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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

There is a second part that is equally bad, but with Zuck:

https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nkbqyk/...

This is what it has come to? This is artificial intelligence? Billions and billions of dollars spent to narrate a recipe? Something that can be written down on a piece of paper?

I have a copy of the classic "Joy Of Cooking" in the kitchen. It was a lot cheaper, works perfectly every time, and doesn't get ruined if (when) I spill foodstuffs on it.

The more you spill, the more the book starts to look delicious

BRB got a book I have to lick real quick.

i always wonder why they choose the stupidest shit for these demos. like, to whom do they think they're advertising this?

To their peers, i.e. their golf billionaire buddies from Fortune-500. They talk with each other and I strongly suspect propagate a whole set of alternative reality ideas among themselves. Like this obsession on the voice activated and controlled everything. Billionaire CEOs probably find it very convenient to pretend to multitask constantly and make voice recordings and commands while doing other CEO tasks or during endless meetings. After all their human secretary can later verify information without taking his time. Meanwhile almost no one from my peer group or relatives uses voice activated anything really, no voice mails, no voice controls, no voice assistants. And I never see people on the streets doing that too.

> Meanwhile almost no one from my peer group or relatives uses voice activated anything really, no voice mails, no voice controls, no voice assistants. And I never see people on the streets doing that too.

Could also be that however your peer group uses things, isn't the only way that thing gets used?

For example, voice messages seems more popular than texting around me right now, at least in Europe and Asia, where people even respond to my texts over Whatsapp and Telegram with voice messages instead. I constantly see people on the street listening and sending voice messages too, in all age ranges.

I don't think any of those people would need an AI assistant to recite cooking recipes though, but "voice as interface" seems to be getting more popular as far as I can tell.

Why you wouldn't just transcribe your message (which most keyboards and messengers support) instead of sending minutes worth of meandering audio full of "uhm" is beyond me. I use voice all the time (assistants, LLM, etc.) but voice messages can die in a fire.

> Why you wouldn't just transcribe your message

So, the obvious answer to me is that voice communications accurately include tone and inflection. But other than that, there are "edge cases" (I mean, they're more like "people") that make it more appealing, especially after Google made their keyboard transcription worse for the people who get the most use out if it (aforementioned "edge cases").

My dyslexic friend's experience with software transcriptions has changed recently. No longer can they say, "What time do I need to pick you up, question mark, I'm just leaving now, comma, so I might be a little late, period." and have it use the punctuation as specified. Now, it's LLM-powered and converts the speech without really letting the user choose the punctuation, except manually after it's been written out, which is difficult to impossible for both dyslexics and blind people.

(As a side note, if a person is an "edge case", it's actually that person's every-time case.)

I agree with you that voice messages can die in a fire. Send a text, or call. I do not want to listen to a voice message.

They don’t want to spend 30 min explaining domain knowledge required to understand a certain super specific case.

Instead they show tech’s quality on a basic highest common denominator use case and allow people to extrapolate to their cases.

Similarly car ads show people going from home to a store (or to mountains). You’re not asking there “but what if I want to go to a cinema with the car”. If it can go to a store, it can go to a cinema, or any other obscure place, as long as there is a similar road getting there.

But those are things cars make sense for. When would I stand in my kitchen with a bunch of random ingredients strewn about the counter wondering what to make with them and conclude that an LLM would have a good answer? And what am I supposed to extrapolate from that example? I guess they were showing off that the system had good vision capabilities? Okay, but generative AIs are notoriously unreliable, unlike cars. Even if the demo had worked, it would tell me nothing about whether it would help me solve some random problem I could think up.

A better analogy would be the first cars being advertised as being usable as ballast for airships. Irrelevant and non-representative of a car's actual usefulness.

In their world this is what they think people do

The sociopaths pushing this kinda crap don't live the same lives you or I do. They have people they pay to make decisions for them, or they pay people to do shit like buy their weekly groceries for them or whatever other stupid crap they're trying to sell as a usecase for these useless AI tools. That's why all these demos are stupid shit like "Buy me plane tickets for my trip", despite the fact that 99.9% of people need very specific criteria out of their plane tickets and it's more easily done with currently available tools anyways.

They literally think "What does a regular Joe need in their day-to-day?" and their out of touch answer is "I have all these ingredients but don't know what to cook" or whatever. It's obvious these people haven't spoken to anyone who isn't an ass-licking yesman in a looooong time.

