(recommend reader mode to dodge the paywall) Look I just... How are you so out of touch industry? Even if I set aside absolutely everything I dislike about AI outside of the actual product: No one...
(recommend reader mode to dodge the paywall)
Hot take … isn’t it kinda crazy that nobody is really using AI Agents,” Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, wrote in a viral X post this week. “Theoretically, the tech is ready for AI agents to totally transform how we work and live our lives … but alas the general public dgaf” (doesn’t give a fuck).
I just have not heard a single person outside of the tech community talk about an agent that they use,” Miller says. “As excited and optimistic as we as an industry may be about the frontier and recursive self-improvement, it's worth pausing and just saying, ‘Huh, what?’”
Look I just... How are you so out of touch industry?
Even if I set aside absolutely everything I dislike about AI outside of the actual product: No one is teaching people how to do that, or why to do that, or how it would help them. They're just putting "AI features" into products and selling them conversations with copy written characters.
Miller’s arguments are convenient coming from someone who sells an AI-powered web browser. But I think he’s correct that today’s agentic products are largely not designed with consumers in mind.
Miller blames the problem on groupthink in the AI industry. Many people who are building these technologies are totally obsessed with them, and they often have a particular sci-fi vision for how the products should look and feel.
I don't even think the sci-fi vibe is necessarily the problem, it's that the tools don't live up to the vibe.
Beyond the lack of teaching, beyond the gap between promise and capabilities, I genuinely don't know how I could integrate agentic AI into my day to day life, like at all. I make light use of AI...
Beyond the lack of teaching, beyond the gap between promise and capabilities, I genuinely don't know how I could integrate agentic AI into my day to day life, like at all.
I make light use of AI tools at work in specific cases where it helps me or saves time. I know and understand the tools. I 'get' what an agent is.
Now, here's a smattering of things I've done in the past few days outside of work: read a comic book, played video games, went to a local block party, ate out at a new restaurant with my wife, watched TV, took pictures with my camera. How could agentic AI help me with any of these activities whatsoever? And if there is any possible 'use-case' for me, how is it any better than using the working brain I have in my head right now?
Truly, genuinely, beyond my qualms about the AI industry, I can't think of many (any) reasons to use the product outside of my narrow work-related usage.
And that, right there, is the goldmine they've oversold. Having the ability in excel to say "hey i'm trying to do this kind of math/formula, help me" in plain text is WILD. That's such a huge...
I make light use of AI tools at work in specific cases where it helps me or saves time.
And that, right there, is the goldmine they've oversold.
Having the ability in excel to say "hey i'm trying to do this kind of math/formula, help me" in plain text is WILD. That's such a huge advancement in helping people learn their tools. I've yet to work anywhere that has anywhere near a full grasp of just their email/text/sheets suite, let alone more complex stuff, and these "AI" tools can 100% help with that.
The issue is that doesn't require a couple trillion in data center build out so now we're on "well obviously it can do everything" which is extra hilarious because even if it can, i probably only need it once. Then i can just setup the pipeline and leave it be.
One of the huge potential upsides i see of AI is helping people standardize the edges of their system (higher quality and more existing APIs) so that others can hook up and self serve, but that's a one and done kind of problem.
I fully agree. For context, I work in this area and did a masters in it. I have been building tools, and looking into integration of these AI agents, and in the end, defining a MCP for your tool,...
I fully agree. For context, I work in this area and did a masters in it.
I have been building tools, and looking into integration of these AI agents, and in the end, defining a MCP for your tool, letting claude do the tedious work of reading the manual and answering your questions in simple terms is just great.
And yes some people let it replace their own thinking - that's a problem. But once you see it as a tool, and it's been getting quite capable - it's not 100% perfect - and I think it sucks at creative work. But that's also because I recognize AI texts and designs so quickly.
But just using AI as an extra "smart" layer above a userface can be quite nice. Don't try to make it replace staff, make it help your users, and it can be great.
Some usecases I have built myself are: quick automation of repetetive tasks in an UI, or "turn my verbal description into a JSON" (in my space sim luna). I have tons of users under 15, none of them will write JSON to customize their system. But they can say: I want a black hole and 2 stars around it - and then the AI writes the JSON
I could spend $20 a month to have a LLM Agent schedule my doctor appointment for me, which I do approximately once a year. Or I could spend $0 and schedule it myself? I guess I could use it to...
I could spend $20 a month to have a LLM Agent schedule my doctor appointment for me, which I do approximately once a year.
Or I could spend $0 and schedule it myself?
I guess I could use it to manage my email inbox??? Except I get approximately 1 email a day I care about and spend exactly 5 minutes in the morning checking my email?
I don’t know what the “value-add” here is.
If the LLM agent could do the dishes or run to the grocery store for me, sure. (I guess it could handle creating a grocery list or ordering for delivery or pickup…except I already build my grocery list with 3 clicks in my recipe app, and I’d rather get my groceries myself so I don’t end up with weird substitutions or bad produce).
Reminds me of the quote "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing. Not for AI to do my art and writing for me so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
If the LLM agent could do the dishes or run to the grocery store for me, sure.
Reminds me of the quote "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing. Not for AI to do my art and writing for me so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I can't find many if any uses at work myself and like you, not so much at home either. Maybe there are amazing things it could do for me, setting aside my other issues with it, but I'm a fairly...
I can't find many if any uses at work myself and like you, not so much at home either. Maybe there are amazing things it could do for me, setting aside my other issues with it, but I'm a fairly techy person for a normy. I am comfortable learning new software and apps (except Instagram, idk I hate it) and can adjust my settings and solve most of my own problems.
But i mostly find interactions with AI frustrating and maybe that's because I can search for sources on my own and educate myself on topics and fix most of my own problems.
I need a robot handyman (and like not a humanoid weird one, a functional one) more than I can think I need an agent. And I think I even know sort of what an agent is.
Personal software I think is a good use case for home. Maybe you already know you could write a script to do a thing, but it's not worth the time or effort to figure it out? Now you can have AI do...
Personal software I think is a good use case for home. Maybe you already know you could write a script to do a thing, but it's not worth the time or effort to figure it out? Now you can have AI do it for you, and if you don't like it, delete it without feeling like you wasted any time.
For example I now have a hugo site on my server (i do some self hosting) that is a personal wuthering waves wiki. Previously I had some notes for stuff in silverbullet (a markdown based wiki), but it was growing unwieldy and I couldn't have any nice layouts or designs without a lot of effort. I started with having the site build out a rotations (combos for each character) with a nice markup for buttons to push and colors and some variations. It grew into I can now go use the official wuwa discord bot that makes images of your characters, download those to a directory, and run a script which will scrape out the data from that (thanks to self hosted back end that is open sourced and maintained by some card generation sites). It will scrape from a community run google sheet of stats to get stat targets, it will diff how far off I am from targets on my character, then give an overall todo list page ordered by what percentage they are away from their stat targets. So now when I play i can bring up a nice layout of the characters and their rotations and check a todo list of which person to grind out. I also have a high level overview table to help me organize who would go on a team based on the things that they do, something I tend to forget.
All of this information exists in one place or another online, sure, but this is also tailored to my characters and the way that I play, and information that I need, all of it built while I was playing crimson desert over the weekend, occasionally tabbing out.
I also used claude to help me set up hosting actual budget, while it was easy to set up the software, it took a bit to figure out how to get it all set up the way i want, and asking the AI questions was much easier than going and reading through the documentation. I set up data scrapping for my information, however I still needed to set up a bunch of rules for organizing things into categories and reconciling payments etc. It also helped me set up a local llm on the server that would run (no graphics card + a lot of ram on the server) so that once a day at night it will try to categorize incoming scrapes etc. I would never have set this up if I didn't have the AI going out and finding answers to my questions so quickly and being able to talk to it so naturally.
I have done a lot of other random things at home with AI, and a lot of times it sits there doing nothing, but when i have an idea it's as simple as starting up a terminal going to claude and typing in the idea, then going back to what i was doing.
I think more and more we will be able to write custom software that fits exactly any need we have, even if it's a one shot task. I am honestly hoping they keep pushing the local models to the point that the AI industry busts wide open and LLMs are just a thing we can have on our PCs.
I don't write scripts, write software, run servers, run wikis or any of that. It would all be a huge complication to my life not really a useful solution to anything for me. I'm nearly entirely...
I don't write scripts, write software, run servers, run wikis or any of that. It would all be a huge complication to my life not really a useful solution to anything for me. I'm nearly entirely unfamiliar with most of the programs, applications, and goals you have for your characters (for what? I don't know)
I really don't want to have to write custom software with the AI on my computer, that sounds miserable for me, a non-tech person. I don't mind learning a software or app or whatever, but I'm not interested in running or developing it. Plus that all sets aside my other issues with AIs, I'm not in favor of them.
Their response to you (and your answer back) feels like such a great example of the original point you were trying to make. Developers and techies (myself included) forget that not everyone wants...
Their response to you (and your answer back) feels like such a great example of the original point you were trying to make. Developers and techies (myself included) forget that not everyone wants to self-host and have to keep services running so they can do the thing. I'm a sysadmin by career and I still put minimal effort into making sure my stuff works; why would someone who doesn't self-host existing applications want to write their own?
The vast majority of people don't run their own services, write code, or even have the spare computer laying around to run a simple lab. Using AI for development only sounds good if you're already writing your own software or you think you can with no idea of what good code looks like (vibecoding in a nutshell). I haven't seen a single actually useful application of generative AI outside of developer-related work, and even then the best use has been synthesizing a large doc base or multiple repos into an understandable summary with links to relevant docs. I genuinely cannot think of a good application for AI that would appeal to the majority of people outside the tech sphere right now.
Exactly and it is that complete lack of understanding of the "non-techie" experience that makes AI conversations so frustrating. I'm the person who can fix the weird computer connection issue to...
Exactly and it is that complete lack of understanding of the "non-techie" experience that makes AI conversations so frustrating. I'm the person who can fix the weird computer connection issue to the screen in the conference room, not someone who can - or wants to - write a program. I haven't written code since using HTML for websites pre-Dreamweaver.
Honestly, I work in the tech field, and the majority of my useful gen ai stuff has been on the non tech side of what I do. I don't trust an AI to write firewall rules or build scripts or whatever...
Honestly, I work in the tech field, and the majority of my useful gen ai stuff has been on the non tech side of what I do.
I don't trust an AI to write firewall rules or build scripts or whatever that I'm not reviewing. They're easy enough to write, and reviewing them carefully takes as much time as doing myself.
I'm honestly like you, I had a self hosting phase, but I realized I was getting almost nothing out of it, and constantly stressing myself out when my janky pile of bullshit inevitably collapsed and I'd have to spend hours fixing it. So yeah, fuck AI for personal tech stuff too.
When it comes to making PowerPoint slides, or formatting text from a contract into an excel spreadsheet with pretty colors, or stuff like that that I need to present to business people though? Sure!
If they're slightly wrong, it's not too big of a deal, and they take me a few minutes to check anyway.
Doing them by hand involves the absolute hell of using wysiwyg editors that randomly decided that whatever you want to do is not allowed, and then you have to trawl through the depths of a Microsoft support forum to figure out how to left justify a chart in PowerPoint or whatever.
Using Claude to make PowerPoint presentations has saved me so much time, it's insane. Its also some of the most tedious, annoying work I do, it's completely mindless, and I'm not losing anything by letting those "skills" atrophy. It lets me focus more on actual, meaningful work.
But I'd rather leave that meaningful work well away from AI.
I actually find this a little annoying when it’s cited as an AI use case, because PowerPoint is actually not a great way to convey the information people use it for (See Edward Tufte). The main...
When it comes to making PowerPoint slides, or formatting text from a contract into an excel spreadsheet with pretty colors, or stuff like that that I need to present to business people though? Sure!
I actually find this a little annoying when it’s cited as an AI use case, because PowerPoint is actually not a great way to convey the information people use it for (See Edward Tufte). The main reason people use it is because it’s sort of easy enough to use so even a marginally computer literate person can throw something together. But if you’re mostly automating content production anyway the PowerPoints decks aren’t any easier than a bunch of other stuff you can do. Why not just prompt out some dynamic visualizations in D3? Why not do one of those “person draws stuff on a marker board” type videos instead? There’s a galaxy of possibilities if people would only use their imaginations!
The fact that the tools exist to enable this but all businesses seem to think to do with it is the same old stuff but lazier is extremely depressing and, to me, speaks to a deep spiritual rot at the heart of our culture. It seems like nobody wants to do this stuff and nobody values the output of it, so why are we doing it at all? What is the point of making it more efficient to produce something we never cared about anyway? Perhaps it’s just a compliance check, but does the compliance check need to reproduce a format meant for periodic presentations if the presentations and nominal review steps aren’t happening? That seems like some sort of business process atavism. If you just want the AI to produce a report that nobody reads why does it need to be rendered as a PowerPoint slide instead of a dry memo? It just feels like people have completely lost the plot here.
Mostly for the same reasons that you must submit a PSD file if you're working in graphic design, you must submit a PDF if you're a lawyer, you must submit a LaTeX file if you're working in math...
Why not just prompt out some dynamic visualizations in D3? Why not do one of those “person draws stuff on a marker board” type videos instead?
Mostly for the same reasons that you must submit a PSD file if you're working in graphic design, you must submit a PDF if you're a lawyer, you must submit a LaTeX file if you're working in math and so on. They're industry standards, and standards are important.
They're not necessarily standards because they're the best tool for the job, but it's just a format that people have come to expect and have built processes around. Even if I had a presentation that was much better suited for a man drawing on a whiteboard video, when I'm asked to submit my deck, and I submit an mp4 of a guy drawing on a whiteboard, the person coordinating the presention is going to be like "what is this, I need your PowerPoint".
This is basically restating the problem I’ve cited in different terms. The standards were built based on certain assumptions around how these things would be used. The world in which those...
This is basically restating the problem I’ve cited in different terms. The standards were built based on certain assumptions around how these things would be used. The world in which those assumptions were made no longer exists. Nobody has any imagination for figuring out whether any of it can be done better.
Its not about imagination, it's about inertia. Its the same reason why we still use ipv4 even though ipv6 exists, or why we use 60hz AC current in the US despite most of our appliances being DC...
Its not about imagination, it's about inertia. Its the same reason why we still use ipv4 even though ipv6 exists, or why we use 60hz AC current in the US despite most of our appliances being DC now. Its not like no one has thought of a better way of doing things. Its just that the current way of doing things works well enough, and no one person has the power to mandate that everyone change. Every organization does business with other organizations and has to do presentations with them. PowerPoint is a convenient, well known way to do that. You can have all the imagination you want, but you can't change the entire worlds standards with imagination.
If there were some catastrophic event that made PowerPoint no longer usable, like Microsoft going out of business, I could see a change taking place, otherwise though, no other alternative offers enough benefits to justify the immense costs to use something else.
There is really no inertia behind PowerPoint aside from nobody actually giving a shit. As a former management consultant who basically lived in PowerPoint I can tell you it’s actually a net...
There is really no inertia behind PowerPoint aside from nobody actually giving a shit. As a former management consultant who basically lived in PowerPoint I can tell you it’s actually a net negative for the purposes for which it’s used, people are just lazy and lack imagination on how to do things better. You can call that “inertia” but that’s really just a way of saying “needs energy to change” and when you put it that way, it becomes clearer that it’s just laziness. It’s not like the glut of “bullshit jobs” out there are doing anything else useful.
I'll give you an example of what I mean by inertia. I worked at a huge bank with about 200k employees. We had hundreds of thousands of other organizations we did business with, meaning other...
I'll give you an example of what I mean by inertia.
I worked at a huge bank with about 200k employees. We had hundreds of thousands of other organizations we did business with, meaning other banks, technology vendors, government regulatory bodies, large customers, investment firms, fintech providers and so on.
Internally, and externally, the way high importance presentations intended to convey information were done was via PowerPoint. To replace PowerPoint with... Say... Guy drawing on whiteboard videos, there are a number of things you'd have to do.
One, you'd have train almost 200k people who have used PowerPoint their entire careers to learn guy drawing on whiteboard software. Two, you'd have to convince all of these other organizations to accept guy drawing on whiteboard videos instead of PowerPoint presentations. Three, you'd have to replace a lot of technology explicitly made to show, create, store, and regulate PowerPoint presentations to do all that stuff with videos instead (meaning large conference room hardware, purpose made remote meeting appliances, sensitivity labeling software, DLP appliances, storage servers, and so on). Four, you'd have to change federal regulatory rules mandating the use of PowerPoint for certain presentations.
Some of this stuff is doable with enough investment, some of it is outside of the realm of the organizations power to change. How would you sell this, likely hundreds of million dollar effort to the board of directors? What material benefit would you be able to demonstrate by ripping out PowerPoint and replacing it with guy with a whiteboard videos? How could you show that it would help the company make more money within the next few years?
It would be a very tough sell, and PowerPoint works well enough, so it's not really done, even if you can imagine a better alternative.
An organization has finite resources, and they spend their resources in ways that maximize their investment. Not spending those resources on things that don't maximize that investment isn't laziness, it's good management.
Again this is just more words to reiterate what I just said while flipping the tone. I recognize all of this, I also say it is extremely depressing that corporate culture has completely lost the...
Again this is just more words to reiterate what I just said while flipping the tone. I recognize all of this, I also say it is extremely depressing that corporate culture has completely lost the plot about what office work exists to facilitate. PowerPoint was never a good tool for its job, I don’t even think it actually works “well enough” considering how many consulting hours have been billed to nitpick over template alignment. So it literally is just a lack of imagination. Most of the people who have been “using PowerPoint their whole career” barely know how to use PowerPoint as it is, and it’s not as if businesses aren’t happy to whiplash business units from one crappy SaaS solution to another hoping they can buy their way out of their poor fundamentals. And it’s not as if those crappy software services don’t radically change their UIs on a semi-annual basis.
Like this is all just a lack of imagination and an inability to take their own jobs seriously. Not just as a list of tasks they’re doing, but the essence of what their corporate function is for. This is why people feel depressed and disconnected from work and why businesses report morale being poor and why everyone thinks their job is bullshit. There’s no connection between the work and making any sort of mark on the world.
