[agloe_dreams]

Nobody actually wants half the useless tools companies are coming up with because most of the solutions are not really novel. They are just wrapping an LLM.

It's kinda like what I realized with the meta Ray-Bans: I can have these things on my face, they can tell me the answer to virtually any question in 10 seconds or less.

But I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask. When you walk in to your local grocery store - you generally know what you want and where to find it. A ton of companies are just gluing LLM text boxes into apps and then scratching their heads when people don't use them.

Why?

Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders. It was all done to make someone else think 'woah, they are following the trend!'.

The core issue with generative AI is that it all works best when focused in a narrow sense. There is like one or two really clever uses I've seen - disappointingly, one of them was Jira. The internal jargon dictionary tool was legitimately impressive. Will it make any more money? Probably not.

[addaon]

> But I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask.

Wow. This just does not match my personal experience. I do an hour or so walk around the reservoir near my house 4-5 times a week, letting my mind wander freely -- and I find that I stop on average at least five or ten times to take notes about questions to learn the answers to later, and occasionally decide that it's worth it to break pace to start learning the answer right then and there.

[agloe_dreams]

Thats super reasonable - I'm a person with ADHD so if I'm asking questions in a grocery store context - I might fully forget things or take way too long to get things done - Going for a walk in nature is absolutely a much better place for questions like that to me though. I think I would prefer to not have tech in the moment to take me out of the space.

[mrandish]

As a fellow ADHDer, can confirm. I must aggressively mono-task to ensure things get done. I have to consciously manage which mode I'm in, "Goal" or "Explore". A simple heuristic I sometimes share with others is: "I can either 'think deeply' or 'do/talk/listen'. Doing both modes at once is possible but at reduced throughput and quality of each. Switching modes is laggy." It's not precisely accurate and there are exceptions but it gets the general idea across.

[alistairSH]

But do you need AI for those answers? I sometimes do the same thing, but Google/DDG/whatever works fine for most, and a niche app works for others (IDing a bird = Merlin app, for example).

[com2kid]

Last year one of my berry bushes had browning leaves with some spots. Google search said infection, treatment plan, etc.

This year I snapped a pic and sent to chat gpt. Normal end of year die off, cut the brown branches away, here is a fertilizer schedule for end of year to support new growth for the next year.

ChatGPT makes gardening so much easier, and that is just one of many areas. Recipes are another, don't trust the math, but chat gpt can remix and elevate recipes so much better than Google recipe blog spam posts can.

[MisterTea]

> This year I snapped a pic and sent to chat gpt.

I used to be able to go to the local gardening center and ask the owner who could right away give you the right answer because that was his expertise that came from years of genuine experience. Then Home Depot put him put of business. Same with the local plumbing shop I could walk into with a leaky valve stem from a sink, have a guy glance at it and reply "that's an American Standard" spin around, open a drawer and hand me the part along with new washers.

Now I have to talk to a computer that may or may not be correct. I would rather talk to a real person.

[com2kid]

> I used to be able to go to the local gardening center and ask the owner who could right away give you the right answer because that was his expertise that came from years of genuine experience.

I can still do this, and I do on occasion. Hopefully I take the proper pictures and can remember enough about what is going on to convey the issue. ChatGPT will ask follow up questions and even ask for additional pictures if things aren't clear.

Also I can take action before my once every other month or so visit to the nursery, allowing me to take more immediate action.

[rogerkirkness]

Is the purpose of gardening to be arms and legs for ChatGPT to grow a garden?

[player1234]

Exactly brother! F the F-ing haters making gardening tips and recipes is a trillion dollar industry, maybe a trillion trillions even!

[poszlem]

Not the OP, but I ask way more questions now than I used to. Before, I’d sometimes wonder about things, but not enough to actually go and research them. Now, it’s as simple as asking the AI, and more often than not, I get a satisfying answer.

[throwanem]

What was the last thing you asked about? What was the answer?

[poszlem]

The origin of the word calf.

1. Calf (young cow, young of certain other mammals)

Old English: cealf (plural calfru or later calves)

Proto-Germanic: kalbaz or *kalbaz/kalbazō

Cognates: Old Norse kálfr, Old High German kalb, German Kalb, Dutch kalf.

Proto-Indo-European root: often linked to gel- (“to swell, be rounded”), possibly referring to the rounded shape of a young animal. Some etymologists, however, leave it as “origin uncertain” beyond Proto-Germanic.

2. Calf (back of the lower leg)

Old English: caf, cealf (“calf of the leg”) — likely related to the animal term, but the link is uncertain.

