good chat, store attendants give me free stuff because I mentioned a problem I had, even big chain employees will go above and beyond just because. All of this with no expectation of reciprocity. Really, I have concrete examples of all where the person helping had no reasonable expectation that I would come back.
If your whole life is purely transactional, and no one is giving you extra, it's time to look at how you move through the world. The problem might be you.
I have to wonder if there's something regional to this.
I used to live in a walkable neighborhood in a southern city, and I had several workers and owners at the businesses on my block who were chatty and we got along well. I tipped a dollar for my coffee every time at a local cafe, and the baristas would give me free coffees or ring up my coffee as a refill. The staff and several customers would often get into chats and I made a few friends just from going to that cafe in the afternoons a few weekdays a week.
That's because we don't make connections with businesses - we make connections with people. That one nice hair dresser. The pharmacist that goes out of her way to make sure my mom's medicines are right. A cashier that's just pleasant to talk with.
Years ago I did most of my grocery shopping at Target. I cared almost nothing about Target the chain. Or Target the super store. I did care about Betty the checker and wanted to know how her grandkids were doing this week.
We must turn back the tide on American microwave culture. Life isn't just about my time, my money...we share life with others, and life is so much better because of it.
"How to Rip Off the Dealership - Bastard Negotiating Tactics"
Without giving too much away, I liked this approach so much that when I bought my last motorcycle, I found a Kenco-equivalent in the Bay Area. It was a fantastic buying experience and I'm so glad I did.
High dollar purchases are stressful and a human touch, from someone that is genuinely interested in not only this sale but the next one, really helps.
Plus, if you buy a bike from a place like that, and something goes wrong, you are almost guaranteed to have it made right without having to fight about it like at a big dealer.
Me neither. I just want a business to get my stuff done in a standard way. Clear pricing upfront and no haggling. No surprise. If I hire someone to take care my yard, then take care of the yard. The price is reasonable. The plants thrive. The lawn is green. The irrigation system just works and does not leak. Connection, what connection?
What is the standard way? There are details which requires having a conversation and a relationship.
I certainly don't want a service to come early morning and wake up my kids or in the afternoon polluting the whole neighborhood with noise and fumes when I want to spend time outside.
>> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
I do want a connection. Because connection is what ensures that the transactional interactions continue to work outside of the "happy path". Connection is what ensures that you can return those expensive headphones you bought because extended use makes your neck hurt, even though the return window has passed.
Note that for the businesses mentioned in the article, the service is the product.
I don't care about service at a gas station - I want to fill my tank, pay, and get out. It's different when I take it to the mechanic - it's a rather old car, and I appreciate them talking intelligently about what the options are and what repairs they would suggest.
If I was getting 8 $ burritos with clearly marked ingredients and total automation end to end, I would gladly work with such a variant of Chipotle as well, even if it cuts workforce by 80% in such a scenario.
Frivolous employment maximisation with words like human connection do not make sense for survival necessities. It works better with discretionary spending
The grab app shows un-skippable ads. And some taxis even have ads "based on your interests" playing on a TV in front of your seat. I found their "no marketing" ;) to be almost too much.
I choose Grab mainly because I always have installed for GrabPay payments. Sometimes I use Gojek (often unloaded because my phone doesn't have much storage) because it's cheaper.
I avoid first-party taxi apps because they're shit and do dumb stuff like charge a 10% surcharge for credit card payments. They could get away with it 20 years ago, but I'm so glad Uber, Grab, and all the others are eating their lunch.
I dunno, I talk to the Doordash bot, it gives me a refund for the failed delivery because it didn't score me as doing fraud, I don't care there was no human involved. It's certainly an upgrade over the menu-driven approach that has no room for deviation.
Yea, on the same note I've had to call the cable company for internet outages a few times recently and the AI system handled the situation well. A few times it was neighborhood outages that it saw. One other time the system reset the modem configuration and the system came up, and one time it saw the interface on the modem was receiving errors and switched me over to a human to send a truck.
