These are helpful reminders, appreciate it. Right now I'm also just navigating through testing myself before sharing with our leadership team. Asking deeper questions during this process is of course helpful, I plan to dig into each problem they want to solve with AI and why.
I really was just curious about any interesting gotchas anyone else has run into. Historically, Microsoft is a balance between "this is great because it's already here, we just need to turn on a button to enable it" and the quality or reliability being not what we expected, to put it mildly. That and onboarding is a headache for external tools, but is often a tiny fraction of long-term maintenance so isn't necessarily the highest-weighted issue.
Fair enough, our users are a broad range of severely non-technical to technical. We have our IT team manage the admin portals for these kinds of things, so not sure there's a huge difference between IT managing the copilot admin vs chat admin.
How about the fact that anthropic and openai's product pages are the exact same thing, down to text bullet points. They're the same thing, only able to copy each other, only able to optimize to some vague mean.
It all just looks the same. I get that this isn't the technical details, but it just sends this message that everyone is copying each other all the time, this is the best way to organize a pricing page, etc.
Just a weird, eerie feeling.
I somewhat agree with this... but what is the long-term viability of vibe-coding? Of paying someone/something else for intelligence? Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? Is it all just going to be local models? I'm not as confident that long term, we will be happy that the knowledge of software building itself might be broadly lost. Happy to hear thoughts of those who are writing code daily.
Funny enough, it was what programming had turned into just before the onset of rapid AI adoption that drove me to find my identity and meaning outside of the hobby and work. It took me a long time! I'm only now feeling more confident about it and it's been years. Definitely worthwhile though.
As another poster mentioned, I also wanted to add that this attitude is why there is so much stress and pressure on kids these days to figure out everything in their lives by the time they're 22. It's pretty amazing to me that anyone can look at a PhD in Chemistry and say that was a wasted decade. Why was he not competitive? What skills were you looking for? In what way are you already biasing candidates based on your preconceived notions about what makes someone helpful, useful, intelligent, etc.
I know broad generalizations aren't too useful, maybe this specific person had real significant shortcomings compared to the other 22 year olds you interviewed, but I encourage you to consider why we are doing "all of this" anyway (is it money? productivity? prestige? big houses?) and why someone might prioritize going so far in a field to actually CONTRIBUTE something new to the field (as one does through a PhD). Maybe consider why someone might not slot perfectly into your idea of the perfect economic pawn, though nevertheless have chosen an absolutely fine way to spend ones life (or ten years of it).
Wait this is really funny, it still just does what it wants, no matter what:
You can have it not use bulleted points, I turned this on, thinking it would be more concise and not so... listy. However, it just uses the same format, without the bullets. I was confused why it was writing 5 word sentences, separated by line breaks. Then I realized it was just making lists, without the bullets.
We always had the technology to do things better, it's the money making part that has made things worse technologically speaking. In this same way, I don't see how AI will resolve the problem - our productivity was never the goal, and that won't change any time soon.
I thought this was a joke ie you need to be a billionaire to be able to use agents like this, but you are correct.
I think we need to stop listening to billionaires. The article is well thought out and well written, but his perspective is entirely biased by never having to think about money at all... all of this stuff is incredibly expensive.
It's bad I can't say that I did it with willpower alone but Brick helped immensely. Their product is great, not a subscription, and even though there are competitors or you could build something like this for your phone, they're good with customer service and I would recommend their product.
Also, Unhook for removing suggestions/comments/etc from Youtube, you can basically turn everything off until it becomes a search bar and your subscriptions.
Get a good website blocking browser extension.
Remove anything that resembles a "recommendation" or avoid it like the plague.
I would say it's slightly worse but they're both not great, as someone who was addicted to being fed something at all times, I was really avoiding every having to spend time with myself if that makes sense. That being said, it's mostly about intention. Are you excited to finally listen to that amazing album or audiobook on your walk after work? That's usually more healthy than when I would scroll on tiktok during my day to avoid feeling anything other than dopamine and avoid bad feelings. It's really about self awareness for me.
I've found the best route at that point is just... copying people who are really good. For my interest (3d modeling) if you want voice-over and directions, those are all pretty basic, but if you want to see how someone approaches a large, complex object, I will literally watch a timelapse of someone doing it and scrub the video in increments to see each modifier/action they took. It's slow but that's also how I built some intuition and muscle memory. That's just the way...
