91–100 of 112 posts
Not just for this article, but from most ideas/articles around LLMs, I feel like they aren't "thinking with portals" enough. We have "portal gun" tech (or at least, that's what's being marketed), and we're using it as better doors.
>A calorie tracking app that’s a chat app grounded by nutrition databases. Just minimize the cognitive effort it takes me to log a meal. My brother in christ, how much cognitive effort does it take to log a meal??
Adds a huge overhead to cooking, adding friction to what is a good habit you wanna keep as easy to stick to as possible.
There's some sort of fundamental category mistake going on with thinking like this. Most of the items in this list fall prey to it, but it is maybe best exemplified by this one: > A writing app that lets you “request a critique” from a bunch of famous writers. What would Hemingway say about this blog post? What did he find confusing? What did he like? Any app that ever claimed to tell you what "Hemingway would say ab…
> A nano banana photo-editing app where I don’t have to write a prompt. Just give me hundreds of templates from trying out different haircuts to seeing what you and your partner’s kid would look like to making me look like The Rock. A photo editing super-app. Quite a few of these "ideas" make me think that the human behind it wants to maximize laziness. Glazing over what Hemingway kinda sorta would have thought about…
A good tool should do reduce the amount of work we have do manually. That's all this is.
On the topic of "24. A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM...", I would strongly caution against this: - short of AGI, what a child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in th…
>> child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child. Much better results than asking a real teacher at school, though.
swallowing gum is bad for you, or watermelon seeds, cracking knuckles causes arthritis, sitting too close to tv ruins your eyes, diamonds come from coal, newton's apple story, a million other things
There's some sort of fundamental category mistake going on with thinking like this. Most of the items in this list fall prey to it, but it is maybe best exemplified by this one: > A writing app that lets you “request a critique” from a bunch of famous writers. What would Hemingway say about this blog post? What did he find confusing? What did he like? Any app that ever claimed to tell you what "Hemingway would say ab…
So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said". ... There's something unsettling that so many people cannot seem to cut clearly through this illusion.
Modern culture, at all scales, is largely based upon such exercises. We rarely know exactly what something (whether a person, organization or entity) truly stands for, with messages often boiled down, contextualized, or re-interpreted through others or through simulations.
People go to theme parks and enjoy rides simulating the wild west and meet characters who resemble, but aren't, their favorite characters from TV (which themselves are a fabrication based upon other, real things). Many cultural (heck, also religious) experiences are an exercise in humans entering into a suspension of disbelief and thinking something is plausible when it has little relation to the original thing it symbolizes. Indeed, the comforting thing about AI may be that at least we can see that process taking place more clearly with it.
> A minimal voice assistant for my Apple Watch. I have lots of questions that are too complicated for Siri but not for ChatGPT. The responses should just be a few words long.
“CRITICAL: Your response will only be shown in an iOS push notification or on a watch screen, so answer concisely in
CRITICAL: The user can not respond so do not ask a question back. Answer the prompt in one shot and if necessary, declare assumptions about the users questions so you could answer it in one shot, while making it possible for the user user to repeat ask with more clarity if your assumptions were not right.”
It works well. The biggest annoyance is it takes about 5-20s to return a response, though I love that it’s nearly instantaneous to send my question (don’t need to wait for any apps to open etc)
Not just for this article, but from most ideas/articles around LLMs, I feel like they aren't "thinking with portals" enough. We have "portal gun" tech (or at least, that's what's being marketed), and we're using it as better doors.
(1) Gave me thoughts about a thing where it creates multiple versions of a photo and has humans pick the best one out of a line up.
If you pay people something between 0.01 and 2 cent per click people can play the game whenever photos become available.
The reward can scale depending on how close your choice is to the winner of that round so that clicking without looking becomes increasingly unrewarding.
Simultaneously it should group people by which version they prefer and attempt to name and describe their taste.
Team Vibrant, Team Noire, Team Picachu etc for the customer to pick from.
You can let the process run as long as you like (for more $)
To make it a truly killer app one can select sets of photos from a specific day/location and have them all done in the same style by having voters pick the image that fits the most poorly in the set for modification. If the set has a high ranking image all other images should also gradually approach that style to find a middle ground.
Then when a successful set is produced later photos can be adjusted to fit with it.
Turn the yearly neighborhood bbq into a meeting of elvish elders.
(2) could upload custom CSS to stylish and modify it when contrast bugs are found. No need to stop at dark/light theme, any color scheme should work.
(3) Click on a var or function name to change it.
(4)(21) Call it Major Weakness and have it talk to you like a drill instructor all day long though a dedicated PA. (6) General Gluttony.
(5) If it has a really good idea about the importance of publications it could not offer anything for weeks until a must-read comes along. (7) A comment section where various AI's battle out what part of the article needs improvement. (10) Just let it run indefinitely. Should be merged with (5) Have that propose research topics worthy of special attention. (12) and (26) can also be merged with (5) Give it security cameras too! Maybe an API for (11). Also merge (14) into this and have it suggest relevant formal courses on the side.
(9)(28) Extension yes, persona no.
(11) Sounds completely awesome, can adjust to the budget and be a tool to hire professionals for special effects and for all other things. Let the unfinished product be the search query.
Could even join the personal drill instructor at the hip and make personal training videos and nutritional journeys. Things like "How I failed to do 100 pull-ups per day" should make a hilarious movie. The plot writes it self.
(13)(16)(17) The platforms wanting to own your data and be in charge of suggestions is really holding things back. I've had wonderful youtube suggestions several times only for them to be polluted with mainstream garbage (as a punishment for watching two videos) at the expense of everything I actually wanted to watch. If I watch 5 game videos or 3 conspiracy vlogs doesn't mean I want to give up on my profession?!? wtf?
I had this thought that most are overdoing things. When semi successful you can just discontinue the front end. Just let the users figure it out. [say] Reddit doesn't need an app and it doesn't need a website. (23) Just let the user figure out the feed. A platform could sell their existing version as a separate product.
(15) Sounds wonderful but similar to (5) and (20) make it into one thing.
(18) Sounds awesome. (8) Rather than do something have the AI create a thing that does a thing. (27) is to similar to be a different thing.
(19) I like the idea to have the AI think long and hard about a response that is as short as possible. It can probably come up with hilarious things.
(24) Sounds great for exploring the earthly realm.
(25) Could do many variations of people search. Authors by context seems obviously good.
This post with quotes rather than numbers: https://pastebin.com/raw/D9zBEy72
On the topic of "24. A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM...", I would strongly caution against this: - short of AGI, what a child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in th…
>> child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child. Much better results than asking a real teacher at school, though.
The problem here is for a child to be thinking this system is reliable when it is not. For now, the lack of reliability is obvious as chatGPT hallucinates on a very regular basis. However, this will become much harder to notice if/when chatGPT will be almost reliable while saying wrong things with complete confidence. Should such models be able to say reliably when they don't know something, this would be a big step for this specific objection I had, but it still wouldn't solve the other problems I mentioned.