mattmaroon

What’s funny about it to me is that it now isn’t confusing because we’ve spent 20 years with it. It’s nonsense but we’ve adapted to it.

I know what not to do: accept pseudoscience.

All “A is linked to B” tells you, and science has shown this time and time again, is that enough academics believe A is linked to B to do a number of hokum studies and show you the ones that came up with any correlation at all while burying all the ones that didn’t.

The average American does not drive that much, in fact it’s an order of magnitude below that. They were making a joke or meaning weeks or something.

Tall, Grande, Venti should be the standard for everything.

You don’t if where you’re coming from has a charger. But for instance, she drives two hours away to another city and stays overnight and drives back in the morning and there isn’t a charger near her hotel there.

I drive two hours to a different city to see a hockey game, and there isn’t one by the arena, and I want to drive back two hours.

You’re charging somewhere and it’s rarely convenient in the Midwest.

Etc

Not at all. At highway speeds you can easily take a Tesla from 80 to 20 in 3 hrs. That’s 210 miles.

Yeah if I’m willing to regularly charged to 100 and drive it down to 10 I can get another hour.

Yeah but if the charger is 15 minutes out of your way, or it’s not got one open, or whatever. There’s real time other than charging in public frequently.

My live-in girlfriend has a Tesla that she has had for six years. We live in northeast Ohio, not a small population.

Each of us once a week have to drive far enough that we would public charge and the inconvenience is enough that we are getting a hybrid.

A 2 hr trip becoming a three hour trip only has to happen to you once a week for a few weeks before you realize the limitations.

“Linked to” is a keyword indicating pseudoscience. Everything is “linked to cancer”.

Yeah I’ve been commenting on here for 20 yrs just to promote some stuff later.

I think the change might be orders of magnitude more software being written rather than an order of magnitude fewer developers. There is a HUGE induced demand coming when software is so cheap to write.

I've never been a professional, but I've been coding for nearly 30 years as an amateur, and I've "written" more code in the last year than the previous 29, and it was all tooling for my very non-tech small business. It's cut HOURS out of my week, and it's all software I could not have afforded to pay developers for. But with Lovable, just describe it and iterate.

What IS going to die is software as a service. I've cancelled hundreds of dollars a month of subs and rolled my own better tooling.

They host the ads. They have some app and integrate Google’s ads in it, then click the ads with the boy network in their app.

The demand for fast, cheap, good enough models has always been borderline infinite, it’s the supply that’s going to take off.

It’s never told me that, but it does help me fix problems. For instance the other day I noticed that my state unemployment insurance rate had increased from 0.75% to 12.75%. I absolutely could have spent hours of my time scouring the website, trying to call and waiting on hold, talking around the issues with a poorly trained state agent.

Instead, I asked ChatGPT what happened. It did a dive and figured out that I was being assessed a penalty rate because I had switched to a new payroll provider that does not file wage reports in my one quarter (seasonal business) where I have no wages. Without a wage report, you are considered delinquent.

You have to love the government, it is the only place where you can be delinquent on a payment you do not owe. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report, navigated to the Support site requested a retroactive rewrite, which was granted and saved me many thousands of dollars.

Would I have done this myself eventually? Probably. But I work a lot in season. Something more important would have been neglected. It would have taken me an amount of hours that I would happily buy back for an entire year of ChatGPT business. It didn’t even hit my 5 hour usage limit to do it.

So maybe instead of asking it how it feels about you, ask it to do useful things. It’s my employee, not my girlfriend.

I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do.

And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years.

ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month

You gotta think long term. This is going to cause all those lumber companies to plant more forests and 40 years from now when they’re big enough boom, 3 new jobs servicing the autonomous tree harvesters.

Me too.

Right now you have a window. AI can do a huge chunk of the work you were doing last year, and outside of programming, nobody seems to know about it yet. I've cut 10 hours a week out of my schedule in the last several months just in time to have my first kid, at the ripe old age of 46.

They'll figure it out and we will be right back to the same pressure we had before, but for a short time at least, if your field is competitive, you have a huge edge.

Ah. Yeah. I can’t wait until the tooling for non-programming tasks catches up to the tooling for programming. I’m sure it will happen. Most of the software world started off aimed at developers (because they made it) and then found its way to us muggles.

Do you work in the space?

Oh I’m just using ChatGPT, I haven’t dives into getting anything to run locally yet. That’s on the off season project list.

I do where possible. I build MCP servers into custom tools. But a lot of it is stuff like filling out permit applications on government websites, or reading festival websites and applying, etc.