FWIW, I'm a techie, but i also work in higher education, and I see a lot of potential for it in teaching. There's been a lot of news coverage on students cheating, but there's also some real...
I genuinely cannot think of a good application for AI that would appeal to the majority of people outside the tech sphere right now.
FWIW, I'm a techie, but i also work in higher education, and I see a lot of potential for it in teaching. There's been a lot of news coverage on students cheating, but there's also some real upsides to it. If you create some scaffolding and combine it with directions on how to teach specific subject matter, it can do a pretty good job tutoring students. It's still early days, and a lot of experimentation is happening, but it's one area I'm hopeful for.
Yeah for sure I would agree with you I can't think of too much for an LLM if you don't engage with a computer too much. I think as things get better over time the ability to talk to your computer...
Yeah for sure I would agree with you I can't think of too much for an LLM if you don't engage with a computer too much. I think as things get better over time the ability to talk to your computer in a natural language is going to be pretty revolutionary when it reaches the point of just happening logically and more deterministically. Already my google searches are half the previous google keyword speak and half natural language inquiries depending what I'm looking for.
I thought of some other uses, I've actually had some good success with cooking. Basically I suck at cooking and don't have many recopies, don't know what a lot of foods are and what they taste like, and generally I struggle with making effort at things and have some anxiety. Regardless of if it makes sense or not, these have been barriers to me cooking anything new. However, I find asking LLMs about recopies and flavors etc is incredibly helpful. I can say I have these ingredients what can I make, or I want to make X, but I don't like this this and this, or I don't like this flavor profile, will it have a strong flavor if I put this in? Just really being able to get dynamic advise on things and work with whatever my cooking issues are, is way better for me than reading cooking sites or youtube videos. I dont know if it is good past basics, but it guided me through marinading some chicken and grilling it, then reheating in the air fryer with time/temps the other day.
As AI kinda finds its niche, I really do think the big gain for everyone will be natural language interfaces, either via voice or typing in order to perform tasks. We'll have debates when to use buttons vs llms and all that I'm sure, but that really is something that is quite incredible to witness right now that it can do.
I mean, I use a computer for work and at home. But I don't see much benefit in talking to a computer as if it were a person. I also prefer to use trusted sites for recipes, I don't trust LLMs to...
I mean, I use a computer for work and at home. But I don't see much benefit in talking to a computer as if it were a person.
I also prefer to use trusted sites for recipes, I don't trust LLMs to "know" a good recipe vs a site that just...does recipes. I have learned from those types of sites my entire life. (And from cookbooks!)
Idk I just don't see it being a benefit over what I already do.
I really try and refrain from posting on AI posts, because I do love AI but it is so hated and I try and take in the critique to moderate my usage. With recipes though? Recipes are amazing as an...
I really try and refrain from posting on AI posts, because I do love AI but it is so hated and I try and take in the critique to moderate my usage.
With recipes though? Recipes are amazing as an LLM use. It's absolutely a great way to find and alter recipes, especially when things inevitably don't work so well and you're in the middle of cooking, and then the pot starts boiling over and you can ask Gemini how to fix things. It's great. I appreciate it so much for cooking.
It would require me to have a level of trust in the AI that I don't have. I am not much of a cook, but I also don't ask my computer what's wrong in the middle of a recipe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It would require me to have a level of trust in the AI that I don't have. I am not much of a cook, but I also don't ask my computer what's wrong in the middle of a recipe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I say it's worth a shot, but that's also because I enjoy recklessly failing in cooking. Lots of laughter and love in those moments. But I am very weird. To each their own!
I say it's worth a shot, but that's also because I enjoy recklessly failing in cooking. Lots of laughter and love in those moments. But I am very weird. To each their own!
For me, it’s the fact that it can break down, say like making a Roux, into specfic steps that make it seem less daunting and then also be able to help you try and save it
For me, it’s the fact that it can break down, say like making a Roux, into specfic steps that make it seem less daunting and then also be able to help you try and save it
As far as I am aware I haven't dipped my toes into ai agents. But I do have some situations where I've used LLMS to help me generate scripts, or figure out how to do specific tasks in a...
As far as I am aware I haven't dipped my toes into ai agents. But I do have some situations where I've used LLMS to help me generate scripts, or figure out how to do specific tasks in a spreadsheet, or write a regular expression. I guess these are situations where I could use agents to give access to varying spreadsheets to automate some steps for me. For instance, I'm working on pulling data from my Garmin smartwatch (web export) and sleep data from my CPAP machine, to look for patterns. The data unfortunately doesn't mesh well together, my CPAP labels the date differently than the Garmin, there are missing entries which means lines have to be matched up using date heuristics before being copied, etc. This is the sort of work that someone with years of knowledge using spreadsheets, regular expressions, database work, or scripting could figure out in minutes. I would have to research each step and build my knowledge from the ground up, or I could just ask an LLM how I can accomplish what I want to do.
I honestly don't trust agentic ai enough to just dump a .csv file into it and ask it to "merge this data". I've seen too many mistakes in what it does to trust it, and I certainly don't trust myself enough to check it for errors.
Heck, a big part of the issue at hand is likely that to use these agents, we have to have a task the we understand enough to want to hand off, and we have to know how to hand it off. These companies want us to hand them tasks that we don't understand past "book a weekend trip for me to Miami, Florida" so they can book the hotel chain, flights etc. that pay them referral fees.
You are right to not trust AI to do data crunching, but what it is great at is writing code to do data crunching. In your scenario even if you do know how to put data together as an expert,...
You are right to not trust AI to do data crunching, but what it is great at is writing code to do data crunching. In your scenario even if you do know how to put data together as an expert, chances are you won't know specifically about how to pull the data off a specific device nor the format, and would have to research it, and all the tedium of figuring out what each field means etc. But this is the win when you know what needs to happen, you already know you have to pull data from sources and then combine and reduce it into the numbers that have meaning to you.
This is where AI is really great, it'll get the format for your device, have data classes built, be able to explain to you what every field is, and then you can work with it how to put the data together to line up the discrepancies. If it feels algorithmically unsolvable you can have it build something to help you resolve the data out. I know for a fact you aren't the first person to try to mesh non conforming data together for a full picture and so the AI is going to know all sorts of things from other projects you know nothing about, I would not be surprised that there isn't some whitepaper somewhere it has slurped up for specifically your CPAP to Garmin comparison.
Actually I asked fable just now about it and it says there are lots of CPAP sleep apnea DIY projects out there. OSCAR is free pc software for reviewing and exploring data from a CPAP machine, and said some have better exports from SD card dumps. There is SleepHQ a cloud service and they are pushing for charting CPAP data alongside wearable data from watches. It said it sees threads on Apnea Board where people have written python tooling to visualize Garmin data directly with an eye toward importing it into OSCAR. It listed 3 bullet points of data combine issues, noon-to-noon vs midnight date convention, for the matching lines with missing entries says pandas (python data lib) has a pd.merge_asof() function designed for it that joins two time serires on nearest date with a tolerance window (as an aside wow glad i know about that now lol), and garmin's web export gives CSV/JSON while full account export gives FIT files, but there is a python library to read that fitparse/garmin-fit-sdk, and also garminconnect for pulling data via the API.
In the end you can get that overview, check each of those, pick the method and try stuff with sample data you provide it, they eye the combined output to see if it is good. Then you can make sure that it writes lots of test cases so any modifications going forward can guarantee that your data is staying accurate to the path you've chosen.
This is honestly a perfect example of how I'd use an LLM, I would have the idea you mentioned, research it, get dissuaded, and never do it. Now i'd just fire claude off on it while I'm playing video games and get something, if it turns out good could then really focus on it into something very nice for myself.
Funnily enough, I’d been thinking that a housebot would’ve better for you than an AI agent. Unfortunately, something more generalist is still expensive. A robomower or robovac is cheaper, but more...
Funnily enough, I’d been thinking that a housebot would’ve better for you than an AI agent. Unfortunately, something more generalist is still expensive. A robomower or robovac is cheaper, but more limited.
Genuinely that is the sort of help I'd need. (Stepkid who is a mechatronics engineer is looking at a mower for us as a present) But also I wouldn't want the humanoid ones that are bad at...
Genuinely that is the sort of help I'd need. (Stepkid who is a mechatronics engineer is looking at a mower for us as a present)
But also I wouldn't want the humanoid ones that are bad at everything (and usually seem to involve humans driving them) or my home recorded and shared widely. Gimme a little Wall-E that can fix shit.
I don't see "generalist" type robots ever really taking off. They're always going to necessarily be more expensive, less reliable, and worse at their tasks versus robots built for one specific...
I don't see "generalist" type robots ever really taking off. They're always going to necessarily be more expensive, less reliable, and worse at their tasks versus robots built for one specific task. And if you're buying a 60k robot that can "do everything" versus 12 $5k robots that can do the tasks you need them to do, the 60k robot can still only do one thing at a time, and when it breaks, you're totally screwed.
The way I see things going is that specific tasks start becoming more and more automated. We've got a robomower, a robovac, one day we'll have a robot that just picks things up off the ground, a robot that folds laundry, a robot dishwasher that automatically loads and unloads itself, a robot power washer that cleans your house and so on. Designing a single general purpose robot that can do all of those things well would likely cost as much as a house, even years into the future.
Its not. However the world really is not ready for AI. I mean in a socioeconomic sense. That is really what is slowing adoption. Why would anyone replace themselves as an employee? Why would the...
better than using the working brain I have in my head right now
Its not. However the world really is not ready for AI. I mean in a socioeconomic sense. That is really what is slowing adoption. Why would anyone replace themselves as an employee? Why would the CEO on the country club/beach/golf course want to come into the office to supervise a bunch of AI when they can delegate to other humans from their private jet?
Most of the world is not designed for LLM controlled automation. In fact its explicitly not because it was not considered a possibility and most systems are strictly designed around a human in the loop as a requirement. As time goes on companies that move away from this will gain market share and everyone will have to follow suite.
Another issue is that pay/work ratio is already terrible. What AI proposes is not that your brain can do something else. That it can do the work of 20-50 employees by your brain essentially acting as supervisor to an automated system. However this causes the obvious question. If I can run a company as a single employee, why am I working for someone else when the pay is $hit?
Additionally people are using AI incredibly ineffectively right now. It requires rather deep computer knowledge to make it useful at this time. That will change slowly.
Anything you didn't like in those games ? You can make a custom mod. You're TV is showing you ads ? try make a custom app that blocks them (not sure if possible...) If you're processing them on...
played video games
Anything you didn't like in those games ? You can make a custom mod.
watched TV
You're TV is showing you ads ? try make a custom app that blocks them (not sure if possible...)
took pictures with my camera
If you're processing them on your computer there's plenty you can do there too.
Not saying these are great, but they are things that could be useful. Essentially you are now an expert hacker and can tweak any computer system to your liking (exaggerating a tad...).
I mod old video games as one of my hobbies and I can promise you that the current models are hot garbage at this, and I know what I am doing. The average user cannot get this to work. Either...
Anything you didn't like in those games ? You can make a custom mod
I mod old video games as one of my hobbies and I can promise you that the current models are hot garbage at this, and I know what I am doing. The average user cannot get this to work.
You're TV is showing you ads ? try make a custom app that blocks them (not sure if possible...)
Either impossible or an already solved problem, depending on the way it is delivered. Not sure why you would want to reinvent this wheel.
A coworker shared a very Claude description on how they solved a problem with a vibecoded app. Turns out they basically just re-invented MPD with a lack of client compatibility and decades of...
A coworker shared a very Claude description on how they solved a problem with a vibecoded app.
Turns out they basically just re-invented MPD with a lack of client compatibility and decades of refinement.
Which is neat....but could have been solved with one google search for 'music player server.' And not burning several hundred more kwh.
Just for fun I gave it a try, I've added a Super Saiyan mode to elden ring, you can press a key combination (which also makes you drink...), you're weapon gets on fire for 60s and you have a...
Just for fun I gave it a try, I've added a Super Saiyan mode to elden ring, you can press a key combination (which also makes you drink...), you're weapon gets on fire for 60s and you have a different moveset.
To be clear that's reusing assets that are already there (the moves are from Sekiro), but it wrote a bunch of Lua to use them together in a new way. Maybe it still qualifies as garbage, but hot garbage I think not ;)
It's true that there's already a adblocker with Claude as contributor, so maybe you don't need to do it yourself.
Elden Ring is a game that loads lua scripts which are super easy to manipulate, I assumed we were speaking about arbitrary games. Like Claude is utterly incapable of adding code to our Mario Kart...
Elden Ring is a game that loads lua scripts which are super easy to manipulate, I assumed we were speaking about arbitrary games. Like Claude is utterly incapable of adding code to our Mario Kart 64 toolset (despite several people trying).
I suspect it would also be capable of using Cheat Engine to create pseudo-mods where that one works.
The ones doing Mario Kart 64 stuff? Yeah, at least in as much as they have successfully made some smaller mods themselves. The big issue is that it isn't fully decompiled (at least our toolkit,...
The ones doing Mario Kart 64 stuff?
Yeah, at least in as much as they have successfully made some smaller mods themselves. The big issue is that it isn't fully decompiled (at least our toolkit, spaghettikart is fully decomped I think) so it hits walls and doesn't know what to do when it hits them.
No idea if they do it professionally. This whole topic is about "normal people" though so that shouldn't have any bearing.
To be clear there's two questions in this debate : Would normal people have a use case for agents, assuming they work ? Does the agents work well enough at the moment ? For 1) I think there's...
To be clear there's two questions in this debate :
Would normal people have a use case for agents, assuming they work ?
Does the agents work well enough at the moment ?
For 1) I think there's probably a decent number of people (not everybody but the more curious crowd) that would enjoy e.g. making mods, hacking stuff, etc. This already happens to a large extend but one still need require a little bit of prior know-how. That said I think it's going to remain a niche market, most people don't want to build their own things from scratch.
For 2) I don't think the tech is quite ready for lay person, it doesn't always work, does stupid things, and generally the user still need to know what's up. That said I made an Android app with Claude with pretty much no knowledge of the process, it was a pain (mostly transfer issues from computer to phone) but not exactly complicated.
I think for throw away mods it can be useful. My friend is not a programmer but has already made several mods for games with custom overlays or information dumps that were great. This would have...
I think for throw away mods it can be useful. My friend is not a programmer but has already made several mods for games with custom overlays or information dumps that were great. This would have been unreachable for us in the past, and I 100% percent agree, the AI is never going to build one of those general mod frameworks people include in all their mods and all that, and it varies by game, but it opens the door, to it.
These are novelties. I could add crystal light to all the water I drink to make it ✨less boring✨. It could be useful for the water to taste like lemonade. But I don’t because it’s not.
These are novelties. I could add crystal light to all the water I drink to make it ✨less boring✨. It could be useful for the water to taste like lemonade. But I don’t because it’s not.
This stuff is honestly a massive pain in the ass. Getting it to work is a pain, but eventually when you do, it feels cool getting something to work. Maybe not the best use of your time, but it was...
This stuff is honestly a massive pain in the ass. Getting it to work is a pain, but eventually when you do, it feels cool getting something to work. Maybe not the best use of your time, but it was fun, so whatever.
The real problem is that in a month or three or a year, a software update, or an API change will happen, or a service you rely on will go out of business, and your custom software will break.
Congrats, you're now in maintenance mode. There is literally no one on earth that enjoys software maintenance. It becomes another chore, and even with an AI tool, you no longer even remember the script or how it works, and fixing it involves reaching back into the depths of your memory to remember where the script is, what tool you used to make it, how to even get started prompting to fix it.
Once you fix it, it'll be good for a bit, then it will break again. This will always happen, for the rest of your life. Its a new task you will have to do every so often, on an unpredictable schedule, until you lose interest, the script irreparably stops working, or you die.
Its an absolute pain in the balls, and I wouldn't recommend anyone who doesn't want to maintain software forever integrate some custom built stuff into an important part of their life because of that, ai or no ai.
My whole view on this whole thing is that those pushing these things "features" fundamentally don't understand that two things can be true at once: The tech can be incredibly impressive in terms...
My whole view on this whole thing is that those pushing these things "features" fundamentally don't understand that two things can be true at once: The tech can be incredibly impressive in terms of what it is actually able to do, while at the same time, not being useful or wanted by the general public.
Like imagine if a company came out with a toaster that can scan the toast and laser toast everything evenly at a molecular level. It costs $1,000 base cost, $50/mo subscription to use, takes 5x as long to toast the toast, requires you to hand over all of your unrelated data so it can "curate" your toasting experience to your exact specifications, and uses more electricity in 10 minutes than my vacuum would in an hour. Like sure, from a technical perspective, that's probably extremely impressive it can do that to the toast on a molecular level. It probably does provide a superior toast at the end of the day. Is it worth all that extra cost and extra time for a vast majority of people? No. There's already a very simple solution available for a fraction of the cost. We don't need to overengineer this.
I know there are actually legitimate use cases for a lot of the AI stuff but the above example is how it feels seeing all of the AI stuff crammed into consumer items that it has absolutely no business being part of.
I felt the pain of the subscription toaster immediately since my laundry machines also want me to subscribe. Why? I have no idea what I would gain from it. This is an excellent example But yes, I...
I felt the pain of the subscription toaster immediately since my laundry machines also want me to subscribe. Why? I have no idea what I would gain from it. This is an excellent example
But yes, I need functional toast not stupidly expensive toast
Reminds me of when everything was being implemented on a Blockchain. Just because your tech can do everything doesn't mean anyone wants it to, and it definitely doesn't mean it's holistically...
Reminds me of when everything was being implemented on a Blockchain. Just because your tech can do everything doesn't mean anyone wants it to, and it definitely doesn't mean it's holistically better than existing solutions. That's without even mentioning the barely-concealed intent to price gouge once everyone does switch.
This is nothing like blockchain. This is genuinely useful technology that is already changing the very substrate of the digital economy - anything software or internet related is affected and...
