9 ms·

I could not agree more with this. 90% of AI features feel tacked on and useless and that’s before you get to the price. Some of the services out here are wantin

I could not agree more with this. 90% of AI features feel tacked on and useless and that’s before you get to the price. Some of the services out here are wanting to charge 50% to 100% more for their sass just to enable “AI features”. I’m actually having a really hard time thinking of an AI feature other than coding AI feature that I actually enjoy. Copilot/Aider/Claude Code are awesome but I’m struggling to think of another tool I use where LLMs have improved it. Auto completing a sentence for the next word in Gmail/iMessage is one example, but that existed before LLMs. I have not once used the features in Gmail to rewrite my email to sound more professional or anything like that. If I need help writing an email, I’m going to do that using Claude or ChatGPT directly before I even open Gmail.

apwell23 2y ago
garmin wants me to pay for some gen-ai workout messages on connect plus. Its the most absurd AI slop of all. Same with strava. I workout for mental relaxation and i just hate this AI stuff being crammed in there. Atleast clippy was kind of cute.
- danielbln 2y ago
  Strava's integration is just so lackluster. It literally turns four numbers from right above the slop message into free text. Thanks Strava, I'm a pro user for a decade, finally I can read "This was a hard workout" after my run. Such useful, much AI.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  At this point, "we aren't adding any AI features" is a selling point for me. I've gotten real tired of AI slop and hype.
- nradov 2y ago
  Strava employees claim that casual users like the AI activity summaries. Supposedly users who don't know anything about exercise physiology didn't know how to interpret the various metrics and charts. I don't know if I believe that but it's at least plausible. Personally I wish I could turn off the AI features, it's a waste of space.
  - rurp 2y ago
    Anytime someone from a company says that users like the super trendy thing they just made I take it with a sizeable grain of salt. Sometimes it's true, and maybe it is true for Strava, but I've seen enough cases where it isn't to discount such claims down to ~0.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    The guy at the Wendy's drive thru has told me repeatedly that most people don't want ketchup so they stopped putting it in bags by default.
- sandspar 2y ago
  I use AI chatbots for 2+ hours a day but the Garmin thing was too much for me. The day they released their AI Garmin+ subscription, I took off my Forerunner and put it in a drawer. The whole point of Garmin is that it feels emotionally clean to use. Garmin adding a scammy subscription makes the ecosystem feel icky, and I'm not going to wear a piece of clothing that makes me feel icky. I don't think I'll buy a Garmin watch again. (Since taking off the watch, I miss some of the data but my overall health and sleep haven't changed.)
Andugal 2y ago
> I’m actually having a really hard time thinking of an AI feature other than coding AI feature that I actually enjoy. If you attend a lot of meetings, having an AI note-taker take notes for you and generate a structured summary, follow-up email, to-do list, and more will be an absolute game changer. (Disclaimer, I'm the CTO of Leexi, an AI note-taker)
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  The catch is: does anyone actually read this stuff? I've been taking meeting notes for meetings I run (without AI) for around 6 months now and I suspect no one other than myself has looked at the notes I've put together. I've only looked back at those notes once or twice. A big part of the problem is even finding this content in a modern corporate intranet (i.e. Confluence) and having a bunch of AI-generated text in there as well isn't going to help.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I thought the point of having a meeting-notes person was so that at least one person would pay attention to details during the meeting.
    - jethro_tell 2y ago
      I thought it was so I could go back 1 year and say, 'I was against this from the beginning and I was quite vocal that if you do this, the result will be the exact mess you're asking me to clean up now.'
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        Ah, but a record for CYA and “told you so”, that’s pure cynicism. “At least one person paying attention” at least we can pretend the intent was to pair some potential usefulness with our cynicism.
    - gus_massa 2y ago
      Also, ensure that if the final decition was to paint the the bike shed green, everyone agree it was the final decitions. (In long discusions, sometimes people misunderstand which was the final decition.)
danielbln 2y ago
I enjoy Claude as a general purpose "let's talk about this niche thing" chat bot, or for general ideation. Extracting structured data from videos (via Gemini) is quite useful as well, though to be fair it's not a super frequent use case for me. That said, coding and engineering is by far the most common usecase I have for gen AI.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Oh, I'm sorry if it wasn't clear. I use Claude and ChatGPT to talk to about a ton of topics. I'm mostly referring to AI features being added to existing SaaS or software products. I regularly find that moving the conversation to ChatGPT or Claude is much better than trying to use anything that they may have built into their existing product.
