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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..."

I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.

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> I run a not-for-profit pinball museum

Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.

For sure, but I think the deeper problems are how much the industry changed over the decades and the extent to which pinball repair content comes from amateurs opining on forums.

Pool technology has been more stable, and there are more people out there writing well-informed content for LLMs to extract and present as their own.

Two years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from ChatGPT to fix your outdoor plumbing, people here would have been frothing at the mouth for merely suggesting it. Four years ago it wasn't even on the radar of future possibilities.

The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

Maybe? It's a plausible theory. But these operations are all wildly unsustainable financially at the moment, and it's not clear where they'll get future data from, having destroyed a lot of the incentives that generated their current source content.

Bubbles are not a great time to form intuitions. WebVan [1] and Kozmo [2] also seemed to herald a new age. Decades later, brick-and-mortar grocery stores and convenience stores are still doing fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com

They already have all the data, all the money and all the chips. It’s actually the best it’ll ever be, as newer models will have to start paying off all that capex, newer models will be trained mostly on slop, and the SEO and influence op leeches will have begun their arms race to insert their products and values into the training data. We’ve seen this pattern before. AirBnB, Uber, social media, streaming video, et cetera didn’t get better once the VC money ran out and they needed to start turning a profit, they got much much worse.

  > The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

Someone in 2004:

  A few years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky button to fix your outdoor plumbing. 

  The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

We are in the golden age of AI. Things are going to get worse at some point. It happened to google, it will happen to AI.

> the golden age of AI

a.k.a. the third? fourth? AI summer

I would still call you nuts for trusting ChatGPT with learning any construction or plumbing tasks. Atleast PVC is dead simple though since you basically just glue it together.

It's still insane to do that today. Using any LLM to get info for things is a terrible idea, because they will slip inaccurate info into the mix and you have no way of knowing where it is.

The horoscope reference is resonating for me.

I know very little about pinball machines, out of curiosity, do some come with any amount of schematics or diagrams?

Not OP, but this channel does a lot of walkthroughs of popular machines and explains how those systems work in-game:

https://youtube.com/@papapinball

I also strongly recommend the Technology Connections series on how electromechanical pinball works:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFV...

I would love to put them on a kiosk in the museum.

I have schematics as early as 1937, but the odds that the manuals stayed with the machine are pretty low. (Usually these machines were owned by somebody who had a bunch, and I suspect the manuals tended to get collected centrally.) You can generally buy manuals on eBay, and some are being reprinted by people who own the original IP.

The internet has a lot of scans of wildly varying quality. The AI industry's hunger for data means there has been a lot of progress in OCR and data extraction, so I have notions of taking something like PaddleOCR and trying to turn the scans into a cohesive reference site that will work well on phones, etc. But I'm not sure when I will get to it.

If people out there are interested in working on a project like that, let me know. Email me at william@theflip.museum.

By chance is it the one in Asheville, NC?

That's a good one! But no, we're in Chicago: https://www.theflip.museum/

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