This is nothing like blockchain. This is genuinely useful technology that is already changing the very substrate of the digital economy - anything software or internet related is affected and everything is changing. Development of the software, analysis of the requirements, testing and security testing and many more fields will never be the same. With blockchain, you had to be very creative and inventive to find a way of how to use the most expensive and bloated database system ever in your solution. With AI, you have no choice not to. It is being used.
All that said:
The issue is... No, the first issue is: none of this is impressive for a regular person. It will not help him in his work or leisure.
Another issue is: tech bros and grifters. The "AI guys" have no business plan and try to balance their numbers by pretending every single person on earth is their potential customer.
The grifters have jumped from the previous "big thing" to the next big thing and are trying the same old scams to get rich quick.
Add "doom trolling" by the big guys where they try to scare everyone by saying that their technology is so dangerous that it will either kill everyone or at least make them unemployed.
Of course, the only reaction to be expected is animosity or hate towards the technology.
But it is NOT useless. Unless the apocalypse comes (which it may), the AI bubble will possibly burst but the AI technology will stay forever and change forever everything that is digital-related.
I think you're reading into my comment something general when I said something specific. When tech craze X comes along, tech people assume "thing Y but with X crammed in" will be automatically...
I think you're reading into my comment something general when I said something specific. When tech craze X comes along, tech people assume "thing Y but with X crammed in" will be automatically appealing to the public without actually adding any value to Y. That was true of Blockchain, 3d printing, social media, big data, and it's true of generative AI now. That contains no judgement of the actual usefulness of the technology.
In fact the best analogy to this article might be the "3d print shops" I saw spring up around 2012 that seemed to expect that customers themselves would do the work of thinking up useful things to print, and so did not draw much business and later pivoted.
Places are still like this. I have an out-of-production plastic part in my fridge that’s broken and, as a result, the water dispenser doesn’t work. It’s literally just a plastic rod of a specified...
Places are still like this. I have an out-of-production plastic part in my fridge that’s broken and, as a result, the water dispenser doesn’t work. It’s literally just a plastic rod of a specified length with a particular sequence of ridges along its side and a small hook on the end. It ought to be super easy to 3D print.
But every print shop I talked to is like “Sure just send over the CAD files.” I can send you a photo, I can send you measurements, I can tell you the exact circumference of the hook and the depth of the ridges and how for apart they are. I can actually just give you the parts number from the Electrolux website and provide you with the broken part. But don’t fucking ask me to familiarize myself with CAD like, is the only work you expected to do owning the machine?
Afaik, depending on the shop, yep. Machinists machine to a spec that an engineer engineers for them, and presumably that goes for 3d printing shops as well. Their expertise is in maintaining and...
But don’t fucking ask me to familiarize myself with CAD like, is the only work you expected to do owning the machine?
Afaik, depending on the shop, yep. Machinists machine to a spec that an engineer engineers for them, and presumably that goes for 3d printing shops as well. Their expertise is in maintaining and operating a print farm.
Btw I've been screwing around in CAD for a few months at this point, and I can try to crank something out if you're OK to share that info? (and it isn't too complex) No guarantees that it's correct, however, ofc.
Yeah if they seemed like a fully fledged machinist sort of operation I’d have understood that more, but this was basically a 3D printer set up in a place that is mostly just a regular print (as in...
Yeah if they seemed like a fully fledged machinist sort of operation I’d have understood that more, but this was basically a 3D printer set up in a place that is mostly just a regular print (as in reams of paper) shop. It seemed like a little side project of the owner and it was kind of expensive for what it was.
Also I eventually got in touch with a friend who had a 3D printer and he told me that for the kind of stress I’d be putting on the part to do what it does, the types of filaments he had probably wouldn’t be strong enough at the thinness required so it’ll probably break constantly and I’ll just be replacing it like a disposable part over and over again. Doable if I had my own 3D printer, but more annoying than it’s worth if I’m shipping it.
Aah, fair. I know a couple people who did that sort of thing. I think it was a lot more common earlier on, then they all moved out to sell other peoples' 3D models on Etsy instead. Not really my...
It seemed like a little side project of the owner and it was kind of expensive for what it was.
Aah, fair. I know a couple people who did that sort of thing. I think it was a lot more common earlier on, then they all moved out to sell other peoples' 3D models on Etsy instead. Not really my cup of tea ...
[design issues]
Fair enough as well! I'd note that, depending on the geometry, affixing 3d printed parts onto e.g. cheap, small diameter, commodity threaded rod (or even something like coat hanger wire) could work well. And that -- were you willing to have it printed anyhow -- a lot of the engineering filaments (e.g. carbon fibre-reinforced polycarbonate) should be able to take basically anything you can throw at them.
Just food for thought; I expect you already had this discussion, and skipped it in your comment for brevity 😅 hope you find a solution that works for you, though.
This seems like one of the biggest issues in the "AI Boom(/Bubble)" and it's super high evaluations/investment. I also think the gap between the promise of "anyone can use AI to do tons of amazing...
This seems like one of the biggest issues in the "AI Boom(/Bubble)" and it's super high evaluations/investment.
I also think the gap between the promise of "anyone can use AI to do tons of amazing things for you" proponents talk about and the reality of the complexity of actually setting up more advanced AI Agents/harnesses. Let alone using them in any kind of effective way.
I think he's right that in order to get any kind of broad adoption it needs to get WAY simpler for ordinary non-tech people to be able to use. The problem is by the time you simplify and "dumb down" the tooling enough to be usable by an average non-technical Joe it's lost nearly all its usefulness. You're at Microsoft levels of AI tools that can't even do what the "suggested prompt" says.
I don't think the tech industry is conscious of how much their existing skillsets lead them to being able to 'effectively' use these tools. How to be specific and clear enough in prompts to get results even close to what you wanted. How to review the output to see if it actually did what you asked and re-prompt for changes where it didn't.
The more autonomous it is the more it will get things horribly wrong and make catastrophic mistakes which leads to bad PR and even more people realizing how dangerous it can be running these tools without proper isolation and security practices. The more autonomous and long running an agent is the more important a good highly detailed prompt is, and even then there's a very good chance it's still going to get lots wrong.
Then we're back at needing to teach people very technical skills to use them, which defeats the whole idea of broad appeal.
None of this is to mention all the other issues with AI.
I tried pewdiepie's lil self hosted UI thing a month after he released it and even then, I guess it didn't detect my amd GPU because everything I tried, it kept running on my CPU and I eventually...
I tried pewdiepie's lil self hosted UI thing a month after he released it and even then, I guess it didn't detect my amd GPU because everything I tried, it kept running on my CPU and I eventually gave up and uninstalled it. I'm not sure what I'd use an AI at home for.
I use copilot at work sometimes to make it do VBA or mvc bootstrap because I dislike both of those and it does a good enough job, much faster than I would for sure.
What I find annoying is spaces where I feel like it could be used but clearly isn't. I drive on the same highways EVERY time I drive home from a certain frequent direction. Google maps ALWAYS wants me to take the first exit I can and go down some shitty side road that claims to be 1 minute faster. That side road has like 10 stop signs where as the route I always take is just another highway with 2 stop lights that are green more often than not but maybe slightly more distance miles wise. Why can google not recognize that I took that side path once and literally never again and stop telling me to go that way.
Another, is there a general android interface ai yet? Is there something I can say "hey phone play [specific album] in musicolet" (my preferred music application) I know this used to be a thing when google music and you had uploaded things to it. Instead of posting not knowing I tried it. I reenabled gemini and it said it couldn't. Useless. Absolutely useless.
If it helps, Waze (owned by Google and sharing some data) typically defaults to "your usual route". Plus you can have an Orc narrate your trip and they added a "less chatty" mode where it doesn't...
If it helps, Waze (owned by Google and sharing some data) typically defaults to "your usual route". Plus you can have an Orc narrate your trip and they added a "less chatty" mode where it doesn't give you every direction, but doesn't only give you alerts like the Alerts Only mode.
But I get that, I also think that what seems obvious to us - send me the route I took last time - is not how every driver operates. I take the slower route home sometimes to change scenery, drive slower, etc. but theres not a good way to tell it to "take the back road unless it's super late at night or if the corn is high at the intersection, if they planted beans this year disregard." So I just let it recalculate when I turn.
You're welcome. It's absolutely part of my calculus when I drive home right now to ensure I switch to the back road after the 2 way stop intersection with corn on all four corners that's currently...
You're welcome. It's absolutely part of my calculus when I drive home right now to ensure I switch to the back road after the 2 way stop intersection with corn on all four corners that's currently like 7 feet tall, but last year that intersection was beans on at least 3 corners.
I am glad that this is not just a thing I do. I absolutely have routes that I will not take for two or three months of the year because it is impossible to safely cross when the corn goes right up...
I am glad that this is not just a thing I do. I absolutely have routes that I will not take for two or three months of the year because it is impossible to safely cross when the corn goes right up to the road.
Oh, no, the corn is tall, the soybeans are short. When the corn is up it blocks your line of sight. So last year I didn't worry about that intersection because it was most/all beans, but this...
Oh, no, the corn is tall, the soybeans are short. When the corn is up it blocks your line of sight. So last year I didn't worry about that intersection because it was most/all beans, but this year, due to crop rotation and whatever other reasons, all four corners of this intersection are 7 foot tall corn.
Meaning I can't see if someone isn't slowing down at the stop sign on the cross road.
Processing both the corn and soybeans smells but that's just a thing anyone in Central Illinois knows because every now and then you get a whiff of Decatur
The Google maps thing drives me nuts, too. That doesn't even need LLMs, this is just a missing feature. I often select a route to specifically avoid certain roads at certain times. Even if they're...
The Google maps thing drives me nuts, too. That doesn't even need LLMs, this is just a missing feature.
I often select a route to specifically avoid certain roads at certain times. Even if they're faster, the traffic makes it a miserable drive, and I'm willing to pay the 10 minutes. But when I get to the branching point, it "helpfully" says "I found a faster route!" and automatically tries to re-route me, which I then have to reject. While driving. Bad design.
It should just be able to take in some settings for "This road is bad, don't use it unless it's a 30 minute diff", or other basic stuff. "Avoid highways" is too heavy-handed.
Would also be nice to say "start navigating when we get to this point". I don't need turn-by-turn out of the neighborhood, and it is annoying when it interrupts what I'm listening to. But I'm obviously not going to input my destination while driving to delay manually either.
Lots of opportunity for slightly more intelligence.
Also nice would be a "navigate until here" cuz I I know my way home once on highway but if I have ventured off somewhere new its the offhighway multiple turns in town to get back to highway that I...
Also nice would be a "navigate until here" cuz I I know my way home once on highway but if I have ventured off somewhere new its the offhighway multiple turns in town to get back to highway that I don't know.
To be fair this is mainly due to the fact that google maps does not actually calculate your destination fully. They are cheating by simplifying the pathways by looking at popularly used roads and...
To be fair this is mainly due to the fact that google maps does not actually calculate your destination fully. They are cheating by simplifying the pathways by looking at popularly used roads and try to balance it by traffic/usage. This video explains it much more in detail if you're willing to check out.
From my personal experience, old tomtoms/garvins from 15 years ago did better on this aspect (this is not to say their current offerings are bad. I just have no experience with the newer gps devices). Sure, they were requesting paths that looked better on the paper but if you had a deviation that you kept repeating, they'd start suggesting you those roads instead. Although I do not know if those devices actually did brute force calculating each section unlike today's apps. I can tell you that our devices certainly did not rely on an always online connection so they had to do all that work on board.
I go to a weekly evening class, and I was surprised that several non-technical people there chat enthusiastically about their use of ChatGPT as a sounding board for things like—make-up tips,...
I go to a weekly evening class, and I was surprised that several non-technical people there chat enthusiastically about their use of ChatGPT as a sounding board for things like—make-up tips, sanity checks/second opinions, body doubling, search engine.
It is genuinely a better search engine than the search engines at this point just because it automatically filters out the pages and pages of dross and SEO slop for you. I often use it as a first...
It is genuinely a better search engine than the search engines at this point just because it automatically filters out the pages and pages of dross and SEO slop for you. I often use it as a first pass to give me a lit review on a topic before reading through the actual sources it provides, which would generally have taken me like 15 minutes to even begin finding if I happened to be familiar with the subject to start with. As a research aide it’s honestly invaluable and better able to find and surface information than any person would be simply because it has a better vocabulary to search for related or connected stuff than any person could. Especially if it’s a topic about which you’re not super familiar, getting a general introduction from an LLM can give you the basic vocabulary and ways of thinking to begin doing your own exploration into the topic.
Plus at this point there’s a lot of stuff I learned a long long long time ago and only dimly sort of remember. I often check myself by asking a question of an LLM that I think I know the answer to just to have it verify that I’m not misremembering or that the scholarship hasn’t substantively changed in the 10-20 years since I first read about it.
Even stuff like “I have X, Y, Z ingredients, suggest some dishes I can make with this” is more useful than the recipe tracking mapping software and webpages out there. I wouldn’t trust the LLM’s to give me a recipe for obvious reasons, but then you can go find a recipe on a recipe blog and feed it back to the LLM to say “strip out the testimonials and ads and just give me the measurements and instructions.”
I have been making LLM recipes for the past year and there have been some real bangers and surprisingly few stinkers. It's basically replaced recipe blogs for me, which have been almost unusable...
I have been making LLM recipes for the past year and there have been some real bangers and surprisingly few stinkers. It's basically replaced recipe blogs for me, which have been almost unusable for many years.
One of my new favourite ways of making salmon was courtesy of claude:
panko bread crumbs
olive oil and/or butter
dijon mustard
parmesan
whatever herbs you want
I'm sure this recipe existed previously, but I had never tried it.
Yeah personally I have no interest in engaging with a non-person computer as if it were a person. I can search for tips or ask here, or watch videos, and a fake person doesn't count as body...
Yeah personally I have no interest in engaging with a non-person computer as if it were a person. I can search for tips or ask here, or watch videos, and a fake person doesn't count as body doubling for me. I have search engines.
Like all that would do is isolate me from people and make me prone to AI psychosis. I'm not being obstinate, I just find no use in using an AI for these things rather than actual people or existing tools so the AI wouldn't improve anything.
I get what you're saying, but the key differentiator for me is that I can go back and forth with an LLM. This lets me refine, filter, zero-in, course-correct, or ask spinoff questions. A given...
I get what you're saying, but the key differentiator for me is that I can go back and forth with an LLM. This lets me refine, filter, zero-in, course-correct, or ask spinoff questions. A given conversation becomes an increasingly-sharpening picture of the overall context of my goal. It just seems like a naturally better fit for the way I think and work (than using search engines).
(To be clear, I completely agree that nobody should be using LLMs as substitutes for interpersonal interaction with real people, like friendship, companionship, "companionship", therapy, etc.)
I've used search engines long enough - and if I'm doing deep research I'm hopping through sources linked from paper to paper - that it works fine for me to think my searches in keywords. I also...
I've used search engines long enough - and if I'm doing deep research I'm hopping through sources linked from paper to paper - that it works fine for me to think my searches in keywords.
I also have to double check the LLM anyway so it's pointless in my mind.
It sounds like a solution trying desperately to find a problem. I am genuinely struggling to find any good usecase for where AI agent could be really useful in my personal life. The examples we...
It sounds like a solution trying desperately to find a problem. I am genuinely struggling to find any good usecase for where AI agent could be really useful in my personal life. The examples we see from the tech gurus are always bonkers, like Altman creating a podcast of his kids’ interests. Instead of talking to them ?
Compared to just a few decades ago, our lives are already heavily optimized by digital solutions. Do we really need more ?
Programmers be like: I have to do a thing, let me spend all day automating it so that I never have to do it again Programmers a week later: spending time coding because other related use cases...
Programmers be like: I have to do a thing, let me spend all day automating it so that I never have to do it again
Programmers a week later: spending time coding because other related use cases came up and code needs to be expanded
Normal people: do the thing
Normal people a week later: do the other thing
Tech companies are just out of touch. If theres setup required, most people will not do it unless they absolutely have to. None of this Ikea software shit. No setup required is what we want and all your new features require us to give you our whole life story.
Relevant xkcd Personally, I actually kind of enjoy this loop. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Programmers be like: I have to do a thing, let me spend all day automating it so that I never have to do it again
Programmers a week later: spending time coding because other related use cases came up and code needs to be expanded
Claude has kinda messed up my balance there cause it costs me only company provided tokens to automate the most stupid things I think its super silly that the language models automated all the...
Claude has kinda messed up my balance there cause it costs me only company provided tokens to automate the most stupid things
I think its super silly that the language models automated all the tasks that we don’t really mind doing but some dope still has to clean my toilet bowl and that dope is me today because Claude cant do it :(
Tangentially related, as I actually found a nice use for stable diffusion models the other week. Generally, I think they've saturated the web with bland imagery. In short, I need to build a fence...
Tangentially related, as I actually found a nice use for stable diffusion models the other week. Generally, I think they've saturated the web with bland imagery. In short, I need to build a fence for my porch. So I took a picture and asked Gemini to add a fence. I did this a few times with various descriptions of the fence to get an idea what it would look like. Some were really bad, e.g. making the fence where the current stair is thus blocking the entrance, but some were nice examples. I could show them to the rest of the family and we could pick a design that seem nice. Doing it by hand would be impossible for me at least and hiring someone to draw them (photorealistically) would be prohibitively expensive.
Other than that in the case of image generation I'm at a loss.
It took me soooooo bleeping long to come up with a series of similar icon style pictures to use for different groups in class that it legit would have been faster to do it myself. TBH, I was just...
It took me soooooo bleeping long to come up with a series of similar icon style pictures to use for different groups in class that it legit would have been faster to do it myself. TBH, I was just trialing to see what it came up with, but the very, very, very clear problem is:
AI doesn’t actually “know”, what it is outputting. It just outputs a “thing”.
Say I asked it to make an image in 80s outrun style of a group of lemurs at a dance party and it came up with something, and I tell it to change the third lemur’s hat to a cowboy hat, it has ZERO idea of what “the third lemur” is, and it just randomly spits out more hallucinatory shit, and every iteration gets more and more freaky.