nicolas_t 2y ago
I like perplexity when I need a quick overview of a topic with references to relevant published studies. I often use it when researching what the current research says on parenting questions or education. It's not perfect but because the answers link to the relevant studies it's a good way to get a quick overview of research on a given topic
teeray 2y ago
> This demo uses AI to read emails instead of write them LLMs are so good at summarizing that I should basically only ever read one email—from the AI: You received 2 emails today that need your direct reply from X and Y. 1 is still outstanding from two days ago, _would you like to send an acknowledgment_? You received 6 emails from newsletters you didn’t sign up for but were enrolled after you bought something _do you want to unsubscribe from all of them_ (_make this a permanent rule_).
- throwaway290 2y ago
  What is the reason to unsub ever in that world? Are you saying the LLM can't skip emails? Seems like an arbitrary rule
- joshstrange 2y ago
  What system are you using to do this? I do think that this would provide value for me. Currently, I barely read my emails, which I'm not exactly proud of, but it's just the reality. So something that summarized the important things every day would be nice.
- namaria 2y ago
  I have fed LLMs PDF files, asked about the content and gotten nonsense. I would be very hesitant to trust them to give me an accurate summary of my emails.
  - HdS84 2y ago
    One of our managers uses Ai to summarize everything. Too bad it missed important caveats for an offer. Well, we burned an all nighters to correct the offer, but he did not read twenty pages but one...
    - namaria 2y ago
      I don't know if this is the case but be careful about shielding management from the consequences of their bad choices at your expense. It all but guarantees it will get worse.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Honestly I don't even enjoy coding AI features. The only value I get out of AI is translation (which I take with a grain of salt because I don't know the other language and can't spot hallucinations, but it's the best tool I have), and shitposting (e.g. having chatGPT write funny stories about my friends and sending it to them for a laugh). I can't say there's an actual productive use case for me personally.
- genewitch 2y ago
  I've anecdotally tested translations by ripping the video with subtitles and having whisper subtitle it, and also asking several AI to translate the .srt or .vtt file (subtotext I think does this conversion if you don't wanna waste tokens on the metadata) Whisper large-v3, the largest model I have, is pretty good, getting nearly identical translations to chatgpt or whatever, Google's default speech to text. The fun stuff is when you ask for text to text translations from LLMs. I did a real small writeup with an example but I don't have a place to publish nor am I really looking for one. I used whisper to transcribe nearly every "episode" of the Love Line syndicated radio show from 1997-2007 or so. It took, iirc, several days. I use it to grep the audio, as it were. I intend to do the same with my DVDs and such, just so I never have to Google "what movie / tv show is that line from?" I also have a lot of art bell shows, and a few others to transcribe.
  - farrelle25 2y ago
    > I used whisper to transcribe nearly every "episode" of the Love Line syndicated radio show from 1997-2007 or so. Yes - second this. I found 'Whisper' great for that type of scenario as well. A local monastery had about 200 audio talks (mp3). Whisper converted them all to text and GPT did a small 'smoothing' of the output to make it readable. It was about half a million words and only took a few hours. The monks were delighted - they can distribute their talks in small pamplets / PDFs now and is extra income for the community. Years ago as a student I did some audio transcription manually and something similar would have taken ages...
    - genewitch 2y ago
sanderjd 2y ago
I think the other application besides code copiloting that is already extremely useful is RAG-based information discovery a la Notion AI. This is already a giant improvement over "search google docs, and slack, and confluence, and jira, and ...". Just integrated search over all the various systems at a company was an improvement that did not require LLMs, but I also really like the back and forth chat interface for this.
petekoomen 2y ago
One of the interesting things I've noticed is that the best experiences I've had with AI are with simple applications that don't do much to get in the way of the model, e.g. chatgpt and cursor/windsurf. I'm hopeful that as devs figure out how to build better apps with AI we'll have have more and more "cursor moments" in other areas in our lives
- dangus 2y ago