I will say one thing that frustrates me is the opaqueness of the billing model. I basically just have to pay a random amount. I guessed that it navigating the web is relatively pricey from watching my usage as it does stuff. And the whole thing is worth 10x what I pay for it anyway, it just would be nice if the pricing were somehow more transparent, even in hindsight. It can explain to me what is thinking as it does stuff, it could also explain the tokens.

Also, I have certainly gone down some unproductive rabbit holes figuring out what to do with it. Time spent on it is an investment, just like automating anything. You spend hours upfront to save them on an ongoing basis.

But, I think I’m on the black on it already after just a few months of heavy use. For instance I just tell it to book my dumpsters, bathrooms, sanitation crew, and security for X event. It goes and pulls event details, looks through my email to see who I get those from, and emails them relevant details, with no prompting.

Another good example: we launched a really fancy hot cocoa concept last fall that was a hit and I wanted to try to go to all of the local pumpkin patches in October and Christmas tree farms after Thanksgiving to serve when they have big crowds.

I asked it to contact all of the ones in my area and it sent out 70 emails and I booked several spots. It made me a nice database so I can see who followed up and who I need to reach out to again, etc. and it just gets those from my inbox.

Hours of my time saved with simple prompts. So while some things take awhile to pay off, some are instant.

Huge gaps. I expect the tooling to get better for non-programmers. Codex and Cowork are great, but you still feel like you’re trying to hammer the square peg through the circle hole often when using it for non-programming tasks.

The AI is good enough to do a lot of tasks but the tooling just isn’t caught up to it yet.

I’d say it’s freed up ten hours a week of my time. And that’ll only improve.

Yes. Bureaucracy for sure when I throw festivals. ChatGPT pulls permits for me. (I think that uses a lot of tokens because of the browser control?) Manages the admin side along with some tools I built in Lovable via mcp servers.

Marketing definitely. My food truck side is relatively high volume and it manages my kitchen and warehouse side, basically generating all of the instructions my employees follow, managing and updating my PoSes, creating signage assets for specials, etc.

Reels/posts production and managing ad spend.

Here’s a fun one. I switched payroll providers after several years and suddenly my unemployment insurance rate went from 0.8% to 12.75% which is borderline debilitating to me. I knew something was wrong but not what and I work a lot of hours and calling the state takes forever and is usually unhelpful.

ChatGPT figured out that it was a penalty rate and dug in for me. Turns out because I’m seasonal and have no payroll for one quarter of every year, Gusto did not file a quarterly wage report, so even though I owed nothing I was delinquent. Gotta love government, it’s the only place where you can be delinquent for $0.

ChatGPT filed the report and requested a retroactive re-rate, which they granted. I’m sure I would have figured this out eventually but it would have taken hours, or $5 in tokens.

There. I have the business plan with two seats and I use them both and blow through it pretty fast. I think it’s because much of what I have it do involves using a browser. For instance I have it pull various permits from cities and there’s no API for that.

All white collar work will be done by AI soon, there won’t be scaling down, just scaling up. I do food trucks and festivals and I’ve got AI doing so much of my non-meatspace work now that I’m buying $10-$20 a day in tokens. At that rate, hardware starts to look cheap, and I have less of a use case for it than most white collar workers.

I make my own all natural energy drink. I too don’t like coffee much, no matter how hard I’ve tried, but also those things have a lot of chemicals other than caffeine in them.

You can buy powdered caffeine derived from green tea. I do bottling including my own sodas so I have ready access and you might have to buy at least 1 lb, which is a lot of caffeine, but it’s worth it for your health.

I don’t drink more than 200mg in a day and usually not even that much so maybe I’m at a gram a week-ish. So a lb would last me for over 8 years.

Get a jewelers scale and you’re good to go

Things aren’t poorly thought out just because they’re a short internet comment. I could easily have delved into the background belief that’s deeply-rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Thinking humans aren’t special isn’t necessarily nihilism, it can be because you believe you’re only a tiny part of the vast universe, and that what we experience as “self” is just an illusion caused by limited processing power, and that since we are all part of the universe, not a separate thing from it, the universe itself has a level of consciousness that we don’t understand and might, for instance, want to develop an intelligent species that could develop artificial life for it for some purpose we don’t understand.

It is neither nihilist nor misanthropic, it’s just an internet comment that has no reason to get that deep and therefore you assumed it had no depth.

Feel better?

It was a Hacker News comment, not a doctoral thesis. People like you are why this site so desperately needs a block feature.