A human knows in a second exactly what you are saying and fixes it.
That has been my general experience with diffusion models. In my cas with the porch I used a base photo and it fairly consistently was ble to add a fence to it in various styles. So I think this...
That has been my general experience with diffusion models. In my cas with the porch I used a base photo and it fairly consistently was ble to add a fence to it in various styles. So I think this depends a bit on the model you use and probably on Gemini's surrounding tooling.
Bonkers even when presented by non-tech gurus. I have yet to come across a use case that I get presented to me as "game changing" that actually seems like it meaningfully improves my use. Case and...
The examples we see from the tech gurus are always bonkers
Bonkers even when presented by non-tech gurus. I have yet to come across a use case that I get presented to me as "game changing" that actually seems like it meaningfully improves my use.
Reading through what this person did, I can't help think to myself, what is so goddamn hard about opening your iMessage chat with your uncle, scrolling up 3 texts, and replying to your uncle yourself?
Like seriously, are we that inconvenienced responding to people that this is what passes as a transformative use case? Like sure, it's impressive it is able to summarize it, but it's not useful to me in the slightest. It takes me longer to have this back and forth conversation with the agent. then go back and verify that it correctly identified my uncle's last request, and then verifying again on google that the road is actually closed. I guess if you don't care to verify if the information is accurate it maybe saves you the time of a quick Google search, but I am just utterly baffled that people want to interact with their phone/other people this way.
This is the issue I have. I don’t trust LLMs to be right, so unless it’s something I already know, there’s no point in asking one. It’s just an extra few steps for no benefit.
then go back and verify
This is the issue I have. I don’t trust LLMs to be right, so unless it’s something I already know, there’s no point in asking one. It’s just an extra few steps for no benefit.
Yes that particular use of Siri is crazy. But I think the point it's trying to make is that Siri has improved a lot. Try to read less into the specific situation and more into the possibilities...
Yes that particular use of Siri is crazy. But I think the point it's trying to make is that Siri has improved a lot. Try to read less into the specific situation and more into the possibilities beyond that use. I also tried the new Siri recently because I wanted to try a different coffee shop this past weekend. I remembered my friend had suggested a spot we ended up not going to, but I forgot the name. I tried searching "coffee" in my texts. I tried searching the name of the city (I remembered the wrong name). I considered scrolling up, but it was a long time ago, we had talked a lot since then, and I didn't remember the exact date. Then I asked Siri to do it and it did it.
That's a fair take and can probably agree with that. While I have been mostly on Android and barely ever used Siri on my work phone, I've heard it being extremely limited in its functionality as a...
I think the point it's trying to make is that Siri has improved a lot.
That's a fair take and can probably agree with that. While I have been mostly on Android and barely ever used Siri on my work phone, I've heard it being extremely limited in its functionality as a common complaint.
I think I more took issue with how the author picked a task, that absolutely does not need AI in the slightest to complete, and used it as an example of a "transformation" in their workflow.
Better search indexing like you mentioned I think is where things can really shine if it gets integrated right.
From the link you shared: I suspect the future powerful and actually useful Siri that the OP dreams of may never arrive, unfortunately. I wouldn’t quite say I’m a Siri poweruser but I’ve...
From the link you shared:
We finally have the Siri we’ve been waiting for. It’s still in its infancy, but I am excited to see where this goes
I suspect the future powerful and actually useful Siri that the OP dreams of may never arrive, unfortunately.
I wouldn’t quite say I’m a Siri poweruser but I’ve definitely done a good bit with shortcuts, and I regularly use Siri for setting timers and alarms, and occasionally to send messages (although it seems to be unwilling or unable to use any other messaging apps, which makes it borderline useless for my needs). I get the impression new Siri promises so much, but more than anything I worry that it will lose so much of what it can currently do, in order to pretend it’s capable of so much more
Because for the past 20 years that annoying chatbot in the bottom right corner has been useless and on most websites it still is useless. Because it costs a ton of money to integrate a not useless...
Because for the past 20 years that annoying chatbot in the bottom right corner has been useless and on most websites it still is useless.
Because it costs a ton of money to integrate a not useless one like Claude into sharepoint sheets.
Because for a lot of people tech has been moving to fast to begin with and most everyone really just wants you to stop moving the buttons around every other week so they can get some work done
I like my agent. I've been using it for months now and I've built several custom connectors (MCP-style) and microservices to make it super useful for me personally. And in terms of quality of...
I like my agent. I've been using it for months now and I've built several custom connectors (MCP-style) and microservices to make it super useful for me personally. And in terms of quality of life, it's absolutely worth it!
I also run a decommissioned enterprise server in my closet, know what Kubernetes is, have built several web applications, have successfully set up printing on Windows and seem to be blessed with an innate technopathy that makes computers and machines work better when I'm near them. This is not a joke, I actually believe this.
Obviously these "agentic systems" are completely out of the conceptual reach of the untarnished, the pure, the virgin non-computer-touchers, and no amount of marketing can change that.
Because normal people don't even know what they are and nothing actually helps them use agents in a simple way. (I would leave a more substantial comment but the article is behind a paywall)
Because normal people don't even know what they are and nothing actually helps them use agents in a simple way.
(I would leave a more substantial comment but the article is behind a paywall)
Generalized comment here because the linked article is behind a paywall so I can't read it... AI is hyped to be the next big thing for everyone. However, AI (when asked a question) will provide...
Generalized comment here because the linked article is behind a paywall so I can't read it...
AI is hyped to be the next big thing for everyone. However, AI (when asked a question) will provide information that cannot be trusted (as people have learned and as people are notified). While it may not matter much for an errant thought to know the true capital of California, it does seem like a waste of mental effort to consider a wrong answer as correct or to hear an answer which would require me to do research to verify. For those who want to "not think", any response may be good enough to get by (and complete the test or homework assignment). For others, it seems like a waste of mental energy to ask something from something that will convincingly deliver incorrect information at random times.
When a person gets an impression about something, it can be hard for that impression to change. With people getting the impression that AI cannot be trusted, they would likely not use AI except in limited circumstances where the effort to monitor AI and research its' output is less than the effort it would be to just do the task yourself. AI does not save you time with regards to your question if you have to then research the question to see if AI is even telling accurate information to you.
When compared with earlier digital assistants, AI seems to fall flat too. With other assistants, I had to say specific key words (such as "Play 90s Rock on Pandora") to which the robotic assistant did what was asked. With AI, specific keywords seem to not matter as much and the responses from AI can be somewhat random as well. Rather than the old assistant way of "carry out my command", the new AI is more like "Google search what to do and guess what I want".
AI is impressive and does amazing things. Still, for most people, I imagine that they want their electronics to "do this command" and they want truthful answers to their trivia questions. With the impression that AI can't do either consistently, it is more consistent to just not use AI and do things in a matter which you know will lead to consistent results.
Of course, this is all with regards to the general public (which is generally hard to make sweeping generalizations about). I imagine that sweeping generalizations such as this have to be a very difficult field of study and is something yearning for a statistician to come and take surveys for. Without that, you just have my (likely inaccurate) hypothesis as to why AI isn't taking off as some people want it to.
For me, it's a matter of trust. I feel like I could benefit greatly from an AI agent that could read through my emails and sort through the junk to summarize what's important and flag things like...
For me, it's a matter of trust.
I feel like I could benefit greatly from an AI agent that could read through my emails and sort through the junk to summarize what's important and flag things like upcoming subscription renewals, appointment reminders, long ignored responses, reminders to reach out to friends that I don't interact with often, etc. That said, unless it's entirely offline and done on my own computer, I don't and won't trust it. I don't trust the owners of these systems to have such a deep insight into my personal life, and I'm already considering how to move my email to a more private service for that very reason.
Even if I genuinely saw a use case for agents outside development (where I am not even convinced) the insane amount of token usage for agentic use would already make it a non starter for me....
Even if I genuinely saw a use case for agents outside development (where I am not even convinced) the insane amount of token usage for agentic use would already make it a non starter for me.
Broadly speaking, you either give an agent broad control to let it do what you want or you give it a very restricted set of options and things it can call on. The first option, from my personal testing, is just very expensive. The second option limits the added value for having an LLM in the loop that you might as well do it by hand or automate something the old fashioned way.
They can always just use cheaper models. It'll have to be legitimate reflection about wasted screen space, development time, etc. that removes junk AI features.
They can always just use cheaper models. It'll have to be legitimate reflection about wasted screen space, development time, etc. that removes junk AI features.
I'm really thinking about my work's enterprise subscription and some of those higher level "pushes" for AI use but if the feature remains fairly annoying and useless and keeps giving bad answers...
I'm really thinking about my work's enterprise subscription and some of those higher level "pushes" for AI use but if the feature remains fairly annoying and useless and keeps giving bad answers (like many AI help bots on various social media sites and things) I think it won't be given the priority in further development. Especially if those programmers can't afford to vibe code it anymore.
But idk, it's the only hope I have left from my leadership pushing AI daily.
If I can't boss an AI around to do work as good as mine and let it come back to me with a perfect answer with minimal questions, then it is a company-sponsered waste of time. I told Opus 5 on...
If I can't boss an AI around to do work as good as mine and let it come back to me with a perfect answer with minimal questions, then it is a company-sponsered waste of time.
I told Opus 5 on Ultracode, ostensibly "best of the best" I can use, to generate me a docker-compose file with a caddy proxy updating dns for two domains and three services.
It promptly declared that it was impossible to do DDNS with two domains at the same time on a single Caddy instance. Because it allegedly paresed through the source code of the relevant modules. It's top suggestion was to update the other domain using a cron job. I'm no stranger to a half-baked cron job, but also it brilliantly highlighted how bad these things are.
I've had it pin ancient versions of libraries because one time there was a regression for 5 minutes with the latest runtime. It yanked my Python version from 3.14 to 3.8 on the premise that there was a code regression that prevented installation (there wasn't, it was a temporary dns failure).
Was definitely talking about much more normie sort of work because idk what the hell any of what you said was. So. I will assume it was bad at it. Meanwhile I'm being asked to "run that through...
Was definitely talking about much more normie sort of work because idk what the hell any of what you said was.
So.
I will assume it was bad at it.
Meanwhile I'm being asked to "run that through AI" anytime I have a question.
Yes, it was borderline technobabble, but it's the kind of technobabble that it's allegedly the best possible at. And it was as wrong as citing that the USSR is alive and well.
Yes, it was borderline technobabble, but it's the kind of technobabble that it's allegedly the best possible at.
And it was as wrong as citing that the USSR is alive and well.
Even the best models provide 'meh' answers more often than not. Switching to cheaper models that are even just 5% worse will be quickly abandoned by anybody that has a reasonable choice to do so.
Even the best models provide 'meh' answers more often than not.
Switching to cheaper models that are even just 5% worse will be quickly abandoned by anybody that has a reasonable choice to do so.
Depends on the domain. For the magic chat bot that's suppose to turn your website into a Star Trek experience - yeah those suck. I was recently kind of shocked that that Cloudflare chat bot...
Depends on the domain. For the magic chat bot that's suppose to turn your website into a Star Trek experience - yeah those suck. I was recently kind of shocked that that Cloudflare chat bot doesn't know how Cloudflare works. But I have been surprised on occasion when a chat bot sidebar pulls up the correct excerpt from their documentation.
Case and point as far as I am concerned. As far as answering your comment goes, if I wanted to implement deep research in the same way I have seen it work from google, anthropic and openAI then it...
Case and point as far as I am concerned. As far as answering your comment goes, if I wanted to implement deep research in the same way I have seen it work from google, anthropic and openAI then it would be in the hundreds for just token usage. In fact, you can easily see this if you ever used those research tools, you tend to hit your ratelimits rather quickly even on the expensive plans.
So in my mind there is no reasonable consumer agentic market as these things simply aren't cheap.
I wasn't trying to debate anything. Genuinely just curious! I've only started looking at my usage numbers and was fascinated by it. I think it's still possible for agentic use by normal consumers...
I wasn't trying to debate anything. Genuinely just curious! I've only started looking at my usage numbers and was fascinated by it. I think it's still possible for agentic use by normal consumers some day. The $20/month plan at OpenAI has given me a lot more usage than I'd think for personal use. My cousin sent me a screenshot of a Chinese model with 100 million tokens used for $0.85 (heavily cached). Apple's building in agentic support in Safari, which would make basic use free for hundreds of millions. I see no reason the cheap end of the market can't develop.
EDIT: I'm using Opus 4.6/4.8/5 and Sol. Both are stupidly expensive compared to the "open source" options.
Safari's built in agentic support would be free at point of use, but in actuality the cost would be generalized across the cost of all Apple services, as Apple isn't going to be paying it...
Safari's built in agentic support would be free at point of use, but in actuality the cost would be generalized across the cost of all Apple services, as Apple isn't going to be paying it themselves out of the goodness of their heart. Unlike a lot of other, more specialized companies, Apple has a lot of other products and services where they can place the resulting expense of a "free" service to hide what's happening. Besides, living in the Apple ecosystem isn't cheap. It's not likely to be replicated at the truly cheap end of the market.
It depends on their agent setup but Safari exposes an MCP server and if the agent runs locally, it's effectively "free". Maybe it runs in PCC though. Still, as capabilities get better, why...
It depends on their agent setup but Safari exposes an MCP server and if the agent runs locally, it's effectively "free". Maybe it runs in PCC though. Still, as capabilities get better, why wouldn't what runs in PCC today run on-device in X years?
The article makes a distinction between agentic use and chat use. For just general chat use, you are absolutely right. But, within chatGPT there is also agentic use in the form of the deep...
The $20/month plan at OpenAI has given me a lot more usage than I'd think for personal use.
The article makes a distinction between agentic use and chat use. For just general chat use, you are absolutely right. But, within chatGPT there is also agentic use in the form of the deep research functionality I mentioned. I can't remember what limitations chatGPT put in place (I think it simply limits the amount of search you can do?) but with Anthropics version you are quickly told after a few uses that you have hit your usage limit with the $20 plan.
That's just one agent, one they supposedly have optimized the heck out on their side and something all parties are already rate limiting.
I tried implementing it myself in various ways. I also did play around with versions other folks have attempted to build. Once you have to pay for the tokens, even with chinese models it becomes hella expensive. You still needs fairly top of the line models for starters (you can do some initial triaging with smaller quicker models) and to go through all data simply consumes a ton of tokens.
That is just one consumer application. The article starts out with this tidbit
“Hot take … isn’t it kinda crazy that nobody is really using AI Agents,” Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, wrote in a viral X post this week. “Theoretically, the tech is ready for AI agents to totally transform how we work and live our lives …
Not all of the agents infused in the live Josh here envisions will be as token heavy as full blown search and research. But it is clear he's envisioning a lot more of them. So left or right, shit is too expensive for the fairy tale of AI agents totally transforming how we work and live our lives.
I don't feel like you're really disputing anything I said, but maybe I'm misunderstanding? I've been using the $20/month plan for agentic use, coding on the side at home for fun every few days....
I don't feel like you're really disputing anything I said, but maybe I'm misunderstanding? I've been using the $20/month plan for agentic use, coding on the side at home for fun every few days. I've also been having it do deep research reports for me ("how much is my condo worth?") once in a while. It's been more than adequate for my use. The really long, detailed report about my condo which included a list of comparable properties and analysis on those used 10% of my weekly usage budget.
I think that what you are describing still falls under very light consumer use as far as the Josh Miller and friends are concerned. They want you to use agents for ALL THE THINGS not just...
I think that what you are describing still falls under very light consumer use as far as the Josh Miller and friends are concerned. They want you to use agents for ALL THE THINGS not just occasional software projects and occasional deep research.
I am not being facetious here either, I honestly don't think that the usage you are describing even scratches the surface of what they'd want the usage to be. Or, what they need it to be to ever be able to get anything back from the insane VC cash infusion this entire market has gotten.
Okay, maybe not, but who cares what Josh Miller thinks? If we don't reach 24/7 use of agentic AI use, it doesn't mean it can't still be an important part of our lives. The dismissals of AI in this...
Okay, maybe not, but who cares what Josh Miller thinks? If we don't reach 24/7 use of agentic AI use, it doesn't mean it can't still be an important part of our lives. The dismissals of AI in this thread aren't scoped to just what Josh Miller is saying, but agentic AI in general.
Usually I don't. But since he is specifically quoted in the article and the article is generally about why agentic use isn't catching on how he and other CEOs think it should it is only reasonable...
Okay, maybe not, but who cares what Josh Miller thinks?
Usually I don't. But since he is specifically quoted in the article and the article is generally about why agentic use isn't catching on how he and other CEOs think it should it is only reasonable that this is the context that people are discussing it in.
The dismissals of AI in this thread aren't scoped to just what Josh Miller is saying, but agentic AI in general.
Possibly, but you are responding to me, I am not dismissive to agentic AI use. I am just saying that, all things considered, it is pretty expensive for very little value add in many cases. Even if they are wrapped in more feature complete products I might add.
$800/month is less than one day of billable hours for software development work where I am. As long as the AI is improving your efficiency 10% you can easily justify the expense and pass it on to...
$800/month is less than one day of billable hours for software development work where I am. As long as the AI is improving your efficiency 10% you can easily justify the expense and pass it on to the client. Any business will see it the same.
The big AI companies charge a lot per token, but more efficient models (that are already running inference at a profit) like GLM 5.2 are still incredibly useful.
I agree with your sentiment that for someone who is using the AI to generate income there's math here that can make sense in some situations. The article is discussing why "normal" people aren't...
I agree with your sentiment that for someone who is using the AI to generate income there's math here that can make sense in some situations.
The article is discussing why "normal" people aren't using AI Agents though. $800/mo would be massively expensive for a "normal" person to use at home.
Maybe someone wealthy who has staff at home could justify offsetting the $800 in staff for AI token spend, but that's not most "normal" people.
The pricing would have to be extremely different for a consumer market vs business for it to make any kind of broad adoption to make economic sense.