Possible origin: Could be from the same gel- “swell” root, referring to the bulging muscle at the back of the leg, or an independent development within Germanic.

Cognates: Old Norse kálfi (“calf of the leg”), Swedish kalv (leg calf), Icelandic kálfi.

[MisterTea]

Literally plugged the phrase "etymology word calf" into duckduckgo and the first result was this: https://etymologyworld.com/item/calf

This feels similar to a recent conversation with my friend when I was trying to recall the SoC used in the Nintendo Switch and he insisted on using his chatgpt app when I just went to the Wikipedia page for the Switch faster then he could open his app.

I don't want to sound negative, but - to me people who over rely on LLMs are lazy and low effort. I would not hire or work with them.

[throwanem]

Can you tell me about the one two before that, without looking it up?

[sceptic123]

Whether it's correct or not is another question

[jdhzzz]

I read that as I-Ding a bird. It was a second of wondering what I-Ding a bird was until I got to "Merlin" and realized it was ID-ing a bird (face-palm emoji here).

[infecto]

I am in the same boat. I am always thinking about things and recently often asking ChatGPT for an answer. Having a natural language interface for questions has opened the door for me to many more questions.

[GuB-42]

It happens to me all the time, however, I want to have real answers. And while a LLM is sometimes involved, I usually go deeper, with some cross referencing, fact checking and primary sources. LLMs are great at giving you a starting point, but the problem with them is that it is impossible to distinguish between fact or fiction, so I always have to verify. Really, I have seen my fair share of falsehoods popping up on LLMs, sometimes on simple and uncontroversial topics.

On hot topics like politics, illegal drugs, gender and racial differences, etc... it may be impossible to even get an answer passed the filters.

[reactordev]

I rarely have questions of others but I always question myself. :shrug:

There’s a difference between asking out loud or another being vs asking yourself internally.

[addaon]

> I rarely have questions of others but I always question myself.

There's only so many questions I have the ability to answer myself. Of those, there's only so many that I have the lifespan to answer myself. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and even on the shoulders of average people -- really it's shoulders all the way down. Unless the questioning itself is the source of joy (which it certainly sometimes is), I prefer to find out what others have learned when they asked the same questions. It's vanishingly rare that I believe I'm the first to think through something.

[reactordev]

Absolutely, they usually tend to write about it...

[svara]

I think not having those instant answers available is a big part of why your mind wanders in that setting.

[addaon]

I have the answers available (I have a phone and good connection), I just am tactical about when to pursue the answer in realtime and when not. If it feels like it's going to open up a wider field of questioning -- or if it feels like I'll learn that this vein is fully mined and goes nowhere -- I'll spend a few minutes searching; otherwise, defer.

[mikepurvis]

I was going to say the same. It's probably so much healthier to make note of questions for later research than to stop right then and there and either a) fall down a Wikipedia rabbit hole or b) have an AI strapped to your face perform an info-dump.

[throwanem]

Not everyone wants an imagination. This is good for those who don't.

[delusional]

I mirror that experience, except for the latter half. I enjoy just being outside and letting my mind wander, letting it wonder about odd questions in the moment. I never actually want or care about the answers, I just like the feeling of thinking.

I already have my phone, I could look up the answers immediately. The reason I don't isn't that I can't. It's that asking the question is the point, not answering it.

[starik36]

My walk is also around a reservoir, also 4-5 times a week and the length of the walk around it is also 1 hour.

Are you the guy that walks the poodle?

[addaon]

Negative, just myself. I suspect I've mentioned my physical location on HN previously -- southern Utah.

[starik36]

Ah, OK. Wrong state - similar reservoir. There is a guy who walks his poodle at the same time as I walk. We've exchanged head nods for years.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

When I walk around, I have many questions in my head. But I never stop to do something about it. If the question is important enough, it will stick and I'll do something about once I get back.

This is the modern curse: I know I can get an answer to nearly every question, and I can get it quickly, just taking my phone out of my pocket and dictating it, it takes zero effort. I feel it's worth to restrain oneself and just enjoy the walk. It just feels better.

[sidewndr46]

I've tried to express a similar sentiment to people in the past - that 443rd redesign of the UI for JIRA that moves a button from one side to another. It isn't actually for you. You aren't the user of the software. The user of the software is the product manager (or equivalent role). They need to justify their current role or their next promotion.

[hn_acc1]

Sadly, it takes away from my productivity when I was already used to the position of the button previously.

I do understand that sometimes things need to be redesigned. But crowing like you landed on the moon because your new phone icons now have "rounded edges with shading" or somesuch fuckery that will just slow down the rendering.. gets old and annoying really fast.

