Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dot by New Computer

new.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 120 posts

Re: Dot by New Computer

#81

Post by imglorp »

thomashop wrote: post #14
leodriesch wrote: post #9

Their privacy policy lists OpenAI as one of their partners for data processing, which indicates that this is happening not on your device, and data is also shared with third parties. For me this is the main counterargument against apps like these. I want to feel free to post any information into this without thinking about who may read or use it. Local is the only way to go for software like this in my opinion.

They say in their about page: "We will never monetize your data. We will never monetize your attention. And we believe that the only way we can build towards the future we envision is through the continuous reinforcement of mutual trust and respect. Currently, we leverage best-in-class cloud-hosted models, including ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and a selection of open-source options. Over time, we plan to reduce exte…

Never is a funny word to see in a TOS, like those "Unlimited" service plans. It wouldn't be cynical to say how hollow such promises ring.

Re: Dot by New Computer

#82

Post by famouswaffles »

refulgentis wrote: post #77
famouswaffles wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Putting this all together is ambitious but individually, they're all things that have been realized to some degree.

Each is possible but having been adjacent to Google projects in this vein for 7 years, and having worked on something similar, lead me to have a substantial discount rate on what I call "magic wand" AI design work. It would be very odd and transformative indeed to have this all coalesce and work. But don't listen to me, I'm probably going to go all out on my pitch now too.

1 is retrieval augmented generation.

2 is just fancy talk for what high perfoming LLMs do

3 has been done many times over

4 is achievable with Imagebind if we're going for an exotic solution. Otherwise GPT-4V with AudioToText and TTS will do just fine (Open AI have something similar set up)

5 is as simple as timed prompts sent by the company unbeknownst to the user.

6 is the probably the most bespoke thing here. I'm guessing this is the "information as a quiz" thing they try to demonstrate.

7 is the same as 2

8 is High perfoming LLM with a specific prompt.

I'm not trying to discount your experience but the technology that is making any of this possible is a few years old and the new state of the art version which is far ahead of everything else is ~8 months old so unless you just worked on something like this then I'm not sure it's much indication on what is achievable.

I guess we'll see.

Re: Dot by New Computer

#83

Post by pilgrim0 »

azinman2 wrote: post #34
cabirum wrote: post #23

In a year, Dot app is discontinued and you lose everything.

If new technology and products don’t have a chance for optimism on HN, where do they?

If _toxic_ technology and products don’t have a chance for optimism on HN, where do they? Fixed that for you. Also, is this really “technology” through and through? I mean, surely there’s scientific knowledge behind it, but is the materialized outcome really something those two founders really achieved out of applied scientific knowledge? From reading their about page, I doubt they are invested in factoring the neuropsychological, social and cultural impacts, long or short term. It seems more like a narrative they’ve built and liked how it sounded in their head. I’m a designer engineer and I known how tempting it is to prototype such aesthetic pipe dreams, those that you never bothered to honestly and seriously question the validity, since it would obviously ruin all the fun. In those cases it’s easier to let yourself be fooled by your own foolishness. After all, how can it be not good if it looks good and pleases me? It must be good! No, more than that. It is necessary! It’s the way of the future! It has to be done! Right? Has it ever occurred to you that the, hm, “hackers”, might actually have a bit of sense, affording them the ability to distinguish useful technology from bullshit?

Re: Dot by New Computer

#84

Post by aroman »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #67
aroman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same could have been said of Workflow — which Apple acquired and rebranded as a first-party app.

acquisition doesn't really count as sherlocking, it's usually implementing an idea from an existing app without any money being exchanged a more recent example this was F.lux, which Apple implemented as "Night Shift"

> acquisition doesn't really count as sherlocking

Yes, that's my point, that there are other paths to this being adopted by Apple with on-device processing that are mutually beneficial both to the startup and Apple.

Re: Dot by New Computer

#85

Post by refulgentis »

famouswaffles wrote: post #82
refulgentis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each is possible but having been adjacent to Google projects in this vein for 7 years, and having worked on something similar, lead me to have a substantial discount rate on what I call "magic wand" AI design work. It would be very odd and transformative indeed to have this all coalesce and work. But don't listen to me, I'm probably going to go all out on my pitch now too.