$800/month is too expensive for sure, but some of the Chinese models are pretty solid now and 1-2 orders of magnitude lower in pricing. That gets it to where $10-20/month is a feasible price,...
$800/month is too expensive for sure, but some of the Chinese models are pretty solid now and 1-2 orders of magnitude lower in pricing. That gets it to where $10-20/month is a feasible price, especially when you consider that the average person will use far, far fewer tokens than what I or @teaearlgraycold use.
The features themselves aren't very compelling for a normal person yet, but stuff like Apple's password reset feature for leaked credentials being agent-driven will become the norm. Truly consumer-focused experiences will eventually be built. Can we look at the technology and really think no one's going to find a way to incorporate a natural-language interfaced computing environment? We've only just begun to build out the next generation of interfacing, but it's been a dream for decades.
I agree with most of what you're saying, I think you hit the nail on the head with having to use cheaper open weight (likely Chinese - fwiw this is what I use at home for playing around in this...
I agree with most of what you're saying, I think you hit the nail on the head with having to use cheaper open weight (likely Chinese - fwiw this is what I use at home for playing around in this space) models to save costs and that the features themselves aren't there yet.
Not saying they definitely never will be, but these two things alone are huge for general adoption and broadly answer the question the article poses.
I think your example is likely the way this will go. Less "AI as a product" and more "This consumer facing product or service has some AI features now". This will probably eventually move from "gimmicks" to features normal people actually want.
I think we're still a very very long way off from "normal" people running agents to do useful tasks for themselves.
My employer will happily spend $200+ a month per head on AI stuff, but shirks at the idea of paying $500 a year for a piece of software that would easily be 3x more beneficial, but lacks AI as a...
My employer will happily spend $200+ a month per head on AI stuff, but shirks at the idea of paying $500 a year for a piece of software that would easily be 3x more beneficial, but lacks AI as a feature.
I'm guessing an IDE? What do they have you use? Or is it something else? I think an employer should consider letting their employee use up to 5% of their annual salary on tools if the tools are...
I'm guessing an IDE? What do they have you use? Or is it something else? I think an employer should consider letting their employee use up to 5% of their annual salary on tools if the tools are going to make them move faster. More than 5% if it can be defended. Most employers are too penny pinching on tooling.
Toad for Oracle. Although oof, their prices went up, esp with new AI editions. I can still reasonably justify the base edition, but those high-end DBA editions are just getting out of hand....
Toad for Oracle.
Although oof, their prices went up, esp with new AI editions.
I can still reasonably justify the base edition, but those high-end DBA editions are just getting out of hand.
DBeaver is catching up, but there are still a lot of rough edges for Oracle in particular.
Related: Just this afternoon, I burned $20 of extra credits in a single Opus 5 on medium prompt. It's almost got the same ROI as a slot machine. Almost.
I don't use Reddit, but I came across this comment of a guy in ChatGPT subreddit that burned through most of his 20$ monthly limits in a single day because his agent worked for 8 hours. Made me...
I don't use Reddit, but I came across this comment of a guy in ChatGPT subreddit that burned through most of his 20$ monthly limits in a single day because his agent worked for 8 hours.
Made me cringe so hard. I'm guessing the subscription limits are pretty high, compared to what you would get by paying directly for the API.
I use them every single day for a variety of tasks, but the tasks I work on typically have some way for me or the agent to get rapid feedback on accuracy. I suspect most people don't have that...
I use them every single day for a variety of tasks, but the tasks I work on typically have some way for me or the agent to get rapid feedback on accuracy. I suspect most people don't have that luxury. When programming you can set up various feedback signals (compiler errors, test suites) that can automatically get fed into the LLM as text which will put it back on track. And every time you do this you give the AI company training data so the next iteration is less likely to make the same mistake.
Yesterday I successfully did some vibe-CADing (I should just learn a real CAD program eventually, though). I was using OpenSCAD. In that case it's not quite as good as normal programming, but as long as I give it small and precise steps I can visually evaluate each change for accuracy. In general having a computer visualize something for you gives you a superpower. And 3D modeling is inherently visual so it's trivial there. But for any other computer work you can use LLMs to create visual feedback systems for what would normally need to be visualized internally.
Same reason why every new thing is adapted slowly. "Normal people" are slow adopters and the early adopters are weird. I remember a time when people who used cell phones in public were thought as...
Same reason why every new thing is adapted slowly. "Normal people" are slow adopters and the early adopters are weird.
I remember a time when people who used cell phones in public were thought as being a bit eccentric.
When it comes to AI, old people are more eager to adopt it than young people, which indicates the reasons for adopting it aren't the same. Old people tend to care less about the future than young...
When it comes to AI, old people are more eager to adopt it than young people, which indicates the reasons for adopting it aren't the same.
Old people tend to care less about the future than young people so environmentally destructive tech probably doesn't feel as negative to them. Age also makes you more interested in something that lets you fake pro results but also takes away from your learning to do things yourself. Kids are smart for being cautious! And they can tell the difference between a crappy AI flyer vs. something that was made mindfully while many regular older folks can't. Being a con-artist is just not cool like having a cell phone used to be.
(There are other uses for AI besides con-artistry, but for some reason the use-cases pushed by early AI adopters in regular people's social spaces fall largely in that bucket.)
Speaking as one of those older folks with a modicum of IT wisdom, I won't touch AI agents for personal use with a 10-meter pole, for the foreseeable future. The glaring environmental costs,...
Speaking as one of those older folks with a modicum of IT wisdom, I won't touch AI agents for personal use with a 10-meter pole, for the foreseeable future.
The glaring environmental costs, security issues, data harvesting, damage to web resources, corruption of truth, political power balance, impact on creators, and "first taste is free/cheap" risks of dependency and skill degradation, are absolutely relevant to me.
I think the main driver for older folks is a sense of wonder. “You’re telling me I can generate a picture by telling the computer to make it?” Something that would take them hours to do instead...
I think the main driver for older folks is a sense of wonder. “You’re telling me I can generate a picture by telling the computer to make it?” Something that would take them hours to do instead takes 30-60 seconds.
Obligatory reminder about mental health stigma and how those two things aren't really alike, and that schizophrenia looks like a lot of things and is often so distressing for the person. I've...
Obligatory reminder about mental health stigma and how those two things aren't really alike, and that schizophrenia looks like a lot of things and is often so distressing for the person.
I've never really found people talking to themselves to be bothersome whether it's a cell phone or stimming or delusions or rehearsing a conversation though so I just have a tolerance for people existing in public anymore.
Yes, yes. But having spent a significant amount of time involuntarily commited at a mental ward myself for psychosis, I also don't feel too far off the mark. Fun story: I was on day 3 or so (time...
Yes, yes. But having spent a significant amount of time involuntarily commited at a mental ward myself for psychosis, I also don't feel too far off the mark.
Fun story:
I was on day 3 or so (time was wobbly there, let alone with sands of time) of having a roomate that would shit himself periodically for fun (having told me himself before doing so), steal my shit, and start screaming at 2AM non-stop till the night watch would come in and sedate him. Had been denied many requests to transfer to a different room, as they were all booked.
I walk up to the attending and ask if a spare solitary room is available so I can get some sleep (having been told by psychiatrist to get lots of sleep). They say I can't go there. I say "Well, you can let me go there, or I can go smash my roomate in the face with a book until you're forced to put me there, and one of these options requires you to fill out a lot more paperwork."
They let me spend the next few nights in solitary.
Most normal people around me use AI. There's a reason chatgpt keeps being the most downloaded app, you don't get to those insane numbers with just tech users. I can't read the article because it's...
Most normal people around me use AI. There's a reason chatgpt keeps being the most downloaded app, you don't get to those insane numbers with just tech users. I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, do they address this? If regular people don't use it, why are the usage numbers so high?
The most common uses I see with people around me are:
OVERWHELMINGLY MOST COMMON: Looking for information. Not everyone knows how to search well, and frankly search engines have gotten so awful in the last few years, they border on unusable. But you can ask the AI and it immediately gives you a pretty accurate answer.
Text generation: Especially for work and for students.
Image generation. IMO that's why artists hate AI so much, I personally know several people who used to pay artists for commissions that no longer do.
The biggest difference I see between regular people using it and online discussions by tech people, is overwhelmingly the tone. Regular people like it and are impressed. Tech/online people are at best extremely skeptical and generally think it can't do anything well. At worst, they hate it with passion.
The only exception is artists. Anyone related to art I know, normie or not, (not just visual art, musicians too) really hates it.
I keep seeing a performative hatred of generative AI from video game developers due to their proximity to artists. There are people that won’t use LLMs for any coding because of a sense of...
I keep seeing a performative hatred of generative AI from video game developers due to their proximity to artists. There are people that won’t use LLMs for any coding because of a sense of solidarity with visual artists. I think this is silly, especially because they have genuinely stayed away from LLMs and thus say incorrect things about their capabilities. Personally I use LLMs for coding but pay for visual art from talented artist friends. They will do a far better job than an image generator will. You don’t need to use image generators because you’re using LLMs and artists should not dictate how you write code.
I like AI more than most people on the internet seem to likw AI. I use stable diffusion sometimes. I often search with Perplexity or get chatGPT to write stuff for me. I dont know how AI agents...
I like AI more than most people on the internet seem to likw AI. I use stable diffusion sometimes. I often search with Perplexity or get chatGPT to write stuff for me.
I dont know how AI agents work, where to go to use one, or even where to start. Honestly I dont really know what the difference is
(recommend reader mode to dodge the paywall)
Look I just... How are you so out of touch industry?
Even if I set aside absolutely everything I dislike about AI outside of the actual product: No one is teaching people how to do that, or why to do that, or how it would help them. They're just putting "AI features" into products and selling them conversations with copy written characters.
I don't even think the sci-fi vibe is necessarily the problem, it's that the tools don't live up to the vibe.
Beyond the lack of teaching, beyond the gap between promise and capabilities, I genuinely don't know how I could integrate agentic AI into my day to day life, like at all.
I make light use of AI tools at work in specific cases where it helps me or saves time. I know and understand the tools. I 'get' what an agent is.
Now, here's a smattering of things I've done in the past few days outside of work: read a comic book, played video games, went to a local block party, ate out at a new restaurant with my wife, watched TV, took pictures with my camera. How could agentic AI help me with any of these activities whatsoever? And if there is any possible 'use-case' for me, how is it any better than using the working brain I have in my head right now?
Truly, genuinely, beyond my qualms about the AI industry, I can't think of many (any) reasons to use the product outside of my narrow work-related usage.
And that, right there, is the goldmine they've oversold.
Having the ability in excel to say "hey i'm trying to do this kind of math/formula, help me" in plain text is WILD. That's such a huge advancement in helping people learn their tools. I've yet to work anywhere that has anywhere near a full grasp of just their email/text/sheets suite, let alone more complex stuff, and these "AI" tools can 100% help with that.
The issue is that doesn't require a couple trillion in data center build out so now we're on "well obviously it can do everything" which is extra hilarious because even if it can, i probably only need it once. Then i can just setup the pipeline and leave it be.
One of the huge potential upsides i see of AI is helping people standardize the edges of their system (higher quality and more existing APIs) so that others can hook up and self serve, but that's a one and done kind of problem.
I fully agree. For context, I work in this area and did a masters in it.
I have been building tools, and looking into integration of these AI agents, and in the end, defining a MCP for your tool, letting claude do the tedious work of reading the manual and answering your questions in simple terms is just great.
And yes some people let it replace their own thinking - that's a problem. But once you see it as a tool, and it's been getting quite capable - it's not 100% perfect - and I think it sucks at creative work. But that's also because I recognize AI texts and designs so quickly.
But just using AI as an extra "smart" layer above a userface can be quite nice. Don't try to make it replace staff, make it help your users, and it can be great.
Some usecases I have built myself are: quick automation of repetetive tasks in an UI, or "turn my verbal description into a JSON" (in my space sim luna). I have tons of users under 15, none of them will write JSON to customize their system. But they can say: I want a black hole and 2 stars around it - and then the AI writes the JSON
I could spend $20 a month to have a LLM Agent schedule my doctor appointment for me, which I do approximately once a year.
Or I could spend $0 and schedule it myself?
I guess I could use it to manage my email inbox??? Except I get approximately 1 email a day I care about and spend exactly 5 minutes in the morning checking my email?
I don’t know what the “value-add” here is.
If the LLM agent could do the dishes or run to the grocery store for me, sure. (I guess it could handle creating a grocery list or ordering for delivery or pickup…except I already build my grocery list with 3 clicks in my recipe app, and I’d rather get my groceries myself so I don’t end up with weird substitutions or bad produce).
Reminds me of the quote "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing. Not for AI to do my art and writing for me so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I can't find many if any uses at work myself and like you, not so much at home either. Maybe there are amazing things it could do for me, setting aside my other issues with it, but I'm a fairly techy person for a normy. I am comfortable learning new software and apps (except Instagram, idk I hate it) and can adjust my settings and solve most of my own problems.
But i mostly find interactions with AI frustrating and maybe that's because I can search for sources on my own and educate myself on topics and fix most of my own problems.
I need a robot handyman (and like not a humanoid weird one, a functional one) more than I can think I need an agent. And I think I even know sort of what an agent is.
Personal software I think is a good use case for home. Maybe you already know you could write a script to do a thing, but it's not worth the time or effort to figure it out? Now you can have AI do it for you, and if you don't like it, delete it without feeling like you wasted any time.
For example I now have a hugo site on my server (i do some self hosting) that is a personal wuthering waves wiki. Previously I had some notes for stuff in silverbullet (a markdown based wiki), but it was growing unwieldy and I couldn't have any nice layouts or designs without a lot of effort. I started with having the site build out a rotations (combos for each character) with a nice markup for buttons to push and colors and some variations. It grew into I can now go use the official wuwa discord bot that makes images of your characters, download those to a directory, and run a script which will scrape out the data from that (thanks to self hosted back end that is open sourced and maintained by some card generation sites). It will scrape from a community run google sheet of stats to get stat targets, it will diff how far off I am from targets on my character, then give an overall todo list page ordered by what percentage they are away from their stat targets. So now when I play i can bring up a nice layout of the characters and their rotations and check a todo list of which person to grind out. I also have a high level overview table to help me organize who would go on a team based on the things that they do, something I tend to forget.
All of this information exists in one place or another online, sure, but this is also tailored to my characters and the way that I play, and information that I need, all of it built while I was playing crimson desert over the weekend, occasionally tabbing out.
I also used claude to help me set up hosting actual budget, while it was easy to set up the software, it took a bit to figure out how to get it all set up the way i want, and asking the AI questions was much easier than going and reading through the documentation. I set up data scrapping for my information, however I still needed to set up a bunch of rules for organizing things into categories and reconciling payments etc. It also helped me set up a local llm on the server that would run (no graphics card + a lot of ram on the server) so that once a day at night it will try to categorize incoming scrapes etc. I would never have set this up if I didn't have the AI going out and finding answers to my questions so quickly and being able to talk to it so naturally.
I have done a lot of other random things at home with AI, and a lot of times it sits there doing nothing, but when i have an idea it's as simple as starting up a terminal going to claude and typing in the idea, then going back to what i was doing.
I think more and more we will be able to write custom software that fits exactly any need we have, even if it's a one shot task. I am honestly hoping they keep pushing the local models to the point that the AI industry busts wide open and LLMs are just a thing we can have on our PCs.
I don't write scripts, write software, run servers, run wikis or any of that. It would all be a huge complication to my life not really a useful solution to anything for me. I'm nearly entirely unfamiliar with most of the programs, applications, and goals you have for your characters (for what? I don't know)
I really don't want to have to write custom software with the AI on my computer, that sounds miserable for me, a non-tech person. I don't mind learning a software or app or whatever, but I'm not interested in running or developing it. Plus that all sets aside my other issues with AIs, I'm not in favor of them.
Their response to you (and your answer back) feels like such a great example of the original point you were trying to make. Developers and techies (myself included) forget that not everyone wants to self-host and have to keep services running so they can do the thing. I'm a sysadmin by career and I still put minimal effort into making sure my stuff works; why would someone who doesn't self-host existing applications want to write their own?
The vast majority of people don't run their own services, write code, or even have the spare computer laying around to run a simple lab. Using AI for development only sounds good if you're already writing your own software or you think you can with no idea of what good code looks like (vibecoding in a nutshell). I haven't seen a single actually useful application of generative AI outside of developer-related work, and even then the best use has been synthesizing a large doc base or multiple repos into an understandable summary with links to relevant docs. I genuinely cannot think of a good application for AI that would appeal to the majority of people outside the tech sphere right now.
Exactly and it is that complete lack of understanding of the "non-techie" experience that makes AI conversations so frustrating. I'm the person who can fix the weird computer connection issue to the screen in the conference room, not someone who can - or wants to - write a program. I haven't written code since using HTML for websites pre-Dreamweaver.
Honestly, I work in the tech field, and the majority of my useful gen ai stuff has been on the non tech side of what I do.
I don't trust an AI to write firewall rules or build scripts or whatever that I'm not reviewing. They're easy enough to write, and reviewing them carefully takes as much time as doing myself.
I'm honestly like you, I had a self hosting phase, but I realized I was getting almost nothing out of it, and constantly stressing myself out when my janky pile of bullshit inevitably collapsed and I'd have to spend hours fixing it. So yeah, fuck AI for personal tech stuff too.
When it comes to making PowerPoint slides, or formatting text from a contract into an excel spreadsheet with pretty colors, or stuff like that that I need to present to business people though? Sure!
If they're slightly wrong, it's not too big of a deal, and they take me a few minutes to check anyway.
Doing them by hand involves the absolute hell of using wysiwyg editors that randomly decided that whatever you want to do is not allowed, and then you have to trawl through the depths of a Microsoft support forum to figure out how to left justify a chart in PowerPoint or whatever.
Using Claude to make PowerPoint presentations has saved me so much time, it's insane. Its also some of the most tedious, annoying work I do, it's completely mindless, and I'm not losing anything by letting those "skills" atrophy. It lets me focus more on actual, meaningful work.