Hey, that recipe is worth trillions of dollars of investment, the destruction of the natural environment and the displacement of huge numbers of talented and skilled people. Show some respect for our billionaire class.

People used exactly the same argument to negate a need for the internet and later for the mobile phones.

https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

God, that's actually painful to watch. I can't believe I lasted two minutes.

Mark's definitely mastered optimizing for peak cringe factor while at 1.95T valuation.

They just need an emotionless android without conscience, who does whatever is in the best interest of raking in money. They don't need technological excellence. Whether people at his company technologically succeed or fail, what matters is, that the company processes all the PII and feeds the algorithms. The rest is just for show.

I think such an emotionless android would have diligently prepared numerous backup scripts, sets of lenses, actors, demonstrations etc. to cover any failure contingency, since the cost of that is infinitesimal compared to even a slight change in their brand value.

they have one in the already in the CEO position

Not to put words in the OP's mouth, but I think that was the joke.

It's funny because he spent so much money on hair and clothing stylists, jewellery, BJJ coaching, surfing lessons , really made an effort to come across as "cool" and the end result is...you cannot fake who you are, and your actions are what define you and make up your character, he is prime example of that. He cannot escape who he is.

> He cannot escape who he is.

One of the best CEOs in the world with about 20 years of experience at age 40? And also founded the company?

He’s doing pretty good. And if you’re talking about “image” he is a millennial archetype.

I wouldn't say he's one of the best CEOs. He's been "successful" by - selling an unhealthy addictive product - burying research on its mental health impact on children - engaging in anticompetitive behavior

Oh yeah, add stealing the original idea for facebook from the Winklevoss twins. I'll take being a loser if that's what it takes.

It's not about the harm you do, it's about the billions you have. But you seem to have a moral compass, you wouldn't understand ;-)

What courage and integrity is being demonstrated here?

Yes he's rich and influential and blah blah blah blah blah and he's also AN ENORMOUS FUCKING DORK with the intellectual depth of a half-empty bottle of salad dressing. For all his money I'd rather be me than him.

I’m a Millennial and I’m no lizardman, thank you very much.

Eh, I wouldn't want to have a beer with him or leave my dog with him. He's doing well financially but that's about it.

Obligatory https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak

Good god...

I was going to say that’s two minutes I won’t get back (and I won’t) but, ya know, schadenfreude.

It's kind of like Peep Show, where the writers tried to engineer the most awkward social situations, only without the jokes.

Tangent: if you like cringey social awkwardness comedy (not my usual cup of tea, but in this case it's extraordinary, and hilarious), try "I Think You Should Leave".

"Brian's Hat" is the 1st one I saw and maybe the best: https://youtu.be/LO2k-BNySLI?si=qEX7STkSOeCVZtK-

Also "Hot Dog Car" https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo?si=jz5EKwjJZm1UMZau

Nathan for You is almost physically painful to watch, the cringe is so intense I can only take a few seconds at a time.

Canadians do it best. https://youtu.be/tXgfzxXUVsc?si=vBXu20TewUldSBJB

That he certainly is good at, but I loved his interview with Fabio, also that Monica Lewinsky one.

Nathan Fielder is a genius.

The Rehearsal is less in-the-moment cringe and more soul-soaking cringe. Amazing stuff.

Also a tangent, but Microsoft was the OG for corporate cringe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ

Everyone forgets about this cringe from Microsoft, but it is oddly endearing to me too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zww2ivWdLas

Developers developers developers developers!

One of the best mashups on youtube came from this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

Enjoy. :)

It goes back waaay further than that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLuC4yZk7us

Oh my god.

How strong does a company's reality distortion field have to be for people to think your friends are going to want to come over to play with a new version of Windows?

I mean, why not "Let's all have wine and cheese and do root canals on each other!"?

It was a different time.

I honestly was excited about Windows 95. Win98 was underwhelming, and WinME was a joke that I never bothered to install on my own machines. Win2K brought back some of the excitement, but not much.

Then Vista came out, and it was a total flop at first. Win7 fixed most of those mistakes, but the damage was done. Vista basically killed any chance Microsoft had at building excitement for an OS.

FWIW, I think the last macOS version that I was really looking forward to was High Sierra.

Yeah, younger folks don't remember that new operating systems used to be a thing of excitement -- what cool new features will we get? -- and not, like today, a thing of distress -- what did they break this time, and which new ways have they found to piss me off

I remember my dad driving us to the local Windows 95 pre-launch event by Microsoft. I was 10 and had learned the ridiculous and useless skills of DOS memory configuration and bootdisk juggling to get all of the games to run. Win95 was so cool! I remember spending hours on the multimedia catalog and demos on the CD-ROM and marvelling at the possibilities.