  Perhaps the real takeaway is that there really is only one product, two if you count image generation. Perhaps the only reason Cursor is so good is because editing code is so similar to the basic function of an LLM without anything wrapped around it. Like, someone prove me wrong by linking 3 transformative AI products that: 1. Have nothing to do with "chatting" to a thin wrapper (couldn't just be done inside a plain LLM with a couple of file uploads added for additional context) 2. Don't involve traditional ML that has existed for years and isn't part of the LLM "revolution." 3. Has nothing to do with writing code For example, I recently used an AI chatbot that was supposed to help me troubleshoot a consumer IoT device. It basically regurgitated steps from the manual and started running around in circles because my issue was simply not covered by documentation. I then had to tell it to send me to a human. The human had more suggestions that the AI couldn't think of but still couldn't help because the product was a piece of shit. Or just look at Amazon Q. Ask it a basic AWS question and it'll just give you a bogus "sorry I can't help with that" answer where you just know that running over to chatgpt.com will actually give you a legitimate answer. Most AI "products" seem to be castrated versions of ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. That sort of overall garbage experience seems to be what is most frequently associated with AI. Basically, a futile attempt to replace low-wage employees that didn't end up delivering any value to anyone, especially since any company interested in eliminating employees just because "fuck it why not" without any real strategy probably has a busted-ass product to begin with. Putting me on hold for 15 minutes would have been more effective at getting me to go away and no compute cycles would have been necessary.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I have used LLMs for some simple text generation for what I’m going to call boilerplate, eg why $X is important at the start of a reference architecture. But maybe it saved me an hour or two in a topic I was already fairly familiar with. Not something I would have paid a meaningful sum for. I’m sure I could have searched and found an article on the topic.
knightscoop 2y ago
I wonder sometime if this is why there is such an enthusiasm gap over AI between tech people and the general public. It's not just that your average person can't program; it's that they don't even conceptually understand why programming could unlock.
bamboozled 2y ago
Have you ever been cooking and asked Siri to set a timer? That's basically the most used AI feature outside of "coding" I can think of.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Setting a timer and setting a reminder. Occasionally converting units of measure. That's all I can rely on Siri (or Alexa) for and even then sometimes Siri doesn't make it clear if it did the thing. Most importantly, "set a reminder", it shows the text, and then the UI disappears, sometimes the reminder was created, sometimes not. It's maddening since I'm normally asking to be reminded about something important that I need to get recorded/tracked so I can "forget" it. The number of times I've had 2 reminders fire back-to-back because I asked Siri again to create one since I was _sure_ it didn't create the first one. Siri is so dumb and it's insane that more heads have not rolled at Apple because of it (I'm aware of the recent shakeup, it's about a decade too late). Lastly, whoever decided to ship the new Siri UI without any of the new features should lose their job. What a squandered opportunity and effectively fraud IMHO. More and more it's clear that Tim Cook is not the person that Apple needs at the helm. My mom knows Siri sucks, why doesn't the CEO and/or why is he incapable of doing anything to fix it. Get off your Trump-kissing, over-relying-on-China ass and fix your software! (Siri is not the only thing rotten)
rcarmo 2y ago
The e-mail agent example is so good that it makes everything else I’ve seen and used pointless by comparison. I wonder why nobody’s done it that way yet.
dale_glass 2y ago
I find that ChatGPT o3 (and the other advanced reasoning models) are decently good at answering questions with a "but". Google is great at things like "Top 10 best rated movies of 2024", because people make lists of that sort of thing obsessively. But Google is far less good at queries like "Which movies look visually beautiful but have been critically panned?". For that sort of thing I have far more luck with chatgpt because it's much less of a standard "top 10" list.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  o3 has been a big improvement on Deep Research IMHO. o1 (or whatever model I originally used with it) was interesting but the results weren't always great. o3 has done some impressive research tasks for me and, unlike the last model I used, when I "check its work" it has always been correct.
Ntrails 2y ago
> Auto completing a sentence for the next word in Gmail/iMessage is one example Interestingly, I despise that feature. It breaks the flow of what is actually a very simple task. Now I'm reading, reconsidering if the offered thing is the same thing I wanted over and over again. The fact that I know this and spend time repeatedly disabling the damned things is awfully tiresome (but my fault for not paying for my own email etc etc)
- genewitch 2y ago
  I've been using Fastmail in lieu of gmail for ten or eleven years. If you have a domain and control the DNS, I recommend it. At least you're not on Google anymore, and you're paying for fastmail, so it feels better - less like something is reading your emails.
tomjen3 2y ago
I really like my speech-to-text program, and I find using ChatGPT to look up things and answer questions is a much superior experience to Google, but otherwise, I completely agree with you. Companies see that AI is a buzzword that means your stock goes up. So they start looking at it as an answer to the question: "How can I make my stock go up?" instead of "How can I create a better product", and then let the stock go up from creating a better product.

