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> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five

by vkou 4mo ago

> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI. I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of your work to a machine they own or rent. But perhaps someone here can find some tangible improvement.

samvher 4mo ago
Interesting challenge. 1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars. 2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market. 3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully. 4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition. 5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.
watwut 4mo ago
I can name three: - better speech to text, - better auto translation, - better image to text. Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.
beej71 4mo ago
It's allowed me to learn things more quickly. For example, I haven't written any C++ professionally for 20 years, and found myself in the position of needing to know it again. The existing material online for learning it is thick; sometimes I have a question that isn't answered directly or clearly in any way I can find with a standard search. I can grill the LLM much more quickly and pointedly. However, this does not answer the usefulness-at-work question. Does anyone care if I know how the initializer list braces in constructor `Foo{1,2}` work? Today for hiring managers smitten with AI, seems like they don't. Personally, I'm just trying to stay sharp on the off-chance that things crash out and people who know how to engineer *and* code become highly valuable. If not, I'll be doing something else, anyway.
sillyfluke 4mo ago
While I agree with your sentiment and observatin by and large, ideally you could have added a few constraints as a lot of people here have had "Holy shit" moments with AI, but often it's most pronounced in a very specific personal context. Learning topics faster, fixing things without having to call a repair man, life-saving medical tips (somewhat more of a thing because of a handicapped health system, but that's another discussion). Funnily enough though, the benefits don't seem to scale to the work environment as smoothly across the board. It's almost as if, to use pg's famous line, they built things that don't scale. The moment you scale AI beyond the personal context, the noisiness and non-determinism of the technology starts wrecking havoc in ripples through the industry, damn the productivity. Managing the slop you've created, but more importantly (I would normally put an emdash here) managing the slop others created turns out to be a problem as big as the tech that created it. What is the evidence of this? Isn't it strange no revolutionary product has yet been created from the coding output of this technology? More to the point, the only thing that comes close is the Claw. So what we have as the first breakaway product is something to help orchestrate the slop generators, instead of say, a new Phone OS that rivals Android and iOS, or a Metaverse that is actually worthy of its name. Nothing to see here, just more shovels to shovel the shit essentially. We are still in the grasp of the electric and information revolution. Peter Thiel said more than a decade ago that if you compare life in the 70s and now the only major visible difference would simply be more screens in various forms nowadays. This he presented as evidence that no new revolutionary technology has been created in the interim. At present, the same is more true of AI. It has made access to information faster than before. However, unlike other processes of learning, it has made it more difficult to ascertain the correctness of the information presented. It is doing this by actively removing the direct connection between the information it presents and the primary sources responsible for that information (think Google replacing its search field with an AI field). The non-LLM AI stuff in the medical field is what I find most promising. Not the banal AI doctors and nurses replacing real doctors and nurses, but more the research end of things, where hallucinating and pattern matching to create new compounds to test seems promising. Of course, any technology that is able to routinely aid discoveries in applied maths and physics will also be welcome. If this half decade saw an explosion of new bespoke hardware being built and sold aided by LLMs (think a tech shop of 10 employees being able to build and sell robust smartphones from scratch to a niche market sustainably etc), or jumpstarts an era of reverse engineering on crack that pierces through the tech oligopoly then that would be evidence of disruption on a macro scale... But no, alas, we are still waiting.

by vkou 4mo ago

samvher 4mo ago

Interesting challenge. 1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars. 2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market. 3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully. 4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition. 5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.

watwut 4mo ago

I can name three: - better speech to text, - better auto translation, - better image to text. Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.

beej71 4mo ago

It's allowed me to learn things more quickly. For example, I haven't written any C++ professionally for 20 years, and found myself in the position of needing to know it again. The existing material online for learning it is thick; sometimes I have a question that isn't answered directly or clearly in any way I can find with a standard search. I can grill the LLM much more quickly and pointedly. However, this does not answer the usefulness-at-work question. Does anyone care if I know how the initializer list braces in constructor `Foo{1,2}` work? Today for hiring managers smitten with AI, seems like they don't. Personally, I'm just trying to stay sharp on the off-chance that things crash out and people who know how to engineer *and* code become highly valuable. If not, I'll be doing something else, anyway.

sillyfluke 4mo ago

While I agree with your sentiment and observatin by and large, ideally you could have added a few constraints as a lot of people here have had "Holy shit" moments with AI, but often it's most pronounced in a very specific personal context. Learning topics faster, fixing things without having to call a repair man, life-saving medical tips (somewhat more of a thing because of a handicapped health system, but that's another discussion). Funnily enough though, the benefits don't seem to scale to the work environment as smoothly across the board. It's almost as if, to use pg's famous line, they built things that don't scale. The moment you scale AI beyond the personal context, the noisiness and non-determinism of the technology starts wrecking havoc in ripples through the industry, damn the productivity. Managing the slop you've created, but more importantly (I would normally put an emdash here) managing the slop others created turns out to be a problem as big as the tech that created it. What is the evidence of this? Isn't it strange no revolutionary product has yet been created from the coding output of this technology? More to the point, the only thing that comes close is the Claw. So what we have as the first breakaway product is something to help orchestrate the slop generators, instead of say, a new Phone OS that rivals Android and iOS, or a Metaverse that is actually worthy of its name. Nothing to see here, just more shovels to shovel the shit essentially. We are still in the grasp of the electric and information revolution. Peter Thiel said more than a decade ago that if you compare life in the 70s and now the only major visible difference would simply be more screens in various forms nowadays. This he presented as evidence that no new revolutionary technology has been created in the interim. At present, the same is more true of AI. It has made access to information faster than before. However, unlike other processes of learning, it has made it more difficult to ascertain the correctness of the information presented. It is doing this by actively removing the direct connection between the information it presents and the primary sources responsible for that information (think Google replacing its search field with an AI field). The non-LLM AI stuff in the medical field is what I find most promising. Not the banal AI doctors and nurses replacing real doctors and nurses, but more the research end of things, where hallucinating and pattern matching to create new compounds to test seems promising. Of course, any technology that is able to routinely aid discoveries in applied maths and physics will also be welcome. If this half decade saw an explosion of new bespoke hardware being built and sold aided by LLMs (think a tech shop of 10 employees being able to build and sell robust smartphones from scratch to a niche market sustainably etc), or jumpstarts an era of reverse engineering on crack that pierces through the tech oligopoly then that would be evidence of disruption on a macro scale... But no, alas, we are still waiting.