But I'd rather leave that meaningful work well away from AI.
I actually find this a little annoying when it’s cited as an AI use case, because PowerPoint is actually not a great way to convey the information people use it for (See Edward Tufte). The main reason people use it is because it’s sort of easy enough to use so even a marginally computer literate person can throw something together. But if you’re mostly automating content production anyway the PowerPoints decks aren’t any easier than a bunch of other stuff you can do. Why not just prompt out some dynamic visualizations in D3? Why not do one of those “person draws stuff on a marker board” type videos instead? There’s a galaxy of possibilities if people would only use their imaginations!
The fact that the tools exist to enable this but all businesses seem to think to do with it is the same old stuff but lazier is extremely depressing and, to me, speaks to a deep spiritual rot at the heart of our culture. It seems like nobody wants to do this stuff and nobody values the output of it, so why are we doing it at all? What is the point of making it more efficient to produce something we never cared about anyway? Perhaps it’s just a compliance check, but does the compliance check need to reproduce a format meant for periodic presentations if the presentations and nominal review steps aren’t happening? That seems like some sort of business process atavism. If you just want the AI to produce a report that nobody reads why does it need to be rendered as a PowerPoint slide instead of a dry memo? It just feels like people have completely lost the plot here.
Mostly for the same reasons that you must submit a PSD file if you're working in graphic design, you must submit a PDF if you're a lawyer, you must submit a LaTeX file if you're working in math and so on. They're industry standards, and standards are important.
They're not necessarily standards because they're the best tool for the job, but it's just a format that people have come to expect and have built processes around. Even if I had a presentation that was much better suited for a man drawing on a whiteboard video, when I'm asked to submit my deck, and I submit an mp4 of a guy drawing on a whiteboard, the person coordinating the presention is going to be like "what is this, I need your PowerPoint".
This is basically restating the problem I’ve cited in different terms. The standards were built based on certain assumptions around how these things would be used. The world in which those assumptions were made no longer exists. Nobody has any imagination for figuring out whether any of it can be done better.
Its not about imagination, it's about inertia. Its the same reason why we still use ipv4 even though ipv6 exists, or why we use 60hz AC current in the US despite most of our appliances being DC now. Its not like no one has thought of a better way of doing things. Its just that the current way of doing things works well enough, and no one person has the power to mandate that everyone change. Every organization does business with other organizations and has to do presentations with them. PowerPoint is a convenient, well known way to do that. You can have all the imagination you want, but you can't change the entire worlds standards with imagination.
If there were some catastrophic event that made PowerPoint no longer usable, like Microsoft going out of business, I could see a change taking place, otherwise though, no other alternative offers enough benefits to justify the immense costs to use something else.
There is really no inertia behind PowerPoint aside from nobody actually giving a shit. As a former management consultant who basically lived in PowerPoint I can tell you it’s actually a net negative for the purposes for which it’s used, people are just lazy and lack imagination on how to do things better. You can call that “inertia” but that’s really just a way of saying “needs energy to change” and when you put it that way, it becomes clearer that it’s just laziness. It’s not like the glut of “bullshit jobs” out there are doing anything else useful.
I'll give you an example of what I mean by inertia.
I worked at a huge bank with about 200k employees. We had hundreds of thousands of other organizations we did business with, meaning other banks, technology vendors, government regulatory bodies, large customers, investment firms, fintech providers and so on.
Internally, and externally, the way high importance presentations intended to convey information were done was via PowerPoint. To replace PowerPoint with... Say... Guy drawing on whiteboard videos, there are a number of things you'd have to do.
One, you'd have train almost 200k people who have used PowerPoint their entire careers to learn guy drawing on whiteboard software. Two, you'd have to convince all of these other organizations to accept guy drawing on whiteboard videos instead of PowerPoint presentations. Three, you'd have to replace a lot of technology explicitly made to show, create, store, and regulate PowerPoint presentations to do all that stuff with videos instead (meaning large conference room hardware, purpose made remote meeting appliances, sensitivity labeling software, DLP appliances, storage servers, and so on). Four, you'd have to change federal regulatory rules mandating the use of PowerPoint for certain presentations.
Some of this stuff is doable with enough investment, some of it is outside of the realm of the organizations power to change. How would you sell this, likely hundreds of million dollar effort to the board of directors? What material benefit would you be able to demonstrate by ripping out PowerPoint and replacing it with guy with a whiteboard videos? How could you show that it would help the company make more money within the next few years?
It would be a very tough sell, and PowerPoint works well enough, so it's not really done, even if you can imagine a better alternative.
An organization has finite resources, and they spend their resources in ways that maximize their investment. Not spending those resources on things that don't maximize that investment isn't laziness, it's good management.
Again this is just more words to reiterate what I just said while flipping the tone. I recognize all of this, I also say it is extremely depressing that corporate culture has completely lost the plot about what office work exists to facilitate. PowerPoint was never a good tool for its job, I don’t even think it actually works “well enough” considering how many consulting hours have been billed to nitpick over template alignment. So it literally is just a lack of imagination. Most of the people who have been “using PowerPoint their whole career” barely know how to use PowerPoint as it is, and it’s not as if businesses aren’t happy to whiplash business units from one crappy SaaS solution to another hoping they can buy their way out of their poor fundamentals. And it’s not as if those crappy software services don’t radically change their UIs on a semi-annual basis.
Like this is all just a lack of imagination and an inability to take their own jobs seriously. Not just as a list of tasks they’re doing, but the essence of what their corporate function is for. This is why people feel depressed and disconnected from work and why businesses report morale being poor and why everyone thinks their job is bullshit. There’s no connection between the work and making any sort of mark on the world.
FWIW, I'm a techie, but i also work in higher education, and I see a lot of potential for it in teaching. There's been a lot of news coverage on students cheating, but there's also some real upsides to it. If you create some scaffolding and combine it with directions on how to teach specific subject matter, it can do a pretty good job tutoring students. It's still early days, and a lot of experimentation is happening, but it's one area I'm hopeful for.
Yeah for sure I would agree with you I can't think of too much for an LLM if you don't engage with a computer too much. I think as things get better over time the ability to talk to your computer in a natural language is going to be pretty revolutionary when it reaches the point of just happening logically and more deterministically. Already my google searches are half the previous google keyword speak and half natural language inquiries depending what I'm looking for.
I thought of some other uses, I've actually had some good success with cooking. Basically I suck at cooking and don't have many recopies, don't know what a lot of foods are and what they taste like, and generally I struggle with making effort at things and have some anxiety. Regardless of if it makes sense or not, these have been barriers to me cooking anything new. However, I find asking LLMs about recopies and flavors etc is incredibly helpful. I can say I have these ingredients what can I make, or I want to make X, but I don't like this this and this, or I don't like this flavor profile, will it have a strong flavor if I put this in? Just really being able to get dynamic advise on things and work with whatever my cooking issues are, is way better for me than reading cooking sites or youtube videos. I dont know if it is good past basics, but it guided me through marinading some chicken and grilling it, then reheating in the air fryer with time/temps the other day.
As AI kinda finds its niche, I really do think the big gain for everyone will be natural language interfaces, either via voice or typing in order to perform tasks. We'll have debates when to use buttons vs llms and all that I'm sure, but that really is something that is quite incredible to witness right now that it can do.
I mean, I use a computer for work and at home. But I don't see much benefit in talking to a computer as if it were a person.
I also prefer to use trusted sites for recipes, I don't trust LLMs to "know" a good recipe vs a site that just...does recipes. I have learned from those types of sites my entire life. (And from cookbooks!)
Idk I just don't see it being a benefit over what I already do.
I really try and refrain from posting on AI posts, because I do love AI but it is so hated and I try and take in the critique to moderate my usage.
With recipes though? Recipes are amazing as an LLM use. It's absolutely a great way to find and alter recipes, especially when things inevitably don't work so well and you're in the middle of cooking, and then the pot starts boiling over and you can ask Gemini how to fix things. It's great. I appreciate it so much for cooking.
It would require me to have a level of trust in the AI that I don't have. I am not much of a cook, but I also don't ask my computer what's wrong in the middle of a recipe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I say it's worth a shot, but that's also because I enjoy recklessly failing in cooking. Lots of laughter and love in those moments. But I am very weird. To each their own!
Er, but why would I need an LLM to do that? I've been failing at cooking (and succeeding sometimes) for decades?
For me, it’s the fact that it can break down, say like making a Roux, into specfic steps that make it seem less daunting and then also be able to help you try and save it
Gotcha. I genuinely don't have an issue with recipes. I don't cook as often as I like but that's for other reasons
As far as I am aware I haven't dipped my toes into ai agents. But I do have some situations where I've used LLMS to help me generate scripts, or figure out how to do specific tasks in a spreadsheet, or write a regular expression. I guess these are situations where I could use agents to give access to varying spreadsheets to automate some steps for me. For instance, I'm working on pulling data from my Garmin smartwatch (web export) and sleep data from my CPAP machine, to look for patterns. The data unfortunately doesn't mesh well together, my CPAP labels the date differently than the Garmin, there are missing entries which means lines have to be matched up using date heuristics before being copied, etc. This is the sort of work that someone with years of knowledge using spreadsheets, regular expressions, database work, or scripting could figure out in minutes. I would have to research each step and build my knowledge from the ground up, or I could just ask an LLM how I can accomplish what I want to do.
I honestly don't trust agentic ai enough to just dump a .csv file into it and ask it to "merge this data". I've seen too many mistakes in what it does to trust it, and I certainly don't trust myself enough to check it for errors.
Heck, a big part of the issue at hand is likely that to use these agents, we have to have a task the we understand enough to want to hand off, and we have to know how to hand it off. These companies want us to hand them tasks that we don't understand past "book a weekend trip for me to Miami, Florida" so they can book the hotel chain, flights etc. that pay them referral fees.
You are right to not trust AI to do data crunching, but what it is great at is writing code to do data crunching. In your scenario even if you do know how to put data together as an expert, chances are you won't know specifically about how to pull the data off a specific device nor the format, and would have to research it, and all the tedium of figuring out what each field means etc. But this is the win when you know what needs to happen, you already know you have to pull data from sources and then combine and reduce it into the numbers that have meaning to you.
This is where AI is really great, it'll get the format for your device, have data classes built, be able to explain to you what every field is, and then you can work with it how to put the data together to line up the discrepancies. If it feels algorithmically unsolvable you can have it build something to help you resolve the data out. I know for a fact you aren't the first person to try to mesh non conforming data together for a full picture and so the AI is going to know all sorts of things from other projects you know nothing about, I would not be surprised that there isn't some whitepaper somewhere it has slurped up for specifically your CPAP to Garmin comparison.
Actually I asked fable just now about it and it says there are lots of CPAP sleep apnea DIY projects out there. OSCAR is free pc software for reviewing and exploring data from a CPAP machine, and said some have better exports from SD card dumps. There is SleepHQ a cloud service and they are pushing for charting CPAP data alongside wearable data from watches. It said it sees threads on Apnea Board where people have written python tooling to visualize Garmin data directly with an eye toward importing it into OSCAR. It listed 3 bullet points of data combine issues, noon-to-noon vs midnight date convention, for the matching lines with missing entries says pandas (python data lib) has a pd.merge_asof() function designed for it that joins two time serires on nearest date with a tolerance window (as an aside wow glad i know about that now lol), and garmin's web export gives CSV/JSON while full account export gives FIT files, but there is a python library to read that fitparse/garmin-fit-sdk, and also garminconnect for pulling data via the API.
In the end you can get that overview, check each of those, pick the method and try stuff with sample data you provide it, they eye the combined output to see if it is good. Then you can make sure that it writes lots of test cases so any modifications going forward can guarantee that your data is staying accurate to the path you've chosen.
This is honestly a perfect example of how I'd use an LLM, I would have the idea you mentioned, research it, get dissuaded, and never do it. Now i'd just fire claude off on it while I'm playing video games and get something, if it turns out good could then really focus on it into something very nice for myself.
Funnily enough, I’d been thinking that a housebot would’ve better for you than an AI agent. Unfortunately, something more generalist is still expensive. A robomower or robovac is cheaper, but more limited.
Genuinely that is the sort of help I'd need. (Stepkid who is a mechatronics engineer is looking at a mower for us as a present)
But also I wouldn't want the humanoid ones that are bad at everything (and usually seem to involve humans driving them) or my home recorded and shared widely. Gimme a little Wall-E that can fix shit.
I don't see "generalist" type robots ever really taking off. They're always going to necessarily be more expensive, less reliable, and worse at their tasks versus robots built for one specific task. And if you're buying a 60k robot that can "do everything" versus 12 $5k robots that can do the tasks you need them to do, the 60k robot can still only do one thing at a time, and when it breaks, you're totally screwed.
The way I see things going is that specific tasks start becoming more and more automated. We've got a robomower, a robovac, one day we'll have a robot that just picks things up off the ground, a robot that folds laundry, a robot dishwasher that automatically loads and unloads itself, a robot power washer that cleans your house and so on. Designing a single general purpose robot that can do all of those things well would likely cost as much as a house, even years into the future.
I mean I'm never buying a single 5k robot so I suspect you're right that they won't take off.
Its not. However the world really is not ready for AI. I mean in a socioeconomic sense. That is really what is slowing adoption. Why would anyone replace themselves as an employee? Why would the CEO on the country club/beach/golf course want to come into the office to supervise a bunch of AI when they can delegate to other humans from their private jet?
Most of the world is not designed for LLM controlled automation. In fact its explicitly not because it was not considered a possibility and most systems are strictly designed around a human in the loop as a requirement. As time goes on companies that move away from this will gain market share and everyone will have to follow suite.
Another issue is that pay/work ratio is already terrible. What AI proposes is not that your brain can do something else. That it can do the work of 20-50 employees by your brain essentially acting as supervisor to an automated system. However this causes the obvious question. If I can run a company as a single employee, why am I working for someone else when the pay is $hit?
Additionally people are using AI incredibly ineffectively right now. It requires rather deep computer knowledge to make it useful at this time. That will change slowly.
Anything you didn't like in those games ? You can make a custom mod.
You're TV is showing you ads ? try make a custom app that blocks them (not sure if possible...)
If you're processing them on your computer there's plenty you can do there too.
Not saying these are great, but they are things that could be useful. Essentially you are now an expert hacker and can tweak any computer system to your liking (exaggerating a tad...).
I mod old video games as one of my hobbies and I can promise you that the current models are hot garbage at this, and I know what I am doing. The average user cannot get this to work.
Either impossible or an already solved problem, depending on the way it is delivered. Not sure why you would want to reinvent this wheel.
A coworker shared a very Claude description on how they solved a problem with a vibecoded app.
Turns out they basically just re-invented MPD with a lack of client compatibility and decades of refinement.
Which is neat....but could have been solved with one google search for 'music player server.' And not burning several hundred more kwh.
Just for fun I gave it a try, I've added a Super Saiyan mode to elden ring, you can press a key combination (which also makes you drink...), you're weapon gets on fire for 60s and you have a different moveset.
https://imgur.com/a/Z6UZT3c
To be clear that's reusing assets that are already there (the moves are from Sekiro), but it wrote a bunch of Lua to use them together in a new way. Maybe it still qualifies as garbage, but hot garbage I think not ;)
It's true that there's already a adblocker with Claude as contributor, so maybe you don't need to do it yourself.
Elden Ring is a game that loads lua scripts which are super easy to manipulate, I assumed we were speaking about arbitrary games. Like Claude is utterly incapable of adding code to our Mario Kart 64 toolset (despite several people trying).
I suspect it would also be capable of using Cheat Engine to create pseudo-mods where that one works.
Did the people trying have a background in Software engineering and used Claude before?
The ones doing Mario Kart 64 stuff?
Yeah, at least in as much as they have successfully made some smaller mods themselves. The big issue is that it isn't fully decompiled (at least our toolkit, spaghettikart is fully decomped I think) so it hits walls and doesn't know what to do when it hits them.
No idea if they do it professionally. This whole topic is about "normal people" though so that shouldn't have any bearing.
To be clear there's two questions in this debate :
For 1) I think there's probably a decent number of people (not everybody but the more curious crowd) that would enjoy e.g. making mods, hacking stuff, etc. This already happens to a large extend but one still need require a little bit of prior know-how. That said I think it's going to remain a niche market, most people don't want to build their own things from scratch.
For 2) I don't think the tech is quite ready for lay person, it doesn't always work, does stupid things, and generally the user still need to know what's up. That said I made an Android app with Claude with pretty much no knowledge of the process, it was a pain (mostly transfer issues from computer to phone) but not exactly complicated.
I think for throw away mods it can be useful. My friend is not a programmer but has already made several mods for games with custom overlays or information dumps that were great. This would have been unreachable for us in the past, and I 100% percent agree, the AI is never going to build one of those general mod frameworks people include in all their mods and all that, and it varies by game, but it opens the door, to it.
I had a good chuckle reading these because they are adding more things to manage to your life, not less.
These are novelties. I could add crystal light to all the water I drink to make it ✨less boring✨. It could be useful for the water to taste like lemonade. But I don’t because it’s not.
This stuff is honestly a massive pain in the ass. Getting it to work is a pain, but eventually when you do, it feels cool getting something to work. Maybe not the best use of your time, but it was fun, so whatever.
The real problem is that in a month or three or a year, a software update, or an API change will happen, or a service you rely on will go out of business, and your custom software will break.
Congrats, you're now in maintenance mode. There is literally no one on earth that enjoys software maintenance. It becomes another chore, and even with an AI tool, you no longer even remember the script or how it works, and fixing it involves reaching back into the depths of your memory to remember where the script is, what tool you used to make it, how to even get started prompting to fix it.
Once you fix it, it'll be good for a bit, then it will break again. This will always happen, for the rest of your life. Its a new task you will have to do every so often, on an unpredictable schedule, until you lose interest, the script irreparably stops working, or you die.
Its an absolute pain in the balls, and I wouldn't recommend anyone who doesn't want to maintain software forever integrate some custom built stuff into an important part of their life because of that, ai or no ai.
