[kotaKat]

To Apple's 100% credit they were willing to ship engineers out.

This happened day 1 (Thursday) of a 4-day festival. Even though they declined to have Apple come out you know they still sent a couple engineers out to gather data regardless.

On top of that, being proactive once it started happening and getting messaging out to attendees helped cut down the calls by ~50%, which definitely helped.

All you can do is continually refine it once you deploy it. A bit damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> All you can do is continually refine it once you deploy it. A bit damned if you do, damned if you don't

you could also get it to work with fewer false positives before deploying it, so more like damned if you do rush to market without proper testing and not-damned if you're thoughtful and do minimal testing first (which would obviously include dancing)

or, alternatively, just don't deploy and keep deployed a feature which fails so often and for which failures have such a significant impact on people

[johnnyanmac]

>you could also get it to work with fewer false positives before deploying it

I'm sure they did.

[ImPostingOnHN]

"fewer" obviously means fewer than it has now: the amount it currently has is too many, the amount it needs to have is fewer than the amount it currently has

this means they either didn't get it to work with fewer false positives than it has, or they did, then they discarded those improvements, leading to the inadequate release we have now (in which, again, the amount of false positives is too many)

[johnnyanmac]

> the amount it currently has is too many, the amount it needs to have is fewer than the amount it currently has

we can't define what "the amount it needs" is, and we don't know what Apple's definition of "the amount it needs" is. So this is ultimately a fruitless argument.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> we can't define what "the amount it needs" is

speak for yourself: perhaps you can't define it, if you want to admit so.

I can do so, easily: the amount it needs is an amount low enough to not prompt complaints from first responders.

In fact, that's the primary requirement. Doing fancy detection of whatever only comes when you know you aren't butt dialing paramedics and wasting their time.

Sorry, you can't push that negative externality onto society just for a neat slide at WWDC. Denied.

[johnnyanmac]

>I can do so, easily: the amount it needs is an amount low enough to not prompt complaints from first responders.

Great, you then deferred your meaning to another nebulous amount that is again, not defined. Maybe if you were willing to research and derive the current amount of false positives received, and if that threshold is acceptable as is, Id agree.

Otherwise: Maybe you consider mind reading as "easy" and I congratulate you on your talents. In the meantime I'll simply not assume what thresholds are what in the minds of operations that I'm not familiar with.

Alternatively you may be a 911 dispatcher with the power to define this. I hope you can communicate properly with apple becsuse your current estimate isn't really quantifiable.

[gdulli]

You're not damned if you practice judgment that keeps you from using machine learning anywhere just because you can, inflicting others with the hassle of inevitable false positives, false negatives, and false sense of security in a solution that will remain flawed regardless of your own level of patience to throw new versions out.