[rglover]

> Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?

They're unlikely to be vocal because they've already evaluated and decided the role AI will play in their work/life and just moved on/kept working. That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI (either by force or choice).

[phil21]

> That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI

Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of.

Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases.

Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future".

I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.

[seb1204]

I count quite a few of my colleagues into this observing and must learn role. My problem is that most entry use cases that are advertised are not cutting it for me. Write overlong emails that could have been a short hand written one? Write longer prompts to get shorter LLM email responses? Create presentations that screw up the corporate theme and send me fixing it? Write power automate flows that send me chasing errors? Particularly management and leadership positions are urged to engage with LLM tools but are drowning in the noise of busy days and flood of communication. Summarising emails that then misses the crucial information is not saving any time.

[phil21]

> Summarising emails that then misses the crucial information is not saving any time.

Ironically due to an overloaded inbox these days, I've been using a LLM as the world's most inefficient e-mail filter.

It does a decent job at this, and gives at least a nice starting point in the morning for a prioritized hitlist to power through. Gets most things pretty accurate, but I only use it to sense "importance" and not much else.

Certainly not life changing, just a nice to have.

I've had far more real gains with home IT projects. Tons of home automation integrations and "silly" projects I've been wanting to get done for a decade but never really had the energy to want to deal with. These sorts of things also allowed me some time/excuse to play around with agents to see what the fuss was about.

I now have the world's most complex garden irrigation/sensor setup complete with automated watering and grafana panels! I could have tied everything from the hardware through software together myself, but I just was not interested in installing the 856th Ubuntu VM in my life, configuring InfluxDB from scratch, etc.

I can see the future potential due to the above, but I also see how it went off the rails easily and also produced some laughably inefficient/unmaintable stuff like Flux queries which toss what should be variables as statics directly into the grafana panels, etc. Add a single new sensor to a group and you'll be re-writing the panel queries. Just horrible ground level design only maintainable via brute force. But when you just tell it to add the thing and it does... I can see why many feel it's a superpower.

[stasomatic]

For personal use I find "AI" extremely useful and fun.

I asked Claude to create a mini stack that email me a daily digest:

Today's weather, rain forecast. Top ten local news,US news, world news New HN articles, bubble up articles about bicycles, crafts, Japan, exclude Rust, Zig, Python, JS, Node, Bun. Summary of articles in my favorite subreddits.

A separate email summarizing new antique items on ShopGoodWill.com, with their starting prices, auction end dates.

Oh, and it configured Proxmox on my NUC and installed and configured the whole *arr stack.

Now, I am a techie, so I know what to tell it and could do all of the above myself with enough elbow grease, but I never would have. All of the above took under an hour.

Just this morning, I created a plugin so that Claude speaks to me as Samuel L. Jackson, or Arnold, etc. Fun fun.

Replaced 90% of my browser web searches. I don't know how many trees I burned and lakes dried.