My whole view on this whole thing is that those pushing these things "features" fundamentally don't understand that two things can be true at once: The tech can be incredibly impressive in terms of what it is actually able to do, while at the same time, not being useful or wanted by the general public.
Like imagine if a company came out with a toaster that can scan the toast and laser toast everything evenly at a molecular level. It costs $1,000 base cost, $50/mo subscription to use, takes 5x as long to toast the toast, requires you to hand over all of your unrelated data so it can "curate" your toasting experience to your exact specifications, and uses more electricity in 10 minutes than my vacuum would in an hour. Like sure, from a technical perspective, that's probably extremely impressive it can do that to the toast on a molecular level. It probably does provide a superior toast at the end of the day. Is it worth all that extra cost and extra time for a vast majority of people? No. There's already a very simple solution available for a fraction of the cost. We don't need to overengineer this.
I know there are actually legitimate use cases for a lot of the AI stuff but the above example is how it feels seeing all of the AI stuff crammed into consumer items that it has absolutely no business being part of.
I felt the pain of the subscription toaster immediately since my laundry machines also want me to subscribe. Why? I have no idea what I would gain from it. This is an excellent example
But yes, I need functional toast not stupidly expensive toast
Reminds me of when everything was being implemented on a Blockchain. Just because your tech can do everything doesn't mean anyone wants it to, and it definitely doesn't mean it's holistically better than existing solutions. That's without even mentioning the barely-concealed intent to price gouge once everyone does switch.
This is nothing like blockchain. This is genuinely useful technology that is already changing the very substrate of the digital economy - anything software or internet related is affected and everything is changing. Development of the software, analysis of the requirements, testing and security testing and many more fields will never be the same. With blockchain, you had to be very creative and inventive to find a way of how to use the most expensive and bloated database system ever in your solution. With AI, you have no choice not to. It is being used.
All that said:
The issue is... No, the first issue is: none of this is impressive for a regular person. It will not help him in his work or leisure.
Another issue is: tech bros and grifters. The "AI guys" have no business plan and try to balance their numbers by pretending every single person on earth is their potential customer.
The grifters have jumped from the previous "big thing" to the next big thing and are trying the same old scams to get rich quick.
Add "doom trolling" by the big guys where they try to scare everyone by saying that their technology is so dangerous that it will either kill everyone or at least make them unemployed.
Of course, the only reaction to be expected is animosity or hate towards the technology.
But it is NOT useless. Unless the apocalypse comes (which it may), the AI bubble will possibly burst but the AI technology will stay forever and change forever everything that is digital-related.
I think you're reading into my comment something general when I said something specific. When tech craze X comes along, tech people assume "thing Y but with X crammed in" will be automatically appealing to the public without actually adding any value to Y. That was true of Blockchain, 3d printing, social media, big data, and it's true of generative AI now. That contains no judgement of the actual usefulness of the technology.
In fact the best analogy to this article might be the "3d print shops" I saw spring up around 2012 that seemed to expect that customers themselves would do the work of thinking up useful things to print, and so did not draw much business and later pivoted.
Places are still like this. I have an out-of-production plastic part in my fridge that’s broken and, as a result, the water dispenser doesn’t work. It’s literally just a plastic rod of a specified length with a particular sequence of ridges along its side and a small hook on the end. It ought to be super easy to 3D print.
But every print shop I talked to is like “Sure just send over the CAD files.” I can send you a photo, I can send you measurements, I can tell you the exact circumference of the hook and the depth of the ridges and how for apart they are. I can actually just give you the parts number from the Electrolux website and provide you with the broken part. But don’t fucking ask me to familiarize myself with CAD like, is the only work you expected to do owning the machine?
Afaik, depending on the shop, yep. Machinists machine to a spec that an engineer engineers for them, and presumably that goes for 3d printing shops as well. Their expertise is in maintaining and operating a print farm.
Btw I've been screwing around in CAD for a few months at this point, and I can try to crank something out if you're OK to share that info? (and it isn't too complex) No guarantees that it's correct, however, ofc.
Yeah if they seemed like a fully fledged machinist sort of operation I’d have understood that more, but this was basically a 3D printer set up in a place that is mostly just a regular print (as in reams of paper) shop. It seemed like a little side project of the owner and it was kind of expensive for what it was.
Also I eventually got in touch with a friend who had a 3D printer and he told me that for the kind of stress I’d be putting on the part to do what it does, the types of filaments he had probably wouldn’t be strong enough at the thinness required so it’ll probably break constantly and I’ll just be replacing it like a disposable part over and over again. Doable if I had my own 3D printer, but more annoying than it’s worth if I’m shipping it.
Aah, fair. I know a couple people who did that sort of thing. I think it was a lot more common earlier on, then they all moved out to sell other peoples' 3D models on Etsy instead. Not really my cup of tea ...
Fair enough as well! I'd note that, depending on the geometry, affixing 3d printed parts onto e.g. cheap, small diameter, commodity threaded rod (or even something like coat hanger wire) could work well. And that -- were you willing to have it printed anyhow -- a lot of the engineering filaments (e.g. carbon fibre-reinforced polycarbonate) should be able to take basically anything you can throw at them.
Just food for thought; I expect you already had this discussion, and skipped it in your comment for brevity 😅 hope you find a solution that works for you, though.
This seems like one of the biggest issues in the "AI Boom(/Bubble)" and it's super high evaluations/investment.
I also think the gap between the promise of "anyone can use AI to do tons of amazing things for you" proponents talk about and the reality of the complexity of actually setting up more advanced AI Agents/harnesses. Let alone using them in any kind of effective way.
I think he's right that in order to get any kind of broad adoption it needs to get WAY simpler for ordinary non-tech people to be able to use. The problem is by the time you simplify and "dumb down" the tooling enough to be usable by an average non-technical Joe it's lost nearly all its usefulness. You're at Microsoft levels of AI tools that can't even do what the "suggested prompt" says.
I don't think the tech industry is conscious of how much their existing skillsets lead them to being able to 'effectively' use these tools. How to be specific and clear enough in prompts to get results even close to what you wanted. How to review the output to see if it actually did what you asked and re-prompt for changes where it didn't.
The more autonomous it is the more it will get things horribly wrong and make catastrophic mistakes which leads to bad PR and even more people realizing how dangerous it can be running these tools without proper isolation and security practices. The more autonomous and long running an agent is the more important a good highly detailed prompt is, and even then there's a very good chance it's still going to get lots wrong.
Then we're back at needing to teach people very technical skills to use them, which defeats the whole idea of broad appeal.
None of this is to mention all the other issues with AI.
I tried pewdiepie's lil self hosted UI thing a month after he released it and even then, I guess it didn't detect my amd GPU because everything I tried, it kept running on my CPU and I eventually gave up and uninstalled it. I'm not sure what I'd use an AI at home for.
I use copilot at work sometimes to make it do VBA or mvc bootstrap because I dislike both of those and it does a good enough job, much faster than I would for sure.
What I find annoying is spaces where I feel like it could be used but clearly isn't. I drive on the same highways EVERY time I drive home from a certain frequent direction. Google maps ALWAYS wants me to take the first exit I can and go down some shitty side road that claims to be 1 minute faster. That side road has like 10 stop signs where as the route I always take is just another highway with 2 stop lights that are green more often than not but maybe slightly more distance miles wise. Why can google not recognize that I took that side path once and literally never again and stop telling me to go that way.
Another, is there a general android interface ai yet? Is there something I can say "hey phone play [specific album] in musicolet" (my preferred music application) I know this used to be a thing when google music and you had uploaded things to it. Instead of posting not knowing I tried it. I reenabled gemini and it said it couldn't. Useless. Absolutely useless.
If it helps, Waze (owned by Google and sharing some data) typically defaults to "your usual route". Plus you can have an Orc narrate your trip and they added a "less chatty" mode where it doesn't give you every direction, but doesn't only give you alerts like the Alerts Only mode.
But I get that, I also think that what seems obvious to us - send me the route I took last time - is not how every driver operates. I take the slower route home sometimes to change scenery, drive slower, etc. but theres not a good way to tell it to "take the back road unless it's super late at night or if the corn is high at the intersection, if they planted beans this year disregard." So I just let it recalculate when I turn.
But yeah I get the absolute frustration of it
That last comment is the most Illinois statement on driving around I've ever heard, thanks for the laugh.
/noise
You're welcome. It's absolutely part of my calculus when I drive home right now to ensure I switch to the back road after the 2 way stop intersection with corn on all four corners that's currently like 7 feet tall, but last year that intersection was beans on at least 3 corners.
I am glad that this is not just a thing I do. I absolutely have routes that I will not take for two or three months of the year because it is impossible to safely cross when the corn goes right up to the road.
I just don't trust other drivers to stop, all it takes is one drunk driver or someone fucking around to fuck up my everything!
Okay as an urbanite who is now very intensely curious - what is the problem with beans farming? Do they grow extra tall/thick? Do they smell?
Oh, no, the corn is tall, the soybeans are short. When the corn is up it blocks your line of sight. So last year I didn't worry about that intersection because it was most/all beans, but this year, due to crop rotation and whatever other reasons, all four corners of this intersection are 7 foot tall corn.
Meaning I can't see if someone isn't slowing down at the stop sign on the cross road.
Processing both the corn and soybeans smells but that's just a thing anyone in Central Illinois knows because every now and then you get a whiff of Decatur
The Google maps thing drives me nuts, too. That doesn't even need LLMs, this is just a missing feature.
I often select a route to specifically avoid certain roads at certain times. Even if they're faster, the traffic makes it a miserable drive, and I'm willing to pay the 10 minutes. But when I get to the branching point, it "helpfully" says "I found a faster route!" and automatically tries to re-route me, which I then have to reject. While driving. Bad design.
It should just be able to take in some settings for "This road is bad, don't use it unless it's a 30 minute diff", or other basic stuff. "Avoid highways" is too heavy-handed.
Would also be nice to say "start navigating when we get to this point". I don't need turn-by-turn out of the neighborhood, and it is annoying when it interrupts what I'm listening to. But I'm obviously not going to input my destination while driving to delay manually either.
Lots of opportunity for slightly more intelligence.
Also nice would be a "navigate until here" cuz I I know my way home once on highway but if I have ventured off somewhere new its the offhighway multiple turns in town to get back to highway that I don't know.
To be fair this is mainly due to the fact that google maps does not actually calculate your destination fully. They are cheating by simplifying the pathways by looking at popularly used roads and try to balance it by traffic/usage. This video explains it much more in detail if you're willing to check out.
From my personal experience, old tomtoms/garvins from 15 years ago did better on this aspect (this is not to say their current offerings are bad. I just have no experience with the newer gps devices). Sure, they were requesting paths that looked better on the paper but if you had a deviation that you kept repeating, they'd start suggesting you those roads instead. Although I do not know if those devices actually did brute force calculating each section unlike today's apps. I can tell you that our devices certainly did not rely on an always online connection so they had to do all that work on board.
I go to a weekly evening class, and I was surprised that several non-technical people there chat enthusiastically about their use of ChatGPT as a sounding board for things like—make-up tips, sanity checks/second opinions, body doubling, search engine.
It is genuinely a better search engine than the search engines at this point just because it automatically filters out the pages and pages of dross and SEO slop for you. I often use it as a first pass to give me a lit review on a topic before reading through the actual sources it provides, which would generally have taken me like 15 minutes to even begin finding if I happened to be familiar with the subject to start with. As a research aide it’s honestly invaluable and better able to find and surface information than any person would be simply because it has a better vocabulary to search for related or connected stuff than any person could. Especially if it’s a topic about which you’re not super familiar, getting a general introduction from an LLM can give you the basic vocabulary and ways of thinking to begin doing your own exploration into the topic.
Plus at this point there’s a lot of stuff I learned a long long long time ago and only dimly sort of remember. I often check myself by asking a question of an LLM that I think I know the answer to just to have it verify that I’m not misremembering or that the scholarship hasn’t substantively changed in the 10-20 years since I first read about it.
Even stuff like “I have X, Y, Z ingredients, suggest some dishes I can make with this” is more useful than the recipe tracking mapping software and webpages out there. I wouldn’t trust the LLM’s to give me a recipe for obvious reasons, but then you can go find a recipe on a recipe blog and feed it back to the LLM to say “strip out the testimonials and ads and just give me the measurements and instructions.”
I have been making LLM recipes for the past year and there have been some real bangers and surprisingly few stinkers. It's basically replaced recipe blogs for me, which have been almost unusable for many years.
One of my new favourite ways of making salmon was courtesy of claude:
I'm sure this recipe existed previously, but I had never tried it.
Yeah personally I have no interest in engaging with a non-person computer as if it were a person. I can search for tips or ask here, or watch videos, and a fake person doesn't count as body doubling for me. I have search engines.
Like all that would do is isolate me from people and make me prone to AI psychosis. I'm not being obstinate, I just find no use in using an AI for these things rather than actual people or existing tools so the AI wouldn't improve anything.
I get what you're saying, but the key differentiator for me is that I can go back and forth with an LLM. This lets me refine, filter, zero-in, course-correct, or ask spinoff questions. A given conversation becomes an increasingly-sharpening picture of the overall context of my goal. It just seems like a naturally better fit for the way I think and work (than using search engines).
(To be clear, I completely agree that nobody should be using LLMs as substitutes for interpersonal interaction with real people, like friendship, companionship, "companionship", therapy, etc.)
I've used search engines long enough - and if I'm doing deep research I'm hopping through sources linked from paper to paper - that it works fine for me to think my searches in keywords.
I also have to double check the LLM anyway so it's pointless in my mind.
It sounds like a solution trying desperately to find a problem. I am genuinely struggling to find any good usecase for where AI agent could be really useful in my personal life. The examples we see from the tech gurus are always bonkers, like Altman creating a podcast of his kids’ interests. Instead of talking to them ?
Compared to just a few decades ago, our lives are already heavily optimized by digital solutions. Do we really need more ?
Programmers be like: I have to do a thing, let me spend all day automating it so that I never have to do it again
Programmers a week later: spending time coding because other related use cases came up and code needs to be expanded
Normal people: do the thing
Normal people a week later: do the other thing
Tech companies are just out of touch. If theres setup required, most people will not do it unless they absolutely have to. None of this Ikea software shit. No setup required is what we want and all your new features require us to give you our whole life story.
Relevant xkcd
Personally, I actually kind of enjoy this loop. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Claude has kinda messed up my balance there cause it costs me only company provided tokens to automate the most stupid things
I think its super silly that the language models automated all the tasks that we don’t really mind doing but some dope still has to clean my toilet bowl and that dope is me today because Claude cant do it :(
Tangentially related, as I actually found a nice use for stable diffusion models the other week. Generally, I think they've saturated the web with bland imagery. In short, I need to build a fence for my porch. So I took a picture and asked Gemini to add a fence. I did this a few times with various descriptions of the fence to get an idea what it would look like. Some were really bad, e.g. making the fence where the current stair is thus blocking the entrance, but some were nice examples. I could show them to the rest of the family and we could pick a design that seem nice. Doing it by hand would be impossible for me at least and hiring someone to draw them (photorealistically) would be prohibitively expensive.
Other than that in the case of image generation I'm at a loss.
It took me soooooo bleeping long to come up with a series of similar icon style pictures to use for different groups in class that it legit would have been faster to do it myself. TBH, I was just trialing to see what it came up with, but the very, very, very clear problem is:
AI doesn’t actually “know”, what it is outputting. It just outputs a “thing”.
Say I asked it to make an image in 80s outrun style of a group of lemurs at a dance party and it came up with something, and I tell it to change the third lemur’s hat to a cowboy hat, it has ZERO idea of what “the third lemur” is, and it just randomly spits out more hallucinatory shit, and every iteration gets more and more freaky.
A human knows in a second exactly what you are saying and fixes it.
That has been my general experience with diffusion models. In my cas with the porch I used a base photo and it fairly consistently was ble to add a fence to it in various styles. So I think this depends a bit on the model you use and probably on Gemini's surrounding tooling.
Google's model is better about this. ChatGPT's is worse.
Bonkers even when presented by non-tech gurus. I have yet to come across a use case that I get presented to me as "game changing" that actually seems like it meaningfully improves my use.
Case and point, this thread about the upcoming Siri changes on r/apple
Reading through what this person did, I can't help think to myself, what is so goddamn hard about opening your iMessage chat with your uncle, scrolling up 3 texts, and replying to your uncle yourself?
Like seriously, are we that inconvenienced responding to people that this is what passes as a transformative use case? Like sure, it's impressive it is able to summarize it, but it's not useful to me in the slightest. It takes me longer to have this back and forth conversation with the agent. then go back and verify that it correctly identified my uncle's last request, and then verifying again on google that the road is actually closed. I guess if you don't care to verify if the information is accurate it maybe saves you the time of a quick Google search, but I am just utterly baffled that people want to interact with their phone/other people this way.
This is the issue I have. I don’t trust LLMs to be right, so unless it’s something I already know, there’s no point in asking one. It’s just an extra few steps for no benefit.
Yes that particular use of Siri is crazy. But I think the point it's trying to make is that Siri has improved a lot. Try to read less into the specific situation and more into the possibilities beyond that use. I also tried the new Siri recently because I wanted to try a different coffee shop this past weekend. I remembered my friend had suggested a spot we ended up not going to, but I forgot the name. I tried searching "coffee" in my texts. I tried searching the name of the city (I remembered the wrong name). I considered scrolling up, but it was a long time ago, we had talked a lot since then, and I didn't remember the exact date. Then I asked Siri to do it and it did it.
That's a fair take and can probably agree with that. While I have been mostly on Android and barely ever used Siri on my work phone, I've heard it being extremely limited in its functionality as a common complaint.
I think I more took issue with how the author picked a task, that absolutely does not need AI in the slightest to complete, and used it as an example of a "transformation" in their workflow.
Better search indexing like you mentioned I think is where things can really shine if it gets integrated right.
From the link you shared:
I suspect the future powerful and actually useful Siri that the OP dreams of may never arrive, unfortunately.