[palmfacehn]

>Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders. It was all done to make someone else think 'woah, they are following the trend!'.

I'm seeing this again and again. Customers as users seems like the last concern, if it is a concern at all. Adherence to the narrative du jour, fundraising from investors and hyping the useless product up to dump on retail are the primary concerns.

Vaporware or a useless, unlaunched product are advantageous here. Actual users might report how underwhelming or useless it is. Sky high development costs are touted as wins.

[Culonavirus]

> Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders.

It's kinda funny that some online shops are now bragging how great their customer support is because they DON'T use LLM bots xD

[belter]

Dealing with real humans in the future will be the ultimate VIP treatment.

[throwanem]

It already is.

[WD-42]

I just finished implementing a chatbot in a box for a clients sass. What problem does it solve? None that I can tell, other than now the sass “has ai”.

I still have access to the OpenAI dashboard. I can confirm nobody is actually using it.

[brobdingnagians]

We recently got a customer support request asking if we were going to "implement AI" on our website and then saying we could use it in our marketing if we did. No suggestion as to why they would find it useful, or what feature could be augmented with it. It's crazy that the hype is so high that random non-tech users suggest adding AI for marketing.

[lumost]

Embedded AIs are pretty dumb as a product in my opinion. Why would the customer pay you instead of their existing model vendor of choice? Why do they have to learn your chatbox - when it's probably using a crappier model and lacks the context of their preferred vendor.

I really don't want to pay for 5 different AI subscriptions, I want one subscription that works with all my other services (which I already pay for).

[BobaFloutist]

Now the sass can sass you

[iib]

I think those kind of glasses may be really useful for blind people. I have seen similar glasses targeted at blind people, that at least in theory, seemed to me like a good idea.

I recall the glasses also can write on the screen inside the lens, which makes me think they may be good for deaf people as well.

It's just that these use-cases seem uncool, and big companies seem to have to be cool in order to keep either their status or their profits. But I have a feeling the technology may be really useful for some really vulnerable people.

[marcosdumay]

Yes, there are people working on image recognition glasses for blind people.

Nobody seems to have been successful yet, and I think the focus on applying LLMs instead of dumb UI and mixed dumb and ML image processing is a large reason why.

[agloe_dreams]

Oh I do still enjoy the glasses, they are actually rather incredible, even though they do not have a screen. That said - These actually do have a Be My Eyes integration - It is incredibly impressive.

[aaronbaugher]

> Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders.

I'm starting to get asked, "Could AI help you do such-and-such faster?" At first I tried to explain why the answer is no, because such-and-such doesn't lend itself to what AI is good at. But I'm starting to realize I'm going to have to tell them I am using it and maybe give them an example once in a while, because they're hearing too much about its wonderfulness to believe there's something it can't help with. They're going to think I'm just being stubborn even though I tell them I'm not opposed to using AI where it makes sense. If that means the job actually takes a little longer to add in the part where I use AI to speed it up, they'll be happier.

[com2kid]

I use my Meta glasses heavily on vacation, and then occasionally else where. The latest Llama isn't as smart as OpenAI, so after a few wrong answers I gave up on day to day queries.

That said, the scenarios they are good at they are really good at. I was traveling in Europe and the glasses where translating engravings on castle walls, translating and summarizing historical plaques, and just generally letting me know what was going on around me.

[duxup]

Yeah I'm in charge of trying some AI experiments with my company and I look around the landscape for a little inspiration ... is everything just a wrapper on chatgpt or whatever?

I can do that too but it's also not very useful and I'm just shipping data off to some AI company too. Don't know if I want to feed client data elsewhere like that.

[stevenally]

"Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders".

Previous management fads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_fad

Obviously in the right contexts, these methods provided value. But they became widely misapplied, causing a lot of harm.

And the Wikipedia list is far from exhaustive.

[thewebguyd]

> There is like one or two really clever uses I've seen - disappointingly, one of them was Jira. The internal jargon dictionary tool was legitimately impressive. Will it make any more money? Probably not.

Sounds like Microsoft 365 Copilot at my org. Sucks at nearly everything, but it actually makes a fantastic search engine for emails, teams convos, sharepoint docs, etc. Much better that Microsoft's own global search stuff. Outside of coding, that's the only other real world use case I've found for LLMs - "get me all the emails, chats, and documents related to this upcoming meeting" and it's pretty good at that.

Though I'm not sure we should be killing the earth for better search, there are probably other, better ways to do it.

