Comment by remix2000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by remix2000 | Hacker News Reader

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You scrape sites, okay, but what's "ai" got to do with that (I assume ai means chat bots in this context?)

I'm genuinely curious, whatever you're doing sounds cool, but more details beyond the buzzword pitch you'd tell your manager would be welcome on a hard technical site like hn?

(ftr, I'm skeptical of all applications of machine learning, but I keep experimenting with all the various kinds of it, generally with no good result; last real-world useful [to any extent] ml model I tried was BASnet, but whatever you tinkered out sounds cool and if it actually scrapes and filters clothes the way you describe, that'd be quite cool [perhaps even product worthy…?], cuz there are way too many clothes online to look at all of them manually and then esp. on fast fashion sites, there are oftentimes reviews you want to be wary for that indicate low quality products… anyway, that just sounds impossible to automate in my experience, but feel free to prove otherwise)

What "ai" got to do with that would be that he didn't write a scraper and a clothing style ("vibe") categorizer to build a database to process entries in to pick a shop. They just prompted the "ai" (I really don't know why you're putting that in quotes), and it in turn did that for them.

Was it a technically impressive effort from the prompter? No. Are the tools created in the session somehow a massive technical achievement? No. But was it a very useful result? Yes. It took the kind of task that would likely never get done otherwise, and turned it into the kind of thing that got done on a whim.

Doesn't mean that your laptop needs "AI buttons" though.

Ah so what they meant was like a 'vibe coded' a scraper? I thought they meant something like turning descriptions/reviews/photos of clothes into embeddings, as in like sentiment classification but way beyond that? Because the latter would be somewhat cool if it's actually achievable (I doubt it is tho…)

(I mean honestly the project idea[?] they posted sounds like daydreaming some science fiction scenarios, otherwise with all the hype and investment around chat bots, this way of shopping would definitely be mainstream already. If it weren't daydreams, that is. But if my grandma had wheels, she would've been a bicycle, no…?)

You could turn clothing descriptions into embeddings and have a fashion vector database, but doing that would mostly just net you the ability to find adjacent clothings, rather than the ability to navigate available clothing or clothing fitting certain requirements.

What was done is more like using the LLM as a personal assistant that doing long manual labor to find what you might be looking for.

This way of shopping is already a thing. "Hype and investment" goes into how the companies can monetize AI harder (ads! integrated LLM shopping! business development! premium pro max enterprise data policies!), it doesn't really focus much on how the individual can save time and money through non-flashy tasks.

> You could turn clothing descriptions into embeddings and have a fashion vector database

Well, that assumes descriptions are extremely accurate down to the last seam, which is not true. You'd be better off considering reviews and photos, esp. user provided photos, you also need to take into account the model/s in the photos are not necessarily shaped the same as you, so you need to somehow counter that bias in training. This is simply not a task achievable with current ml techniques, however again, feel free to prove otherwise.

(and ftr, I'm of course making a basic assumption that we're past the topic of markov chain/'llm' based chat bots at this point? Those are completely irrelevant to the goal of categorizing clothes based on some characteristics [i.e. the so-called 'vibes'])

good luck scrapping very specific information in a bunch of dynamic websites before AI.

Okay but then 'AI' is just a noise generator when it comes to very specific information… I mean just try asking any chat bot to search for something like specific photography gear for some specific scenario and in my experience it's just as good as simply picking some random stuff, except the chat bot will also gaslight you into thinking you made the right choices, so you don't question them… :/

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