I wouldn’t quite say I’m a Siri poweruser but I’ve definitely done a good bit with shortcuts, and I regularly use Siri for setting timers and alarms, and occasionally to send messages (although it seems to be unwilling or unable to use any other messaging apps, which makes it borderline useless for my needs). I get the impression new Siri promises so much, but more than anything I worry that it will lose so much of what it can currently do, in order to pretend it’s capable of so much more
Because for the past 20 years that annoying chatbot in the bottom right corner has been useless and on most websites it still is useless.
Because it costs a ton of money to integrate a not useless one like Claude into sharepoint sheets.
Because for a lot of people tech has been moving to fast to begin with and most everyone really just wants you to stop moving the buttons around every other week so they can get some work done
I like my agent. I've been using it for months now and I've built several custom connectors (MCP-style) and microservices to make it super useful for me personally. And in terms of quality of life, it's absolutely worth it!
I also run a decommissioned enterprise server in my closet, know what Kubernetes is, have built several web applications, have successfully set up printing on Windows and seem to be blessed with an innate technopathy that makes computers and machines work better when I'm near them. This is not a joke, I actually believe this.
Obviously these "agentic systems" are completely out of the conceptual reach of the untarnished, the pure, the virgin non-computer-touchers, and no amount of marketing can change that.
That's also not a bad thing, per se.
Alright, now I know you're full of it... /s
Any successful setup of printing is always temporary. The pain always comes back around...
Imma gonna go ahead and say if you are running a decommissioned enterprise server in your closet, you probably aren’t an average user ;)
Because normal people don't even know what they are and nothing actually helps them use agents in a simple way.
(I would leave a more substantial comment but the article is behind a paywall)
Generalized comment here because the linked article is behind a paywall so I can't read it...
AI is hyped to be the next big thing for everyone. However, AI (when asked a question) will provide information that cannot be trusted (as people have learned and as people are notified). While it may not matter much for an errant thought to know the true capital of California, it does seem like a waste of mental effort to consider a wrong answer as correct or to hear an answer which would require me to do research to verify. For those who want to "not think", any response may be good enough to get by (and complete the test or homework assignment). For others, it seems like a waste of mental energy to ask something from something that will convincingly deliver incorrect information at random times.
When a person gets an impression about something, it can be hard for that impression to change. With people getting the impression that AI cannot be trusted, they would likely not use AI except in limited circumstances where the effort to monitor AI and research its' output is less than the effort it would be to just do the task yourself. AI does not save you time with regards to your question if you have to then research the question to see if AI is even telling accurate information to you.
When compared with earlier digital assistants, AI seems to fall flat too. With other assistants, I had to say specific key words (such as "Play 90s Rock on Pandora") to which the robotic assistant did what was asked. With AI, specific keywords seem to not matter as much and the responses from AI can be somewhat random as well. Rather than the old assistant way of "carry out my command", the new AI is more like "Google search what to do and guess what I want".
AI is impressive and does amazing things. Still, for most people, I imagine that they want their electronics to "do this command" and they want truthful answers to their trivia questions. With the impression that AI can't do either consistently, it is more consistent to just not use AI and do things in a matter which you know will lead to consistent results.
Of course, this is all with regards to the general public (which is generally hard to make sweeping generalizations about). I imagine that sweeping generalizations such as this have to be a very difficult field of study and is something yearning for a statistician to come and take surveys for. Without that, you just have my (likely inaccurate) hypothesis as to why AI isn't taking off as some people want it to.
For me, it's a matter of trust.
I feel like I could benefit greatly from an AI agent that could read through my emails and sort through the junk to summarize what's important and flag things like upcoming subscription renewals, appointment reminders, long ignored responses, reminders to reach out to friends that I don't interact with often, etc. That said, unless it's entirely offline and done on my own computer, I don't and won't trust it. I don't trust the owners of these systems to have such a deep insight into my personal life, and I'm already considering how to move my email to a more private service for that very reason.
Even if I genuinely saw a use case for agents outside development (where I am not even convinced) the insane amount of token usage for agentic use would already make it a non starter for me.
Broadly speaking, you either give an agent broad control to let it do what you want or you give it a very restricted set of options and things it can call on. The first option, from my personal testing, is just very expensive. The second option limits the added value for having an LLM in the loop that you might as well do it by hand or automate something the old fashioned way.
On my phone while commuting and my train is to arrive so I'll have to cut this comment short. I wanted to reference some older comments I made, instead here is just the one https://tildes.net/~tech/1ua7/google_search_as_you_know_it_is_over#comment-hx1q
Honestly I'm banking on the cost killing the pressure to put AI features everywhere.
They can always just use cheaper models. It'll have to be legitimate reflection about wasted screen space, development time, etc. that removes junk AI features.
I'm really thinking about my work's enterprise subscription and some of those higher level "pushes" for AI use but if the feature remains fairly annoying and useless and keeps giving bad answers (like many AI help bots on various social media sites and things) I think it won't be given the priority in further development. Especially if those programmers can't afford to vibe code it anymore.
But idk, it's the only hope I have left from my leadership pushing AI daily.
If I can't boss an AI around to do work as good as mine and let it come back to me with a perfect answer with minimal questions, then it is a company-sponsered waste of time.
I told Opus 5 on Ultracode, ostensibly "best of the best" I can use, to generate me a docker-compose file with a caddy proxy updating dns for two domains and three services.
It promptly declared that it was impossible to do DDNS with two domains at the same time on a single Caddy instance. Because it allegedly paresed through the source code of the relevant modules. It's top suggestion was to update the other domain using a cron job. I'm no stranger to a half-baked cron job, but also it brilliantly highlighted how bad these things are.
I've had it pin ancient versions of libraries because one time there was a regression for 5 minutes with the latest runtime. It yanked my Python version from 3.14 to 3.8 on the premise that there was a code regression that prevented installation (there wasn't, it was a temporary dns failure).
Was definitely talking about much more normie sort of work because idk what the hell any of what you said was.
So.
I will assume it was bad at it.
Meanwhile I'm being asked to "run that through AI" anytime I have a question.
Yes, it was borderline technobabble, but it's the kind of technobabble that it's allegedly the best possible at.
And it was as wrong as citing that the USSR is alive and well.
Even the best models provide 'meh' answers more often than not.
Switching to cheaper models that are even just 5% worse will be quickly abandoned by anybody that has a reasonable choice to do so.
Depends on the domain. For the magic chat bot that's suppose to turn your website into a Star Trek experience - yeah those suck. I was recently kind of shocked that that Cloudflare chat bot doesn't know how Cloudflare works. But I have been surprised on occasion when a chat bot sidebar pulls up the correct excerpt from their documentation.
How much is it costing you? I'm at ~$800/month now for work.
Case and point as far as I am concerned. As far as answering your comment goes, if I wanted to implement deep research in the same way I have seen it work from google, anthropic and openAI then it would be in the hundreds for just token usage. In fact, you can easily see this if you ever used those research tools, you tend to hit your ratelimits rather quickly even on the expensive plans.
So in my mind there is no reasonable consumer agentic market as these things simply aren't cheap.
I wasn't trying to debate anything. Genuinely just curious! I've only started looking at my usage numbers and was fascinated by it. I think it's still possible for agentic use by normal consumers some day. The $20/month plan at OpenAI has given me a lot more usage than I'd think for personal use. My cousin sent me a screenshot of a Chinese model with 100 million tokens used for $0.85 (heavily cached). Apple's building in agentic support in Safari, which would make basic use free for hundreds of millions. I see no reason the cheap end of the market can't develop.
EDIT: I'm using Opus 4.6/4.8/5 and Sol. Both are stupidly expensive compared to the "open source" options.
Safari's built in agentic support would be free at point of use, but in actuality the cost would be generalized across the cost of all Apple services, as Apple isn't going to be paying it themselves out of the goodness of their heart. Unlike a lot of other, more specialized companies, Apple has a lot of other products and services where they can place the resulting expense of a "free" service to hide what's happening. Besides, living in the Apple ecosystem isn't cheap. It's not likely to be replicated at the truly cheap end of the market.
It depends on their agent setup but Safari exposes an MCP server and if the agent runs locally, it's effectively "free". Maybe it runs in PCC though. Still, as capabilities get better, why wouldn't what runs in PCC today run on-device in X years?
The article makes a distinction between agentic use and chat use. For just general chat use, you are absolutely right. But, within chatGPT there is also agentic use in the form of the deep research functionality I mentioned. I can't remember what limitations chatGPT put in place (I think it simply limits the amount of search you can do?) but with Anthropics version you are quickly told after a few uses that you have hit your usage limit with the $20 plan.
That's just one agent, one they supposedly have optimized the heck out on their side and something all parties are already rate limiting.
I tried implementing it myself in various ways. I also did play around with versions other folks have attempted to build. Once you have to pay for the tokens, even with chinese models it becomes hella expensive. You still needs fairly top of the line models for starters (you can do some initial triaging with smaller quicker models) and to go through all data simply consumes a ton of tokens.
That is just one consumer application. The article starts out with this tidbit
Not all of the agents infused in the live Josh here envisions will be as token heavy as full blown search and research. But it is clear he's envisioning a lot more of them. So left or right, shit is too expensive for the fairy tale of AI agents totally transforming how we work and live our lives.
I don't feel like you're really disputing anything I said, but maybe I'm misunderstanding? I've been using the $20/month plan for agentic use, coding on the side at home for fun every few days. I've also been having it do deep research reports for me ("how much is my condo worth?") once in a while. It's been more than adequate for my use. The really long, detailed report about my condo which included a list of comparable properties and analysis on those used 10% of my weekly usage budget.
I think that what you are describing still falls under very light consumer use as far as the Josh Miller and friends are concerned. They want you to use agents for ALL THE THINGS not just occasional software projects and occasional deep research.
I am not being facetious here either, I honestly don't think that the usage you are describing even scratches the surface of what they'd want the usage to be. Or, what they need it to be to ever be able to get anything back from the insane VC cash infusion this entire market has gotten.
Okay, maybe not, but who cares what Josh Miller thinks? If we don't reach 24/7 use of agentic AI use, it doesn't mean it can't still be an important part of our lives. The dismissals of AI in this thread aren't scoped to just what Josh Miller is saying, but agentic AI in general.
Usually I don't. But since he is specifically quoted in the article and the article is generally about why agentic use isn't catching on how he and other CEOs think it should it is only reasonable that this is the context that people are discussing it in.
Possibly, but you are responding to me, I am not dismissive to agentic AI use. I am just saying that, all things considered, it is pretty expensive for very little value add in many cases. Even if they are wrapped in more feature complete products I might add.
That is somewhat different.
$800/month is less than one day of billable hours for software development work where I am. As long as the AI is improving your efficiency 10% you can easily justify the expense and pass it on to the client. Any business will see it the same.
The big AI companies charge a lot per token, but more efficient models (that are already running inference at a profit) like GLM 5.2 are still incredibly useful.
You are not wrong, but I am just saying why the math doesn't math for consumer agentic applications :)
I agree with your sentiment that for someone who is using the AI to generate income there's math here that can make sense in some situations.
The article is discussing why "normal" people aren't using AI Agents though. $800/mo would be massively expensive for a "normal" person to use at home.
Maybe someone wealthy who has staff at home could justify offsetting the $800 in staff for AI token spend, but that's not most "normal" people.
The pricing would have to be extremely different for a consumer market vs business for it to make any kind of broad adoption to make economic sense.
$800/month is too expensive for sure, but some of the Chinese models are pretty solid now and 1-2 orders of magnitude lower in pricing. That gets it to where $10-20/month is a feasible price, especially when you consider that the average person will use far, far fewer tokens than what I or @teaearlgraycold use.
The features themselves aren't very compelling for a normal person yet, but stuff like Apple's password reset feature for leaked credentials being agent-driven will become the norm. Truly consumer-focused experiences will eventually be built. Can we look at the technology and really think no one's going to find a way to incorporate a natural-language interfaced computing environment? We've only just begun to build out the next generation of interfacing, but it's been a dream for decades.
I agree with most of what you're saying, I think you hit the nail on the head with having to use cheaper open weight (likely Chinese - fwiw this is what I use at home for playing around in this space) models to save costs and that the features themselves aren't there yet.
Not saying they definitely never will be, but these two things alone are huge for general adoption and broadly answer the question the article poses.
I think your example is likely the way this will go. Less "AI as a product" and more "This consumer facing product or service has some AI features now". This will probably eventually move from "gimmicks" to features normal people actually want.
I think we're still a very very long way off from "normal" people running agents to do useful tasks for themselves.
My employer will happily spend $200+ a month per head on AI stuff, but shirks at the idea of paying $500 a year for a piece of software that would easily be 3x more beneficial, but lacks AI as a feature.
I'm guessing an IDE? What do they have you use? Or is it something else? I think an employer should consider letting their employee use up to 5% of their annual salary on tools if the tools are going to make them move faster. More than 5% if it can be defended. Most employers are too penny pinching on tooling.
Toad for Oracle.
Although oof, their prices went up, esp with new AI editions.
I can still reasonably justify the base edition, but those high-end DBA editions are just getting out of hand.
DBeaver is catching up, but there are still a lot of rough edges for Oracle in particular.
Related: Just this afternoon, I burned $20 of extra credits in a single Opus 5 on medium prompt. It's almost got the same ROI as a slot machine. Almost.
I don't use Reddit, but I came across this comment of a guy in ChatGPT subreddit that burned through most of his 20$ monthly limits in a single day because his agent worked for 8 hours.
Made me cringe so hard. I'm guessing the subscription limits are pretty high, compared to what you would get by paying directly for the API.
I use them every single day for a variety of tasks, but the tasks I work on typically have some way for me or the agent to get rapid feedback on accuracy. I suspect most people don't have that luxury. When programming you can set up various feedback signals (compiler errors, test suites) that can automatically get fed into the LLM as text which will put it back on track. And every time you do this you give the AI company training data so the next iteration is less likely to make the same mistake.
Yesterday I successfully did some vibe-CADing (I should just learn a real CAD program eventually, though). I was using OpenSCAD. In that case it's not quite as good as normal programming, but as long as I give it small and precise steps I can visually evaluate each change for accuracy. In general having a computer visualize something for you gives you a superpower. And 3D modeling is inherently visual so it's trivial there. But for any other computer work you can use LLMs to create visual feedback systems for what would normally need to be visualized internally.
Same reason why every new thing is adapted slowly. "Normal people" are slow adopters and the early adopters are weird.
I remember a time when people who used cell phones in public were thought as being a bit eccentric.
When it comes to AI, old people are more eager to adopt it than young people, which indicates the reasons for adopting it aren't the same.
Old people tend to care less about the future than young people so environmentally destructive tech probably doesn't feel as negative to them. Age also makes you more interested in something that lets you fake pro results but also takes away from your learning to do things yourself. Kids are smart for being cautious! And they can tell the difference between a crappy AI flyer vs. something that was made mindfully while many regular older folks can't. Being a con-artist is just not cool like having a cell phone used to be.
(There are other uses for AI besides con-artistry, but for some reason the use-cases pushed by early AI adopters in regular people's social spaces fall largely in that bucket.)
Speaking as one of those older folks with a modicum of IT wisdom, I won't touch AI agents for personal use with a 10-meter pole, for the foreseeable future.
The glaring environmental costs, security issues, data harvesting, damage to web resources, corruption of truth, political power balance, impact on creators, and "first taste is free/cheap" risks of dependency and skill degradation, are absolutely relevant to me.
I think the main driver for older folks is a sense of wonder. “You’re telling me I can generate a picture by telling the computer to make it?” Something that would take them hours to do instead takes 30-60 seconds.
Perhaps it's because old people see death more clearly around the corner, which makes everything that allows doing anything faster valuable.
It still feels weird having someone talk to themselves like a schizophrenic while walking down the sidewalk.
Obligatory reminder about mental health stigma and how those two things aren't really alike, and that schizophrenia looks like a lot of things and is often so distressing for the person.
I've never really found people talking to themselves to be bothersome whether it's a cell phone or stimming or delusions or rehearsing a conversation though so I just have a tolerance for people existing in public anymore.
Yes, yes. But having spent a significant amount of time involuntarily commited at a mental ward myself for psychosis, I also don't feel too far off the mark.
Fun story:
I was on day 3 or so (time was wobbly there, let alone with sands of time) of having a roomate that would shit himself periodically for fun (having told me himself before doing so), steal my shit, and start screaming at 2AM non-stop till the night watch would come in and sedate him. Had been denied many requests to transfer to a different room, as they were all booked.
I walk up to the attending and ask if a spare solitary room is available so I can get some sleep (having been told by psychiatrist to get lots of sleep). They say I can't go there. I say "Well, you can let me go there, or I can go smash my roomate in the face with a book until you're forced to put me there, and one of these options requires you to fill out a lot more paperwork."
They let me spend the next few nights in solitary.
Most normal people around me use AI. There's a reason chatgpt keeps being the most downloaded app, you don't get to those insane numbers with just tech users. I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, do they address this? If regular people don't use it, why are the usage numbers so high?
The most common uses I see with people around me are:
The biggest difference I see between regular people using it and online discussions by tech people, is overwhelmingly the tone. Regular people like it and are impressed. Tech/online people are at best extremely skeptical and generally think it can't do anything well. At worst, they hate it with passion.
The only exception is artists. Anyone related to art I know, normie or not, (not just visual art, musicians too) really hates it.
I keep seeing a performative hatred of generative AI from video game developers due to their proximity to artists. There are people that won’t use LLMs for any coding because of a sense of solidarity with visual artists. I think this is silly, especially because they have genuinely stayed away from LLMs and thus say incorrect things about their capabilities. Personally I use LLMs for coding but pay for visual art from talented artist friends. They will do a far better job than an image generator will. You don’t need to use image generators because you’re using LLMs and artists should not dictate how you write code.
I like AI more than most people on the internet seem to likw AI. I use stable diffusion sometimes. I often search with Perplexity or get chatGPT to write stuff for me.
I dont know how AI agents work, where to go to use one, or even where to start. Honestly I dont really know what the difference is