apwell23 2y ago

garmin wants me to pay for some gen-ai workout messages on connect plus. Its the most absurd AI slop of all. Same with strava. I workout for mental relaxation and i just hate this AI stuff being crammed in there. Atleast clippy was kind of cute.

danielbln 2y ago
Strava's integration is just so lackluster. It literally turns four numbers from right above the slop message into free text. Thanks Strava, I'm a pro user for a decade, finally I can read "This was a hard workout" after my run. Such useful, much AI.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
At this point, "we aren't adding any AI features" is a selling point for me. I've gotten real tired of AI slop and hype.
nradov 2y ago
Strava employees claim that casual users like the AI activity summaries. Supposedly users who don't know anything about exercise physiology didn't know how to interpret the various metrics and charts. I don't know if I believe that but it's at least plausible. Personally I wish I could turn off the AI features, it's a waste of space.
- rurp 2y ago
  Anytime someone from a company says that users like the super trendy thing they just made I take it with a sizeable grain of salt. Sometimes it's true, and maybe it is true for Strava, but I've seen enough cases where it isn't to discount such claims down to ~0.
- genewitch 2y ago
  The guy at the Wendy's drive thru has told me repeatedly that most people don't want ketchup so they stopped putting it in bags by default.
sandspar 2y ago
I use AI chatbots for 2+ hours a day but the Garmin thing was too much for me. The day they released their AI Garmin+ subscription, I took off my Forerunner and put it in a drawer. The whole point of Garmin is that it feels emotionally clean to use. Garmin adding a scammy subscription makes the ecosystem feel icky, and I'm not going to wear a piece of clothing that makes me feel icky. I don't think I'll buy a Garmin watch again. (Since taking off the watch, I miss some of the data but my overall health and sleep haven't changed.)

Andugal 2y ago

> I’m actually having a really hard time thinking of an AI feature other than coding AI feature that I actually enjoy. If you attend a lot of meetings, having an AI note-taker take notes for you and generate a structured summary, follow-up email, to-do list, and more will be an absolute game changer. (Disclaimer, I'm the CTO of Leexi, an AI note-taker)

AlexandrB 2y ago
The catch is: does anyone actually read this stuff? I've been taking meeting notes for meetings I run (without AI) for around 6 months now and I suspect no one other than myself has looked at the notes I've put together. I've only looked back at those notes once or twice. A big part of the problem is even finding this content in a modern corporate intranet (i.e. Confluence) and having a bunch of AI-generated text in there as well isn't going to help.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I thought the point of having a meeting-notes person was so that at least one person would pay attention to details during the meeting.
  - jethro_tell 2y ago
    I thought it was so I could go back 1 year and say, 'I was against this from the beginning and I was quite vocal that if you do this, the result will be the exact mess you're asking me to clean up now.'
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Ah, but a record for CYA and “told you so”, that’s pure cynicism. “At least one person paying attention” at least we can pretend the intent was to pair some potential usefulness with our cynicism.
  - gus_massa 2y ago
    Also, ensure that if the final decition was to paint the the bike shed green, everyone agree it was the final decitions. (In long discusions, sometimes people misunderstand which was the final decition.)

danielbln 2y ago

I enjoy Claude as a general purpose "let's talk about this niche thing" chat bot, or for general ideation. Extracting structured data from videos (via Gemini) is quite useful as well, though to be fair it's not a super frequent use case for me. That said, coding and engineering is by far the most common usecase I have for gen AI.

joshstrange 2y ago
Oh, I'm sorry if it wasn't clear. I use Claude and ChatGPT to talk to about a ton of topics. I'm mostly referring to AI features being added to existing SaaS or software products. I regularly find that moving the conversation to ChatGPT or Claude is much better than trying to use anything that they may have built into their existing product.