Here's one of my favorites, of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over connectivity hiccups. For some reason it evoked a lot more empathy from me...

https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=19m35s

I was on the Wave team! Our servers didn't have enough capacity, we launched too soon. I was managing the developer-facing server for API testing, and I had to slowly let developers in to avoid overwhelming it.

Neat, thanks for sharing this tidbit of history. Hey, what did the team think of the decision to build it on GWT at the time? (From the outside, seemed like an enabling approach but a bit like building an engine and airframe all at once).

Hm, I didn't work on the frontend but I don't particularly remember griping..GWT had been around for ~5 years at that point, so it wasn't super new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit

I always personally found it a bit odd, as I preferred straight JS myself, but large companies have to pick some sort of framework for websites, and Google already used Java a fair bit.

Wave was extremely cool and I wish it had stuck around. Hope it was as fun for you to work on as it was for us to use.

It was fun! Now we still see Wave-iness in other products: Google Docs uses the Operational Transforms (OT) algorithm for collab editing (or at least it did, last I knew), and non-Google products like Notion, Quip, Slack, Loop from Microsoft, all have some overlap.

We struggled with having too many audiences for Wave - were we targeting consumer or enterprise? email or docs replacement? Too much at once.

The APIs were so dang fun though.

There are such long gaps after each question too. Apparently the sci-fi future will be laggier than expected.

This will also not change much, since they want you to use their centralized services for data collection, not local or onsite processing. So you will always have roundtrips and shared resources. For IO this is pretty unacceptable, people get annoyed by millisecond delays.

robozuck was also having wifi problems

Big tech has spent $155bn on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/02/big-tech-...

Should have just hired a korean cook instead of spending billions of dollars to hire some AI dude to come up with an app to narrate a korean recipe.

Wow. That money would repay all public debt of my country (Czechia). Or rebuild a third of Ukraine.

Maybe it's a 5D chess move to generate investor pressure on them to not spend that much.

Nah, more like a 1D chess move. Investors will pay them to invest in AI, so invest in AI, make the stock go up, sell, and leave the dumb investors holding the bag.

2D chess if they're smart: start a new company that competes with the one they just sold to dumb investors. Jack Dorsey is particularly fond of this move.

They classify a lot of it as R&D and write it off taxes. Taxpayers foot the bill.

> They classify a lot of it as R&D and write it off taxes. Taxpayers foot the bill.

Taxpayers do not "foot the bill" for corporations reducing their tax obligations via "write-offs".

See: https://accountinginsights.org/what-does-write-it-off-mean-f...

"That's not a write off!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCP27_vquxQ

Obligatory -- "You don't even know what a write-off is. Do you?"

https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ

Something I like about that scene is Seinfeld (the actor) clearly struggles not to smile at Kramer's delivery of the punch line despite that he (the character) was supposed to be irate with Kramer.

Heh. Well, Kramer himself...was often less amused...

Thread/video: https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/7lvvg5/michael_...

Probably that's why it feels like half the actual episode takes were like that, because they couldn't keep from breaking!

If you're taking about the R&D provisions in the OBBBA, that only changes the schedule of the deduction (immediately vs over several years). R&D, like most business expenses were was always deductible. Whether it's prudent or not isn't a factor.

This is the best thing I’ve seen ever. It makes me so happy I can’t even tell you.

As bad as I thought that was going to be, it was worse. And I set the bar very low for anything involving Zuck. #MustWatch

This is like "The Office" (Original UK version with Ricky Gervais as David Brent) with $2T market cap company.

There is already Hooli!

If not for these epic failures, I won’t even know they had a demo. Guess neg marketing is still marketing, it worked.

OT, but thanks for linking to old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com. The new interface is an abomination.

Would be good to change the OP link to this - it's the same clip but plus a bit more.

I really missed seeing Zuck sweat.

Reminds me of Jin Yang and his 8 ways to cook an octopus, on silicon valley:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ltFB4WBdDg4

Funny how VR was the hyped thing when the show was filmed, and today the hype has been replaced wholesale by AI.

Also funny how Meta has been trying to capitalise on both things.

Every added drop of his flop sweat during this disaster just gives me that much more life. Amazing.

In fairness to Zuck, he spends most of his time hunting with his crossbow these days.

What brand of gear does he use?

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp."

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