[ljf]

Agreed - 95% of the questions I ask Copilot, I could answer myself by searching emails, Teams messages and files - BUT Copilot does a far far better job than me, and quicker. I went from barely using it, to using it daily. I wouldn't say it is a massive speed boost for me, but I'd miss it if it was taken away.

Then the other 5% is the 'extra; it does for me, and gets me details I wouldn't have even known where to find.

But it is just fancy search for me so far - but fancy search I see as valuable.

[tasty_freeze]

My favorite copilot use is when I join a MS Teams meeting a few minutes late I can ask copilot: what have I missed? It does a fantastic job of summarizing who said what.

[player1234]

Isn't there another problem with an employee coming routinely late to meetings, so much that the employee could use a service to bandaid this behavior, asking for a friend

[kyledrake]

> Though I'm not sure we should be killing the earth for better search

Are we, though? What I have read so far suggests the carbon footprint of training models like gpt4 was "a couple weeks of flights from SFO to NYC" https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

They also seem to be coming down in power usage substantially, at least for inference. There's pretty good models that can run on laptops now, and I still very much think we're in the model T phase of this technology so I expect further efficiency refinements. It also seems like they have recently hit a "cap" on the increase in intelligence models are getting for more raw power.

The trendline right now makes me wonder if we'll be talking about "dark datacenters" in the future the same way we talked about dark fiber after the dot com bubble.

[dyauspitr]

> But I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask.

I realistically have between 10-100 questions I ask per day about things not immediately related to work. Double that if you include work based questions.

[raincole]

> I, as a human, rarely have questions to ask

This is an eye-opening sentence. It's quite hard to imagine how to live one's daily life with "few questions to ask." Perhaps this is a neurodivergent thing?

[agloe_dreams]

I meant mostly in the context of daily life tasks as a person with ADHD - so maybe a hair neurodivergent. My issue isn't that I don't wonder things, it is that indulging the wonder would interrupt me from accomplishing almost anything. I would not very highly functioning if I allowed for non-critical thoughts to interrupt the flow. When outside of trying to do specific things and in less focus-dependent tasks, I absolutely wonder and google and get lost on weird random topics.

I think I probably could have worded it more as "I rarely have questions worth knowing the answer to", where the cost of knowing answers is tied to the following rabbit holes and delays/forgotten tasks.

[throwawaylaptop]

I always ponder how many people have a refrigerator in their home their entire life, and what percentage of them don't know how it works.

I've asked several gfs, and they don't have even a hint of how it works. Guy friends do a bit better but not as well as you'd think.

So yes, people live their entire lives not asking obvious questions.

[quickthrowman]

I’d bet it’s 1 in 10, I doubt I would know the answer if I didn’t work in an HVAC adjacent field.

The answer is ‘vapor compression cycle’ which consists of a condenser, evaporator, compressor, and expansion valve along with some tubing and a refrigerant. The cycle is compressor -> evaporator -> expansion valve -> condenser and then the cycle repeats. The refrigerant absorbs heat in the evaporator and rejects it through the condenser.

[throwawaylaptop]

Correct, and that's more detailed than I'd even expect. I'd be satisfied with "I think it has something to do with the rule we learn in physics or chemistry about gasses warming up and cooling down when compressed and decompressed. So a gas gets squeezed, cooled down, and let out and it's even cooler then".

Sometimes I wonder how much more interesting school would be if it just explained how everything works instead of random concepts no one remembers apparently long enough to tie to objects in their life.

[hitarpetar]

some of us have other things to do

[throwawaylaptop]

Obviously we have infinite things to do. But we also waste a shocking about of time on random leisure and braindead nonsense. The interesting part to me is that we obviously do 'must do' and 'should do' and even 'want to do' things before we utterly waste time.

I'm just shocked that "learn how this important object in my home works" is not somewhere on either of those 3 lists.

[zoeysmithe]

I'm autistic and I probably ask many more questions than most people.

I would also argue that ND people seem to be the heavier AI users, at least in my experience. Its a bit like the stereotypical 'wikipedia deep dive' but 10x.

[dwb]

Don’t try and diagnose people like this please. Even if you’re qualified, and I doubt you are, it’s very insensitive.

[R_D_Olivaw]

Oh what a blissful environment the mind that is not full of constant questions begging to be answered and explored must be.

I'll just be over here, floating (often treading water) in a raging river of "what ifs ...", "I wonder ifs..." And, "Hmmms?"

[tempodox]

> … disappointingly, one of them was Jira.

I think this highlights an interesting point: Sensible use cases are unsexy. But the pushers want stuff, however unrealistic, that lends itself to breathless hype that can be blown out of proportion.