1. Look in fridge before work 2. Add any missing items to shopping list 3. Reference said list on the way home from work

1. When you finish the milk, voice record "buy milk" on the phone.

2. At supermarket, listen to voice recordings.

I'm actually working on a pet project to transcribe my 20 years of voice recordings and organise them, then sync them between the phone and desktop. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll know that I needed milk in October 2008.

I mean, there are plenty of voice assistants these days. We use our Alexa for this but both Siri and Gemini could easily do it. Whenever we run low on something, "Alexa, add milk to our shopping list" and then can look at application at grocery store.

And what happens when its your kid who finishes the milk and doesn't mention it to you?

Or you didn't finish the milk, but didn't realize it had gone bad until after you got home with ingredients for a meal depending on milk.

Have a shared shopping list with the family. Teach your kid to put the milk on the list after they finish it. Be at least somewhat aware of how old your food is. Problem solved. Somehow we managed this model for a century.

Somehow we also managed to get by before we had pretty much any kind of technology. Somehow we managed without trains, somehow we managed without telecommunications, somehow we managed without refrigeration, somehow we managed without websites and forums.

Maybe we could do better. Maybe we can automate this as well.

Yup, end game is becoming a Guild Navigator. Obese, immobile, suspended in a tank full of dopamine. Why beat around the bush with all this doing stuff and using our limbs or god forbid thinking? Straight to the neurotransmitters, pure efficiency.

I take it you don't bother writing things down, wouldn't want to have the paper take the place of your own memory turning your brain to mush right?

And obviously you just walk anywhere and everywhere. Wouldn't want your legs to grow feeble and useless. Even riding a bicycle is reducing how much exercise you'd get otherwise, it's simply a tool for the weak.

Well, then, of your cows can only be milked on the 'morn you'll have to do with milking one of the goats.

I think the point is these devices sell some kind of convenience. Anyone who grew up of a certain time is seduced with this idea of our world being perfectly in tune with our needs, like the Jetsons.

Now we have generations of people who grew up with surveillance capitalism and broken promises I wonder what the next big wave will be

I instead use the technology of "whiteboard on fridge, where I write what I want or what is running out." That way it works when I didn't even plan to shop, because I vaguely remember what's on the whiteboard on the fridge.

If human intelligence is so boring and non-special, how exactly did LLMs get this smart? Is it not from a) being developed by humans and b) being fed a very large portion of all human-generated text?

Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.

LLMs learn from patterns in human-provided data (and soon each other and directly from nature). Humans learn(ed) from patterns in nature-provided data, and eventually each other (and, increasingly, LLMs).

There are many here who hate humans I think.

Prob because their life sucks.

"Boring": that's a straw man, it was never in my comment. I did say that people should stop grumbling and use the tool for good things. I'm not quite sure what was your point, but it sounded like you disagreed (one doesn't deploy the straw-man weapon otherwise), and this "Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing" sounds like an expression of grief, which admittedly is a very reasonable feeling for a number of reasons. What confuses me is that creating an intellect at the human level or above is indeed a great human achievement, but it's not a good thing because...? Maybe an emulation of the thing is not as good as the thing, was that your meaning?

Here, let me add my own little straw man: "if God didn't make us, how exactly did humans get so smart? Is not from a) being created in His image and b) being given His love? Without God, we would be mud from the ground (and a rib!)." If you agree with this statement, then, understandably, everything we have done since the Enlightenment has been to secure our place in hell, and LLMs are a particularly impertinent such device, but compared to a true human mind like a figurine of clay to a true person.

But, if of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not, and Man keeps measuring the thing and the thing indeed seems very smart, then Man should stop moping and deal with the consequences of their actions: either ban the thing or use it for their own benefit.

No idea what you're on about. It is provable that humans developed LLMs, there is no proof that God created humans. It's possible that a human creation will someday be more capable and intelligent than humans on all fronts, but it still stands that without the foundation of human intellect, there would be no LLMs. So I don't understand people who act like "AI" is a separate species that came to exist independently and proves human inferiority, that humans need to accept that they're not special, and that we should rush to submit to our new AI overlords. If anything, the existence and capabilities of AI proves that human intellect is still impressive and versatile, because it is a direct reflection of human knowledge.

>> proves human inferiority, that humans need to accept that they're not special, and that we should rush to submit to our new AI overlords

That's a lot of axes you're grinding simultaneously my friend

I have seen lots of comments to that effect on HN. "How do you know whether your brain is not just a next token predictor too?"

