4 ms·
In areas of applicability where GenAI to now considered to be good/great, the pattern I've observed is a frighteningly rapid progression from "abjectly terrible
by mrshadowgoose 1mo ago
In areas of applicability where GenAI to now considered to be good/great, the pattern I've observed is a frighteningly rapid progression from "abjectly terrible", to "middling and mostly more trouble than it's worth" and then "good/great".
Agentic coding and image generation are probably the best examples of this.
There's no guarantee that this trend will be seen with virtual assistants, but if it does, we're on the brink of incredible. Dedicated personal assistants, that actually know and understand one's context and work well together, are unarguably hugely appreciated by those who can afford them.
- ShinyLeftPad 1mo agoNothing can go wrong if we reduce direct human interaction even further and pay some megacorporations to MITM all of it.
- podgietaru 1mo agoAll mediated by the Meta-Human Facebook and Instagram that these people want to shit into the world. I dream of a world where I never know if anything is real, or if the person I'm talking to is even human.
- ShinyLeftPad 1mo agoBut imagine how targeted the ads will be!
- Forgeties79 1mo agoThat future does not sound fun, let alone incredible.
- over_bridge 1mo agoAm I the only one who doesn't want a virtual assistant? I just struggle to understand this goal we apparently are all aiming for I want to be an active player in my own life. I want to do things even if there's some friction. All I can imagine is that future from WallE where everything is so easy no one tries or does anything at all
- podgietaru 1mo agoI'm just not that annoyed by having to search for a flight, or train, or bus. Or make plans. Or find a restaurant. I'm not annoyed enough by these trivial tasks to want to outsource them. I don't want to ask Siri to book me a restaurant, when the alternative is a quick google search.
- flkiwi 1mo agoIt's helps to remember that most of the folks pushing this are ambitious but fundamentally lazy.
- brookst 1mo agoWhat an odd claim. Is it possible they have families, aging relatives to care for, health issues or other reasons that time is precious and “spend an hour correlating amazing restaurants with their available bookings against my crazy schedule” is not a good solution? IMO the greatest failure of the HN-style tech community is complete lack of empathy, or even awareness, for people whose lives have different shapes.
- kthinckley 1mo agofrankly, this is just a lazy and ignorant pov
- brookst 1mo agoCan’t say you’re the only one but I certainly want an assistant. I’ve been putting off some dental work for a year or more because I have an implant that’s come lose, and the two dentists I saw about it said they’d have to remove the crown, send pictures to some lab that might be able to identify the manufacturer (or maybe not), maybe get the right tooling, maybe have to replace the entire thing (thousands of dollars, removing and resetting a post in my jaw), etc etc. all because I didn’t know the manufacturer of an implant I got 20 years ago. Claude cowork was able to understand the problem, interview me, find dental insurance paperwork in my email, identify the prosthedontist used, find that that office had closed years ago, find where the practitioner moved to, their new practice, and get me a number to call. Within a couple of ours I had the manufacturer, procedure notes, and X-rays from the installation. Is that WALL-E style laziness? Maybe. But I’m good with it, as I have line of sight to solving an annoying problem that seemed insurmountable.