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I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots beca

by wpietri 2mo ago

I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..." I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.

SadErn 2mo ago
[dead]
joenot443 2mo ago
> I run a not-for-profit pinball museum Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.
- wpietri 2mo ago
  For sure, but I think the deeper problems are how much the industry changed over the decades and the extent to which pinball repair content comes from amateurs opining on forums. Pool technology has been more stable, and there are more people out there writing well-informed content for LLMs to extract and present as their own.
j45 2mo ago
The horoscope reference is resonating for me. I know very little about pinball machines, out of curiosity, do some come with any amount of schematics or diagrams?
- centuryfall 2mo ago
  Not OP, but this channel does a lot of walkthroughs of popular machines and explains how those systems work in-game: https://youtube.com/@papapinball https://youtube.com/@papapinball
  - wpietri 2mo ago
    I also strongly recommend the Technology Connections series on how electromechanical pinball works: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFVIu2oZc2GGyDf https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFV... I would love to put them on a kiosk in the museum.
- wpietri 2mo ago
  I have schematics as early as 1937, but the odds that the manuals stayed with the machine are pretty low. (Usually these machines were owned by somebody who had a bunch, and I suspect the manuals tended to get collected centrally.) You can generally buy manuals on eBay, and some are being reprinted by people who own the original IP. The internet has a lot of scans of wildly varying quality. The AI industry's hunger for data means there has been a lot of progress in OCR and data extraction, so I have notions of taking something like PaddleOCR and trying to turn the scans into a cohesive reference site that will work well on phones, etc. But I'm not sure when I will get to it. If people out there are interested in working on a project like that, let me know. Email me at william@theflip.museum.
centuryfall 2mo ago
By chance is it the one in Asheville, NC?
- wpietri 2mo ago
  That's a good one! But no, we're in Chicago: https://www.theflip.museum/ https://www.theflip.museum/
Finbel 2mo ago
Two years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from ChatGPT to fix your outdoor plumbing, people here would have been frothing at the mouth for merely suggesting it. Four years ago it wasn't even on the radar of future possibilities. The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.
- wpietri 2mo ago
  Maybe? It's a plausible theory. But these operations are all wildly unsustainable financially at the moment, and it's not clear where they'll get future data from, having destroyed a lot of the incentives that generated their current source content. Bubbles are not a great time to form intuitions. WebVan [1] and Kozmo [2] also seemed to herald a new age. Decades later, brick-and-mortar grocery stores and convenience stores are still doing fine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com
- YurgenJurgensen 2mo ago
  They already have all the data, all the money and all the chips. It’s actually the best it’ll ever be, as newer models will have to start paying off all that capex, newer models will be trained mostly on slop, and the SEO and influence op leeches will have begun their arms race to insert their products and values into the training data. We’ve seen this pattern before. AirBnB, Uber, social media, streaming video, et cetera didn’t get better once the VC money ran out and they needed to start turning a profit, they got much much worse.
- qlte 2mo ago
  > The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be. Someone in 2004: A few years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky button to fix your outdoor plumbing. The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.
- avgDev 2mo ago
  We are in the golden age of AI. Things are going to get worse at some point. It happened to google, it will happen to AI.

by wpietri 2mo ago

SadErn 2mo ago

[dead]

joenot443 2mo ago

> I run a not-for-profit pinball museum Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.

wpietri 2mo ago
For sure, but I think the deeper problems are how much the industry changed over the decades and the extent to which pinball repair content comes from amateurs opining on forums. Pool technology has been more stable, and there are more people out there writing well-informed content for LLMs to extract and present as their own.

j45 2mo ago

The horoscope reference is resonating for me. I know very little about pinball machines, out of curiosity, do some come with any amount of schematics or diagrams?

centuryfall 2mo ago
Not OP, but this channel does a lot of walkthroughs of popular machines and explains how those systems work in-game: https://youtube.com/@papapinball https://youtube.com/@papapinball
- wpietri 2mo ago
  I also strongly recommend the Technology Connections series on how electromechanical pinball works: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFVIu2oZc2GGyDf https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFV... I would love to put them on a kiosk in the museum.
wpietri 2mo ago
I have schematics as early as 1937, but the odds that the manuals stayed with the machine are pretty low. (Usually these machines were owned by somebody who had a bunch, and I suspect the manuals tended to get collected centrally.) You can generally buy manuals on eBay, and some are being reprinted by people who own the original IP. The internet has a lot of scans of wildly varying quality. The AI industry's hunger for data means there has been a lot of progress in OCR and data extraction, so I have notions of taking something like PaddleOCR and trying to turn the scans into a cohesive reference site that will work well on phones, etc. But I'm not sure when I will get to it. If people out there are interested in working on a project like that, let me know. Email me at william@theflip.museum.

centuryfall 2mo ago

By chance is it the one in Asheville, NC?

wpietri 2mo ago
That's a good one! But no, we're in Chicago: https://www.theflip.museum/ https://www.theflip.museum/

Finbel 2mo ago

Two years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from ChatGPT to fix your outdoor plumbing, people here would have been frothing at the mouth for merely suggesting it. Four years ago it wasn't even on the radar of future possibilities. The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

wpietri 2mo ago
Maybe? It's a plausible theory. But these operations are all wildly unsustainable financially at the moment, and it's not clear where they'll get future data from, having destroyed a lot of the incentives that generated their current source content. Bubbles are not a great time to form intuitions. WebVan [1] and Kozmo [2] also seemed to herald a new age. Decades later, brick-and-mortar grocery stores and convenience stores are still doing fine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com
YurgenJurgensen 2mo ago
They already have all the data, all the money and all the chips. It’s actually the best it’ll ever be, as newer models will have to start paying off all that capex, newer models will be trained mostly on slop, and the SEO and influence op leeches will have begun their arms race to insert their products and values into the training data. We’ve seen this pattern before. AirBnB, Uber, social media, streaming video, et cetera didn’t get better once the VC money ran out and they needed to start turning a profit, they got much much worse.
qlte 2mo ago
> The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be. Someone in 2004: A few years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky button to fix your outdoor plumbing. The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.
avgDev 2mo ago
We are in the golden age of AI. Things are going to get worse at some point. It happened to google, it will happen to AI.