It really was much better than most cable related tech calls I've had.
The real issue is that you have to contact them at all.
It's been at least 5 years since I last got in contact with my ISP/cable provider. It took a few minutes for them to reply to my email (15 minutes on new years eve after hours) because a real human always replies. They can provide good service because the product is good enough to not need a call centre's worth of employees to deal with a queue of angry customers.
The area I live in has tons of house construction and all but one of the calls was because of external construction issues in the end. Doesn't matter how good your product is when morons with backhoes exist.
Depends on the company. Some companies have done a great job with their AI chat bots and I've been very impressed with the quality of service, even for queries which I consider quite complex.
i love connecting with a bookseller at a local independent bookstore. or a bartender. or a server. etc. such a more interesting life if you connect with people at the businesses in your community
My wife is a bookseller. She doesn't get tips. She genuinely likes her customers... most of them anyways. Wouldn't like someone that thinks she's only doing it for money since she gets paid whether she's nice or not, but she would still be nice to them.
Maybe some people really do take pride in their work. Worth trying sometime maybe?
they charge my $60 bar tab for $20 and get tipped $20. then the bar closes and we hang out at the bar drinking for free. you should only comment on things that you know about. sorry you don't have the same experience
Yes, but the Awful registration fee is more like a speedbump to make banned behavior at least a little expensive to the offending users. Most of the revenue comes from completely optional aesthetic purchases: avatars, avatars _for others_, smilies, etc. I suspect it's a whale based economy.
True, I think it was more sort of a natural filter than explicitly revenue for the website.
Still, I would be willing to pay a bit more for a website that I actually like if it's a one-time fee; I actually paid for the "Platinum" membership for Something Awful so that I would have access to search, and a custom icon, so I think the total damage was around $30.
Dunno, I guess I just feel like people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think the fact that the only way that companies can really compete for people's time is giving it away for free [1] is a testament that most stuff on the internet is actually kind of shit.
[1] yeah I know something something you are the product something something.
Also look up K shaped economies at the same time and you get a better answer.
But the gist of it is, companies do free to play systems that support themselves by a very small portion of their user base spending a very large amount of money. The free/low paying users find themselves with poor/no service as the companies do anything to attract more whales.
K based economies are somewhat related as you see a very small portion of the participants in an economy make a huge amount of money while everyone else gets poor.
Whales are the tiny percentage of users who spend large amounts of actual money on bullshit non-products offered by mobile apps and online platforms. AKA suckers.
I really like the idea. But my one attempt was disappointing. "playful energetic urban fantasy at night" ended up set to "very slow" by default.
I would really like to be able to run this on my phone. Use my Brilliant smart glasses to periodically take a picture, ask a model to describe the mood/setting, and get an ambient stream to match the mood.
The 'Fast'/embedding model, unless the input is absolutely clear, snaps to the closest alternative.
Here's the song it created when I asked Gemini Flash to do it!
It called it, "Cobalt Kinetic" and explained that, "A high-velocity Mixolydian engine fueled by syncopated electronic pulses and glitchy accents, evoking the iridescent blur of hidden magic weaving through a midnight skyscraper canyon."
This smells like bullshit to me, although I am admittedly not experienced with Claude.
I find it difficult to believe that a sleep mask exists with the features listed: "EEG brain monitoring, electrical muscle stimulation around the eyes, vibration, heating, audio." while also being something you can strap to your face and comfortably sleep in, with battery capacity sufficient for several hours of sleep.
I also wonder how Claude probed bluetooth. Does Claude have access to bluetooth interface? Why? Perhaps it wrote a secondary program then ran that, but the article describes it as Claude probing directly.
I'm also skeptical of Claude's ability to make accurate reverse-engineered bluetooth protocol. This is at least a little more of an LLM-appropriate task, but I suspect that there was a lot of chaff also produced that the article writer separated from the wheat.