"Easing the pain" is the foundation of many of today's problems. It's gotten too easy to avoid discomfort and effort. Also, if we are talking about disabilities, maybe we should start respecting different forms of communication instead of enabling people to "write" in a way that is not authentic to them at all, just so they can seem "normal".

So your solution is, "we don't need technology, we can just change how everyone in the world thinks and behaves instead"

Actually, yes. Even though you tried to make it sound ridiculous. I want to move towards a world where the worth of a person (and their thoughts, feelings, etc.) is not measured by an exclusive standard of "intelligence", especially if that standard is created/enforced by mega-corporations.

I wouldn't have a problem with working off the fruits of other people's labor because most of us are essentially doing that everyday anyway, the issue is that big tech companies (want to) reap all the benefit and create profit from something that should be accessible to everyone. Everything is getting privatized -- housing, water, electricity, and now, thinking and knowledge. We are heading towards a world where you have to pay even more excessive fees just for existing and for completing any basic task.

It's the age old privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

People lose their jobs, the environment is destroyed, our bills skyrocket and all of the gains go to the people who own all the shit...

I honestly cannot believe some people still believe that we'll ever get to a society where nobody has to work and we can live our lives happily ever after. Maybe too many Disney stories?

For the life of me, I can't understand why your comment is being downvoted or flagged or whatever makes it go gray on HN.

I'm guessing it's people knee-jerking that you're being political?

I can't understand the people who don't see it.

The data centers strain the power grids then electricity costs go up for everyone else. This is de facto a regressive tax because everyone needs electricity and the poor pay proportionately more of their income for the increased cost.

Live in San Francisco? Probably not now unless you're rich because of the skyrocketing cost of living due to Tech and AI money. Another de facto regressive tax, driving away other people.

Environmental damage? The poor are the most impacted and the least able to absorb the costs. Do they have the property or renter's insurance to protect them from these disasters? Another de facto regressive tax.

Need a new phone? Or a computer? Same problem.

Want to dabble in AI? You're not going to get too far on $20/month. It's mostly a wealthy person's game.

Or there are the statistics that the vast majority of successful founders from up upper middle class families or wealthier.

Wealth centralization is what our economic system does. The purpose of a system is what it does. If it wasn't, the system would have been changed.

People are like sheep. Plus those who work are preoccupied and are too tired to react to these changes.

> "a worker" is a very very non deterministic abstraction, outside from the most basic tasks

Sure but we (usually) don't fool ourselves into believing otherwise. The problem with AI is that it suggests near-perfect intelligence with reproducible results. So many people are not acknowledging the fundamental limitations of LLMs, whereas we all have an intuition for the limitations of humans.

In addition to the reliability/security aspect, there's the claim to expertise and unwarranted confidence. We also don't (usually) fool ourselves into believing that the manager has gained the skills and expertise of the worker, simply because they gave abstract orders and a good result was achieved.

In other words, "I can code because I prompt an LLM" is like "I can do metalworking because I sign the paychecks of a blacksmith."

Well said!

Some people cannot be convinced of this, but some can, as long as you don't use technical language to describe the issue. Essentially, instead of saying "we need to prevent technical debt and have a maintainable software architecture" one needs to say stuff like "software quality enables a faster time-to-market for new features and less customer churn". i.e. put it in business-y terms.

Yes, but then it's really important to demonstrate that this is true. If they invest in what you propose, time to market for new features needs to actually become faster, or customer churn needs to actually decrease. It's not enough to put the proposal in business-y terms, it has to actually effect the claimed improvements to the business.

Of course customers do not care about code quality in and of itself. Just like they don't inherently care about the type of seam used for a garment. But they do care if their clothes fall apart after two washes. People care if software is buggy or slow or becomes harder to use or more expensive over time. And the way we know how to mitigate that is by ensuring code quality (it's definitely not the only factor, but an important one).

Well, almost all scientific domains have developed a form of structured and formal language, because natural language is too ambiguous. There's "code" everywhere, not just in programming.

This is like the first rule of working with clients -- what the client says they want is often not what they truly want.

Imagine what human researchers could have done with 10 millions... Maybe it wouldn't have been as fast, but I'm sure it would have created more usable knowledge because the work done by humans is usually more digestible to other humans.