10 ms·

Speaking only personally of course, I'm completely over the chat idiom in almost every way. Where is all this future demand coming from? By the time Android lan

by g-mork 6mo ago

Speaking only personally of course, I'm completely over the chat idiom in almost every way. Where is all this future demand coming from? By the time Android lands a God mode ultimate voice assistant it's pretty much guaranteed I will be well beyond the point where I'd want to use it. The whole thing is starting to remind me of 3G video calling where the networks thought it'd change everything, and by the end of it with all the infrastructure in place, the average user has made something like 0.001 3G-native video calls over the lifetime of their usage. Would really love some path forward where the AI parts only poke out as single fields in traditional user interfaces and we can forget this whole episode

colechristensen 6mo ago
I don't understand this perspective. I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" "what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?" likewise chatting through directing it to build something or solve a problem, voice or typing will each have their place. And video calling did take off, plenty of people use facetime and almost everybody working in an office uses some form of video calls. Criticizing the early attempts at getting video calling working because they hadn't taken off yet (I remember them being advertised on "video phones" with 56k modems), of course someone was going to have the idea and implement before it was quite reasonable.
- neonstatic 6mo ago
  > I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" To help with understanding that perspective, I cannot imagine a scenario where I would ask a device connected to the internet to turn off the lights. I literally never wanted this. A physical switch is a 100% non negotiable for me. I feel the same way about non-mechanical car doors. Perhaps due to that outlook I was always puzzled about the entire idea of an "assistant". It's interesting for me to see, that there are people out there who actually want that "assistant".
  - wat10000 6mo ago
    You don't watch Iron Man and want a JARVIS? Current systems are pretty far away from that, but that's the overall draw.
    - neonstatic 6mo ago
      I don't watch superhero stuff. But even with a more classical example of Space Odyssey 2001 - a talking computer has never been something I found even remotely interesting. It took me months to give LLMs a serious try due to this.
      - wat10000 6mo ago
        I guess everybody's different. I personally like the idea of being able to, say, ask what events I have on my calendar for the day while I'm getting dressed, and be able to get a summary and then engage in followup conversation about it. Or have a little reminder that says, it's time to leave in a few minutes, would you like to turn on your car's climate control? It's not to replace my normal computer usage with a voice interface, but to add new capabilities.
  - Barbing 6mo ago
    The switch is a necessity. Ever end up cooking or something when the phone/doorbell rings and you want to pause the music? Have your hands full and wanted to open a door? Hear the weather and then the news as you brew coffee or put your shoes on (without interaction with a bright screen)? You should save some money and keep some privacy doing it your way :)
  - colechristensen 6mo ago
    Have you never... asked a person a question? to do something for you? to pass the salt? what time it was? Maybe you're a little strange but it cannot be that much of a stretch for you to consider using speech to ask for things. Not wanting to hide things behind Internet connected computers is fine, being unable to imagine wanting to use your voice to ask for things is a little silly.
mark_l_watson 6mo ago
I agree with you and the GP post, even though I am an LLM enthusiast. My primary interest is using small edge models to perform specific engineering tasks. In this pursuit I do like to use gemini-cli or Antigravity with Claude a few times a week as coding assistants, but I am using relatively few tokens to do this. I also waste a lot of time, but this is fun time: experimenting with open source coding agents with local models just to see what kinds of results I can get. This is mostly a waste of time, but I enjoy it. My other favorite use pattern: once or twice a week I like to use the iOS Gemini app in voice mode, and once a month also use video input. I really like this, but it is not life changing. Externalities matter: I never use frontier LLM-based AI without thinking of energy, data center, and environmental costs.

by g-mork 6mo ago

colechristensen 6mo ago

I don't understand this perspective. I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" "what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?" likewise chatting through directing it to build something or solve a problem, voice or typing will each have their place. And video calling did take off, plenty of people use facetime and almost everybody working in an office uses some form of video calls. Criticizing the early attempts at getting video calling working because they hadn't taken off yet (I remember them being advertised on "video phones" with 56k modems), of course someone was going to have the idea and implement before it was quite reasonable.

neonstatic 6mo ago
> I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" To help with understanding that perspective, I cannot imagine a scenario where I would ask a device connected to the internet to turn off the lights. I literally never wanted this. A physical switch is a 100% non negotiable for me. I feel the same way about non-mechanical car doors. Perhaps due to that outlook I was always puzzled about the entire idea of an "assistant". It's interesting for me to see, that there are people out there who actually want that "assistant".
- wat10000 6mo ago
  You don't watch Iron Man and want a JARVIS? Current systems are pretty far away from that, but that's the overall draw.
  - neonstatic 6mo ago
    I don't watch superhero stuff. But even with a more classical example of Space Odyssey 2001 - a talking computer has never been something I found even remotely interesting. It took me months to give LLMs a serious try due to this.
    - wat10000 6mo ago
      I guess everybody's different. I personally like the idea of being able to, say, ask what events I have on my calendar for the day while I'm getting dressed, and be able to get a summary and then engage in followup conversation about it. Or have a little reminder that says, it's time to leave in a few minutes, would you like to turn on your car's climate control? It's not to replace my normal computer usage with a voice interface, but to add new capabilities.
- Barbing 6mo ago
  The switch is a necessity. Ever end up cooking or something when the phone/doorbell rings and you want to pause the music? Have your hands full and wanted to open a door? Hear the weather and then the news as you brew coffee or put your shoes on (without interaction with a bright screen)? You should save some money and keep some privacy doing it your way :)
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  Have you never... asked a person a question? to do something for you? to pass the salt? what time it was? Maybe you're a little strange but it cannot be that much of a stretch for you to consider using speech to ask for things. Not wanting to hide things behind Internet connected computers is fine, being unable to imagine wanting to use your voice to ask for things is a little silly.

mark_l_watson 6mo ago

I agree with you and the GP post, even though I am an LLM enthusiast. My primary interest is using small edge models to perform specific engineering tasks. In this pursuit I do like to use gemini-cli or Antigravity with Claude a few times a week as coding assistants, but I am using relatively few tokens to do this. I also waste a lot of time, but this is fun time: experimenting with open source coding agents with local models just to see what kinds of results I can get. This is mostly a waste of time, but I enjoy it. My other favorite use pattern: once or twice a week I like to use the iOS Gemini app in voice mode, and once a month also use video input. I really like this, but it is not life changing. Externalities matter: I never use frontier LLM-based AI without thinking of energy, data center, and environmental costs.