1 is retrieval augmented generation. 2 is just fancy talk for what high perfoming LLMs do 3 has been done many times over 4 is achievable with Imagebind if we're going for an exotic solution. Otherwise GPT-4V with AudioToText and TTS will do just fine (Open AI have something similar set up) 5 is as simple as timed prompts sent by the company unbeknownst to the user. 6 is the probably the most bespoke thing here. I'm…

That's exactly what I'm saying - I've just worked on something like this since January. I throttled back from universal file manager and stuff, I think they're kinda hinting at it too through the "probabilistic computing" thing. Staying focused on RAG + as much local compute as possible, user perception of citations is through the roof compared to practically anything else.

The problem I saw over and over again at Google wasn't, like, how do we do this. It's like the "draw the rest of the f*king owl" meme. You can pull some stuff off probabistically or presenting choices, but it gets real nasty real quick when you screw up (the most public version I can think of here is how immensely frustrating it is if a voice speaker mishears your query, especially twice in a row)

Failures being a series of products is something else I feel hurts, ex. getting 95% of the files right x 95% of your appointments x 95% of your sleep schedule, honestly, each individual prompts reliability is top-tier. Yet, 15% of the time it kinda has no idea what you're doing.

But I'm sort of devil's advocating here, to a point. I think you can get there, but boy it's a lot of work and they're 3-4 years away if they have 100 employees and a lot of work, non-trivial on several fronts, even just the GPT billing is a nightmare. I am 99.9% sure I am the only person on earth besides OpenAI employees who know how to bill functions correctly to the token (to be fair, getting within ~4 tokens is publicly available, just not from OpenAI, incredible reverse engineering work by a few people on a forum thread)

And then I guess there's a smidge of "if you're chasing all these things simultaneously you might not grok it" on my end. You're far better off making a slick interaction for moving files between buckets and creating buckets, than promising you can reverse-engineer from scratch, all the right buckets, with all the right files in them.

Re: Dot by New Computer

#86

Post by k1ns »

All of the negative "how bleak of an existence" comments are completely missing the point (and make me happy for them that they obviously don't have time/task management issues). This sounds incredible for someone with time/task management issues, especially if they are an adult on their own with no one else keeping them accountable.

Re: Dot by New Computer

#87

Post by golergka »

kashunstva wrote: post #36

> Dot remembers Mei’s interest in singing and proactively sends her suggestions for music clubs at school. Imagine having so little agency and motivation within your own existence on this earth that you need an app to remind of what you once found life—affirming.

I don't have to imagine, I have ADHD and depression, and I can't wait to get this app.

Re: Dot by New Computer

#88

Post by pradn »

leodriesch wrote: post #9

Their privacy policy lists OpenAI as one of their partners for data processing, which indicates that this is happening not on your device, and data is also shared with third parties. For me this is the main counterargument against apps like these. I want to feel free to post any information into this without thinking about who may read or use it. Local is the only way to go for software like this in my opinion.

I don't want to be limited by the little CPU on my phone. Maybe one day it'll be powerful enough for all these tasks. But until then, I want a big H100 computing for me. And I want to pay for it! I don't want to be in a position where the service is trying to give me as little compute as possible. Putting me at the center, I want it to do whatever massive compute it needs to to make my life easier.

Re: Dot by New Computer

#89

Post by swyx »

refulgentis wrote: post #85
famouswaffles wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 is retrieval augmented generation. 2 is just fancy talk for what high perfoming LLMs do 3 has been done many times over 4 is achievable with Imagebind if we're going for an exotic solution. Otherwise GPT-4V with AudioToText and TTS will do just fine (Open AI have something similar set up) 5 is as simple as timed prompts sent by the company unbeknownst to the user. 6 is the probably the most bespoke thing here. I'm…

That's exactly what I'm saying - I've just worked on something like this since January. I throttled back from universal file manager and stuff, I think they're kinda hinting at it too through the "probabilistic computing" thing. Staying focused on RAG + as much local compute as possible, user perception of citations is through the roof compared to practically anything else. The problem I saw over and over again at Go…

> incredible reverse engineering work by a few people on a forum thread

which thread please? sounds like some fascinating stuff to learn here

Re: Dot by New Computer

#90

Post by swyx »

jamesmcintyre wrote: post #31

I immediately recognized this as either inspired from or actually from the same creators of the mercuryos concept https://www.mercuryos.com/ . Turns out it's the latter. I love the Mercury OS concept and think it's design both elegantly and sort of subversively packs a myriad of potentially breakthrough ideas. I have been stewing with ideas around the same vision for years. The idea of a new type of UI where the UI s…

for posterity, why did mercuryOS fail?
Post reply on HN