I'm sorry it came off that way, I really didn't intend it to be, it was actually a self call out because I actually never learned as a child to sit with my inner feelings. I attribute that to being more sensitive and probably more intelligent than my siblings and acting as a buffer for my parents and basically only ever wanting to make other people happy, I never developed an inner world like other kids do.
Also I noticed... yoga, travel, art, those are still external. Even meditation can be if you approach it from a standpoint of like... one that is about forming your ego around it rather than being present... not sure if this makes sense. Like you can approach anything from a negative or place of wanting to 'fix' yourself, which ruins the experience imo. For me I would ruin things that were supposed to be fun because I would tell myself I should do this because it's good for me.
That being said, there are really low days still when I will feel absolutely nothing, I will think to myself... if this psychological pain is so intense, why should I keep going? I don't have answers for that. I genuinely just have to make it through the day. I understand that with the pressures of a family and kids, it's not one of those things where you can easily tap out, medication makes sense for that. I was just trying to share how I feel because honestly for me there isn't anyone in my life who I can relate with on this deep of a level... of these feelings, and it's really alienating in itself.
For what it's worth, I have dealt with pretty severe depression for most of my adult life. I am only starting to have periods of coming out when I realized that most of depressed feelings come from a place of ego. I have an identity of who I am and what I like, and I seek things in the external world which might provide meaning for me. For me, it's because I always sought value from the things around me, rather than believing that I am already enough. Every single day, I have to beat down my instincts that tell me that I am worthless and remind myself that there is more beauty in the world and it's actually absurd that I am letting society tear away from me my natural instincts to want to live and enjoy life. You have to really sit with these feelings though... like really really get to know your voice vs the internalized societal voice. I have developed "tests" that help me discern which voice is which, but it has helped a bit. Also working out and taking care of your body is a bonus, and just taking pride in like... doing things to lead a peaceful life is underrated.
Hope you feel better.
Only for the most basic of requests. I have interacted with a fair share of AI front loaded customer service chat portals and they are often misleading, sending outright incorrect info (telling us that the dev team would work on it even when they weren't going to) and I almost always just want to talk to an agent. Yes, it's a good first layer to prevent people who haven't even bothered to read any FAQ or informational pages, but it's not doing real customer service work.
I tend to agree, most platitudes are less impactful simply because your mind inserts what it already knows/autocompletes the phrase meaning because it's something so commonly heard. I read it as something like... you have enough resources to lead a life that has prosperity relative to the limited faculties of a human organism. That seems less catchy, and if you're too literal in your phrasing in writing, then you get the opposite problem where the reader limits their thinking to just what is written. Do you come to a different conclusion?
I sort of relate. I suspect the misplaced confidence one can develop from early successes in one's career eventually manifests as a lot of beliefs needing to be unlearned later in life (especially when facing challenges requiring resilience). I think I am a better person for it (and that is the point).
Every time I see news like this, I just try to focus more on working on things I think are meaningful and contributing positively to the world... there is so much out of our control but what is in our control is how we use our minds and what we believe in.
The thing I find the most funny about all of these demos is they outsource tasks that are pretty meaningful ... choosing where to hike, learning more about the world around you, instead, you'll be told what to do and live in blissful ignorance. The challenge of living life is also the joy, at least to me. Plus I would never trust a company like openai with all of my personal information. This is definitely just them wanting greater and greater control and data from their users.
I mean yes, but if you have an incredibly impressive machine compared to SOTA 10 years ago just lying around, I'd have fun with that too. :)
Plus you can use it for more "practical" stuff like logo design or editing or even just note taking... I wanted to provide some examples of not just youtube machine.
You could consider getting into drawing/design. They compete incredibly well against the display-based tablets made by wacom, especially these days where you can also do 3d and animation in procreate.
In what way is this "ruining your life"? If things don't go as planned, I imagine the person would be in a good position to pivot to higher education/a different job/starting something new. I think this idea that ruining one's life == not following the exact k-12 -> college -> big corporation route is short sighted.
I just wanted to throw my 2 cents, I work in IT and in meat processing there is perhaps only one or two software products that does catch-weight processing well due to the time constraints and custom labeling. If you can do that well you stand to gain a lot in that industry. It doesn't look like you guys are focusing on specific industries, but I actually think you can provide an incredible value to real businesses by doing so.