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GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

chatgpt.com

81–90 of 141 posts

Re: GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

#81
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering my iPhone alarm still sometimes fails to go off (it just shows the alarm screen silently), I'd be inclined to believe you.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24340238/apple-iphone-alar...

Whenever I have to wake for something that I absolutely can’t miss, I set 2-3 extra reminders 5 minutes apart precisely because of this “silent alarm” bug. It’s only happened to me a couple of times but twice was enough to completely destroy my trust in the alarm. The first time I thought I just did something in my sleep to cause it, but the UI shows it as if the alarm worked. I’m lucky to have the privilege that if I oversleep an hour or so it’s no big deal, otherwise ye olde tabletop alarm clock would be back.

Re: GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

#82
post #42
post #28

Amazon had an insane number of people working on just the alarms feature in Alexa when they interviewed me for a position years ago. They had entire teams devoted to the tiniest edge case within the realm of scheduling things with Alexa. This is no doubt one of the biggest use cases in computing: getting your computer to tell you what to do at a given time.

Considering my iPhone alarm still sometimes fails to go off (it just shows the alarm screen silently), I'd be inclined to believe you.

Thanks for that— I though I was going crazy (well still could be I guess) or had some strange habit or gesture I didn’t realize was silencing the alarm somehow.

Re: GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

#83
post #28

Amazon had an insane number of people working on just the alarms feature in Alexa when they interviewed me for a position years ago. They had entire teams devoted to the tiniest edge case within the realm of scheduling things with Alexa. This is no doubt one of the biggest use cases in computing: getting your computer to tell you what to do at a given time.

And gmail schedule delivery just won't work if you want to email yourself a month later.

Re: GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

#84
post #51

The beta is inconsistently showing (required a few refreshes to get something to show up), but my limited usage of it showed a plethora of issues: - Assumed UTC instead of EST. Corrected it and it still continued to bork - Added random time deltas to my asked times (+2, -10 min). - Couple notifications didn't go off at all - The one that did go off didn't provide a push notification. --- On top of that, only usable w…

You'd think Open AI's dev velocity and quality would be off the charts since they live and breathe "AI." If a company building ChatGPT itself often delivers buggy features then it doesn't bode well for this whole 'AI will eat the world' notion.

Well none of the labs have good frontend or mobile engineers or even infra engineers

Anthropic is ahead in this because they keep their UIs simplistic so the failure modes are also simple (bad connection)

OpenAI is just pushing half baked stuff to prod and moving on (GPTs, Canvas).

Find it hilarious and sad that o1-pro just times out thinking on very long or image-intense chats. Need to reload page multiple times after it fails to reply and maybe answer will appear (or not? Or in 5 minutes?). Kinda shows they’re not testing enough and “not eating their own food” and feels like chatgpt 3.5 ui before the redesign

Re: GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

#86
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think Open AI's dev velocity and quality would be off the charts since they live and breathe "AI." If a company building ChatGPT itself often delivers buggy features then it doesn't bode well for this whole 'AI will eat the world' notion.

Well none of the labs have good frontend or mobile engineers or even infra engineers Anthropic is ahead in this because they keep their UIs simplistic so the failure modes are also simple (bad connection) OpenAI is just pushing half baked stuff to prod and moving on (GPTs, Canvas). Find it hilarious and sad that o1-pro just times out thinking on very long or image-intense chats. Need to reload page multiple times aft…

> Anthropic is ahead in this because they keep their UIs simplistic ... OpenAI is just pushing half baked stuff to prod and moving on (GPTs, Canvas).

What's funny is that OpenAI's Canvas was their attempt to copy Anthropic's Artifacts! So it's not like Anthropic is stagnant and OpenAI is at least shipping, Anthropic is shipping and OpenAI can't even copy them right.

Re: GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

#87
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24340238/apple-iphone-alar...

Whenever I have to wake for something that I absolutely can’t miss, I set 2-3 extra reminders 5 minutes apart precisely because of this “silent alarm” bug. It’s only happened to me a couple of times but twice was enough to completely destroy my trust in the alarm. The first time I thought I just did something in my sleep to cause it, but the UI shows it as if the alarm worked. I’m lucky to have the privilege that if…

I love the questioning my sanity before I've completely opened my eyes part. It's like a jump start to my day.

Re: GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

#88
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DateTime stuff is generally super annoying to debug. Can't fault them too badly. Adding a scheduler is a key enabling idea for a ton of use cases

Agreed on date/time being a frustrating area of software development. But wouldn't a company like OpenAI use a tick-based system in this architecture? i.e. there's an event emitter that ticks every second (or maybe minute), and consumers that operate based on these events in realtime? Obviously things get complicated due to the time consumed by inference models, but if OpenAI knows the task upfront it could make an a…

The original cron was programmed this way, but it has to examine every job every tick to check if it should run, which doesn't scale well. Instead, you predict when the next run for a job will be and insert that into an indexed schedule. Then each tick it checks the front of the schedule in ascending order of timestamps until the remaining jobs are in the future.

This is also a bad case in terms of queueing theory. Looking at Kingmans equation, the arrival variance is very high (a ton of jobs will run at 00:00 and much fewer at 00:01), and the service time also has pretty high variance. That combo will either require high queue delay variance, low utilization (i.e. over-provosioning), or a sophisticated auto-scaler that aggressively starts and stops instances to anticipate the schedule. Most of the time it's ok to let jobs queue since most use cases don't care if a daily or weekly job is 5 minutes late.

Re: GPT-4o with scheduled tasks (jawbone) is available in beta

#90
post #35
post #28

Amazon had an insane number of people working on just the alarms feature in Alexa when they interviewed me for a position years ago. They had entire teams devoted to the tiniest edge case within the realm of scheduling things with Alexa. This is no doubt one of the biggest use cases in computing: getting your computer to tell you what to do at a given time.

Recurring schedules across time zones is an unbelievably maddening thing to implement. At first glance it seems simple, but it gets very weird very quickly.

Yeah summer time in different countries switching on different days and often in a different direction (other hemisphere). I used to work on such matters and those weeks were the toughest.
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