nicolas_t 2y ago

I like perplexity when I need a quick overview of a topic with references to relevant published studies. I often use it when researching what the current research says on parenting questions or education. It's not perfect but because the answers link to the relevant studies it's a good way to get a quick overview of research on a given topic

teeray 2y ago

> This demo uses AI to read emails instead of write them LLMs are so good at summarizing that I should basically only ever read one email—from the AI: You received 2 emails today that need your direct reply from X and Y. 1 is still outstanding from two days ago, _would you like to send an acknowledgment_? You received 6 emails from newsletters you didn’t sign up for but were enrolled after you bought something _do you want to unsubscribe from all of them_ (_make this a permanent rule_).

throwaway290 2y ago
What is the reason to unsub ever in that world? Are you saying the LLM can't skip emails? Seems like an arbitrary rule
joshstrange 2y ago
What system are you using to do this? I do think that this would provide value for me. Currently, I barely read my emails, which I'm not exactly proud of, but it's just the reality. So something that summarized the important things every day would be nice.
namaria 2y ago
I have fed LLMs PDF files, asked about the content and gotten nonsense. I would be very hesitant to trust them to give me an accurate summary of my emails.
- HdS84 2y ago
  One of our managers uses Ai to summarize everything. Too bad it missed important caveats for an offer. Well, we burned an all nighters to correct the offer, but he did not read twenty pages but one...
  - namaria 2y ago
    I don't know if this is the case but be careful about shielding management from the consequences of their bad choices at your expense. It all but guarantees it will get worse.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

Honestly I don't even enjoy coding AI features. The only value I get out of AI is translation (which I take with a grain of salt because I don't know the other language and can't spot hallucinations, but it's the best tool I have), and shitposting (e.g. having chatGPT write funny stories about my friends and sending it to them for a laugh). I can't say there's an actual productive use case for me personally.

genewitch 2y ago
I've anecdotally tested translations by ripping the video with subtitles and having whisper subtitle it, and also asking several AI to translate the .srt or .vtt file (subtotext I think does this conversion if you don't wanna waste tokens on the metadata) Whisper large-v3, the largest model I have, is pretty good, getting nearly identical translations to chatgpt or whatever, Google's default speech to text. The fun stuff is when you ask for text to text translations from LLMs. I did a real small writeup with an example but I don't have a place to publish nor am I really looking for one. I used whisper to transcribe nearly every "episode" of the Love Line syndicated radio show from 1997-2007 or so. It took, iirc, several days. I use it to grep the audio, as it were. I intend to do the same with my DVDs and such, just so I never have to Google "what movie / tv show is that line from?" I also have a lot of art bell shows, and a few others to transcribe.
- farrelle25 2y ago
  > I used whisper to transcribe nearly every "episode" of the Love Line syndicated radio show from 1997-2007 or so. Yes - second this. I found 'Whisper' great for that type of scenario as well. A local monastery had about 200 audio talks (mp3). Whisper converted them all to text and GPT did a small 'smoothing' of the output to make it readable. It was about half a million words and only took a few hours. The monks were delighted - they can distribute their talks in small pamplets / PDFs now and is extra income for the community. Years ago as a student I did some audio transcription manually and something similar would have taken ages...
  - genewitch 2y ago

sanderjd 2y ago

I think the other application besides code copiloting that is already extremely useful is RAG-based information discovery a la Notion AI. This is already a giant improvement over "search google docs, and slack, and confluence, and jira, and ...". Just integrated search over all the various systems at a company was an improvement that did not require LLMs, but I also really like the back and forth chat interface for this.

petekoomen 2y ago

One of the interesting things I've noticed is that the best experiences I've had with AI are with simple applications that don't do much to get in the way of the model, e.g. chatgpt and cursor/windsurf. I'm hopeful that as devs figure out how to build better apps with AI we'll have have more and more "cursor moments" in other areas in our lives

