This is ~~Reddit~~ lemmy. Who does?

I don’t know if you remember when Siri was first introduced to iPhoneOS. (It was still called iPhoneOS back then, when the iPhone4S was introduced.)

It replaced a feature that was either called VoiceControl or VoiceCommand, Apple have purged all historical record of the feature.

It was based on Dragon Dictate and as long as you learnt and used the correct Commands, it worked flawlessly. It was completely on device and even the anemic processor in the iPhone 3S and 4.

Then Siri was introduced and despite the significantly improved performance of chip in the 4S, it was a worse experience, especially if you had bad reception.

This AI fad began back when Nuance created Siri and while it has democratised computing, it has also made people dumber.

We used to write bash and Automator scripts that could do the complex, repetitive tasks, but they were not available for everyone (only Mac and CLI UNIX users). Even DOS Users had batch scripts!

Android, iOS and Windows have taken that away from us to make them more accessible and the replacements have been obfuscated by the computing elite. (Look at Windows PowerShell as an example).

Now, people who used to do things with pdf2txt, sed and awk have a wet dream when they tell Claude to analyse the data in a report that someone emailed them! We are getting stupider!