I don't think this applies for this comment, I mean, the title suggests teaching something to an AI, which in the case of Siri would open a lot of very interesting options, I'm sure I'm not the only one who expected something along those lines and was disappointed. "RTM Siri setup instructions" is a less attractive title though.
I've seen the word "teach" used to talk about setting up or programming a computer on many occasions before. It's completely appropriate. I can see why you'd be disappointed but that's not a reason to complain.
The headline would be fine in a magazine article or a tech-light site like Lifehacker.
But, because of Siri's architecture, telling a forum of hackers that you've "taught it" to do something is a wildly different thing.
Hackers click that headline because they're interested in the possibility space where you can integrate arbitrary third party apps.
And when they discover that your headline is a semantic game --that the implicit promise of the headline is a lie-- I don't know how you could expect anything other than complaints.
When I saw the headline my first reaction was: What? Unbelievable, this sounds too good to be true, but maybe the guys from RTM really found a way to do that.
When I clicked on the link I realized it has not much to do with Siri and is just about synching other iPhone apps.
Last time I checked, there was nothing sticking up my ass, but I do come to HN because it is different from Lifehacker, BusinessInsider or HuffPo. Nevertheless I do have to admit that it is a brilliant marketing move. They even started a heated discussion on HN :-)
So to extend my comment from a hacker perspective I felt tricked.
From the perspective of an online marketer I have to admit it is a brilliant move.
Maybe you just need to be more cynical. :) I saw the headline, thought, yeah, they figured out some way to connect it, and got pretty much what I expected.
I agree with you about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.
That title implies a number of things. Personally, I read it and thought "RTM managed to jailbreak Siri and teach it how to interact with a third-party API!!"
That was a very disappointing click-through because that's one misleading title, dude.
I think the problem is sometimes people try to find a way to comment. Generally unless someone is outright wrong or lying I tend to just not upvote something that wasn't very interesting. Starting an argument in a comment thread can be a great place for Karmawhores to get some action.
You tell Siri to add a task, and then it shows up in this other thing. You can quibble about just which entity is doing the sending, but that seems even more pointless than quibbling over "taught".
My quibble isnt with the word "taught", but rather with the overall wording conveyed in the title. As it is now, it seems to suggest that they've uncovered a hidden API where you can add custom grammars to Siri. A more accurate title would be, "RTM can sync with your iphone calendar". It really has little to do with Siri itself. Any calendar task will be synced, not just ones created by Siri.
in my opinion, "taught" seems to imply that siri can actively learn. though siri is an intelligent agent which does speech recognition (firmly planting it in the world of AI), i am under the impression that siri does not actively learn and so saying "taught" in the context of speaking about an AI could be construed as misleading. i could be mistaken about whether siri can do "learning" or not, as i'm not intimately familiar with the tech.
You talk to Siri -> Siri creates a task -> Task is synced to RTM