If any of this happened at all. No hardware mentioned, no company, no actual protocol description published, no library provided.
It makes a nice vague futuristic cyperpunk story, but there's no meat on those bones.
This isn't to the level of the OP, but I just asked Claude "Are there any interesting Bluetooth devices in my vicinity which aren't actually mine or ones I am connected to?" and it downloaded a tool called `blueutil` and identified a variety of things.
When I complained that the results were boring, it installed a Python package called 'bleak', found a set of LED lights (which I assumed are my daughter's) and tried to control them. It said the signal was too weak and got me to move around the house, whereupon it connected to them, figured out the protocol, and actually changed the lights while I was sat on her bed - where I am right now. Now I have a new party trick when she gets home! I had no idea they were Bluetooth controlled, nor clearly without any security at all.
Found that in seconds. EEG, electrical stimulation, heat, audio, etc. Claims a 20 hour battery.
As to the Claude interactions, like others I am suspicious and it seems overly idealized and simplified. Claude can't search for BT devices, but you could hook it up with an MCP that does that. You can hook it up with a decompiler MCP. And on and on. But it's more involved than this story details.
That appears to be more than a centimeter thick, and not particularly flexible. It's more like ski goggles than a sleep mask.
So yeah, a product exists that claims to be a sleep mask with these features. Maybe someone could even sleep while wearing that thing, as long as they sleep on their back and don't move around too much. I remain skeptical that it actually does the things it claims and has the battery life it claims. This is kickstarter after all. Regardless, this would qualify as the device in question for the article. Or at least inspiration for it.
Without evidence such as wireshark logs, programs, protocol documentation, I'm not convinced that any of this actually _happened_.
Claude, or any good agent, doesn't need MCP to do things. As long as it has access to a shell it can craft any command that it needs to fulfill its prompt.
There are no shell commands to do what is described. I could get Claude to interact with BLE devices, but it did it by writing and running various helper applications, for instance using the Bleak library. So I guess not an MCP per se.
Not really? I did something similar for a different device recently. It can make files and has access to bash. It's perfectly capable of installing packages and writing small scripts basically entirely autonomously. No MCP needed.
A lot of BLE peripherals are very easy to probe. And there are libraries available for most popular languages that allow you to connect to a peripheral and poke at any exposed internals with little effort.
As for the reverse engineering, the author claims that all it took was dumping the strings from the Dart binary to see what was being sent to the bluetooth device. It's plausible, and I would give them the benefit of the doubt here.
I was originally going to ask something similar, but from a different angle.
These blog posts now making the rounds on HN are the usual reverse engineering stories, but made a lot more compelling simply because they involve using AI.
Never mind that the AI part isn't doing any heavy lifting and probably just as tedious as not using AI in the first place. I am confused why the author mentions it so prominently. Past authors would not have been so dramatic and just waved their hands that they had some trial and error before finding out how the app is built. The focus would have been on the lack of auth and the funny stuff they did before reporting it to the devs.
Claude could access anything on your device, including system or third party commands for network or signal processing - it may even have their manuals/sites/man pages in the training set. It’s remarkably good at figuring things out, and you can watch the reasoning output. There are mcp tools for reverse engineering that can give it even higher level abilities (ghidra is a popular one).
Yesterday I watched it try and work around some filesystem permission restrictions, it tried a lot of things I would never have thought of, and it was eventually successful. I was kinda goading it though.
I did have to borrow a mac and use xcode to set up my project, I wish that weren't the case.
I'd love to tell iOS users to just use the web version, but in-app purchases on web are a real headache compared to mobile and I haven't set up Stripe or equivalent. And Apple has crippled the web experience on iOS anyway with Safari.
Does any of my approach "vote with my wallet"? No. It's just for me, to avoid the horrible experience of Apple to the extent possible while also reaching users that choose to use iOS.