dangus 2y ago
Perhaps the real takeaway is that there really is only one product, two if you count image generation. Perhaps the only reason Cursor is so good is because editing code is so similar to the basic function of an LLM without anything wrapped around it. Like, someone prove me wrong by linking 3 transformative AI products that: 1. Have nothing to do with "chatting" to a thin wrapper (couldn't just be done inside a plain LLM with a couple of file uploads added for additional context) 2. Don't involve traditional ML that has existed for years and isn't part of the LLM "revolution." 3. Has nothing to do with writing code For example, I recently used an AI chatbot that was supposed to help me troubleshoot a consumer IoT device. It basically regurgitated steps from the manual and started running around in circles because my issue was simply not covered by documentation. I then had to tell it to send me to a human. The human had more suggestions that the AI couldn't think of but still couldn't help because the product was a piece of shit. Or just look at Amazon Q. Ask it a basic AWS question and it'll just give you a bogus "sorry I can't help with that" answer where you just know that running over to chatgpt.com will actually give you a legitimate answer. Most AI "products" seem to be castrated versions of ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. That sort of overall garbage experience seems to be what is most frequently associated with AI. Basically, a futile attempt to replace low-wage employees that didn't end up delivering any value to anyone, especially since any company interested in eliminating employees just because "fuck it why not" without any real strategy probably has a busted-ass product to begin with. Putting me on hold for 15 minutes would have been more effective at getting me to go away and no compute cycles would have been necessary.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I have used LLMs for some simple text generation for what I’m going to call boilerplate, eg why $X is important at the start of a reference architecture. But maybe it saved me an hour or two in a topic I was already fairly familiar with. Not something I would have paid a meaningful sum for. I’m sure I could have searched and found an article on the topic.

knightscoop 2y ago

I wonder sometime if this is why there is such an enthusiasm gap over AI between tech people and the general public. It's not just that your average person can't program; it's that they don't even conceptually understand why programming could unlock.

bamboozled 2y ago

Have you ever been cooking and asked Siri to set a timer? That's basically the most used AI feature outside of "coding" I can think of.

joshstrange 2y ago
Setting a timer and setting a reminder. Occasionally converting units of measure. That's all I can rely on Siri (or Alexa) for and even then sometimes Siri doesn't make it clear if it did the thing. Most importantly, "set a reminder", it shows the text, and then the UI disappears, sometimes the reminder was created, sometimes not. It's maddening since I'm normally asking to be reminded about something important that I need to get recorded/tracked so I can "forget" it. The number of times I've had 2 reminders fire back-to-back because I asked Siri again to create one since I was _sure_ it didn't create the first one. Siri is so dumb and it's insane that more heads have not rolled at Apple because of it (I'm aware of the recent shakeup, it's about a decade too late). Lastly, whoever decided to ship the new Siri UI without any of the new features should lose their job. What a squandered opportunity and effectively fraud IMHO. More and more it's clear that Tim Cook is not the person that Apple needs at the helm. My mom knows Siri sucks, why doesn't the CEO and/or why is he incapable of doing anything to fix it. Get off your Trump-kissing, over-relying-on-China ass and fix your software! (Siri is not the only thing rotten)

rcarmo 2y ago

The e-mail agent example is so good that it makes everything else I’ve seen and used pointless by comparison. I wonder why nobody’s done it that way yet.

dale_glass 2y ago

I find that ChatGPT o3 (and the other advanced reasoning models) are decently good at answering questions with a "but". Google is great at things like "Top 10 best rated movies of 2024", because people make lists of that sort of thing obsessively. But Google is far less good at queries like "Which movies look visually beautiful but have been critically panned?". For that sort of thing I have far more luck with chatgpt because it's much less of a standard "top 10" list.

joshstrange 2y ago
o3 has been a big improvement on Deep Research IMHO. o1 (or whatever model I originally used with it) was interesting but the results weren't always great. o3 has done some impressive research tasks for me and, unlike the last model I used, when I "check its work" it has always been correct.

Ntrails 2y ago

> Auto completing a sentence for the next word in Gmail/iMessage is one example Interestingly, I despise that feature. It breaks the flow of what is actually a very simple task. Now I'm reading, reconsidering if the offered thing is the same thing I wanted over and over again. The fact that I know this and spend time repeatedly disabling the damned things is awfully tiresome (but my fault for not paying for my own email etc etc)

genewitch 2y ago
I've been using Fastmail in lieu of gmail for ten or eleven years. If you have a domain and control the DNS, I recommend it. At least you're not on Google anymore, and you're paying for fastmail, so it feels better - less like something is reading your emails.

tomjen3 2y ago

I really like my speech-to-text program, and I find using ChatGPT to look up things and answer questions is a much superior experience to Google, but otherwise, I completely agree with you. Companies see that AI is a buzzword that means your stock goes up. So they start looking at it as an answer to the question: "How can I make my stock go up?" instead of "How can I create a better product", and then let the stock go up from creating a better product.