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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it come up with different options.

Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not.

Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on.

Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local laborer for that advice. Or at a minimum spent much more time googling for the info.

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So in the coming few years on the question whether or not to change your tires, a suggestions for shops in your area will come with a recommendation to change them. Do you think you would trust the outcome?

I am hoping that there will always be premium paid options for LLMs, and thus the onus would be on the user whether or not they want biased answers.

These will likely be cell-phone-plan level expensive, but the value prop would still be excellent.

Why do you think that's not a problem today when you ask a car mechanic?

My mechanic takes a video of a tire tread depth gauge being inserted into each wheel and reports the values, when doing the initial inspection and tests before every oil change.

It's something that can be empirically measured instead of visually guessed at by a human or magic eight-ball. Using a tool that costs only a few dollars, no less, like the pressure gauge you should already keep in your glovebox.

God forbid people attempt to facilitate legitimate commerce!

> Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not.

You can use a penny and your eyeballs to assess this, and all it costs is $0.01

I find it easily hallucinates this stuff. It’s understanding of a picture is decidedly worse then its understanding of words. Be careful here about asking if it needs a tire change it is likely giving you an answer that only looks real.

It's also something so trivial to determine yourself.

It blows my mind the degree that people are offloading any critical thinking to AI

There's a reason that people have to be told to not just believe everything they read on the Internet. And there's a reason some people still do that anyway.

I agree with you, my post was about not using AI to check tread depth and relying on a penny and your own eyesight instead, illustrated here: https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-che...

You don't even need the penny most of the time, given most car tires have tread wear bars in the tread gaps you can just look at now.

For the tire you can also use a penny. If you stick the penny in the tread with Liconln’s head down and his hair isn’t covered, then you need new tires. No AI. ;)

You don't even need a penny, or have to remember where on the penny you're supposed to be looking... There are wear bars in the tread in every single tire. If the tire tread is flush with them, the tires are shot. Also there is a date code on the side, and if your tires are getting near 10 years old, it's probably a good time to replace them.

Now I think this conversation will happen in my lifetime:

Me: "Looks like your tire is a little low."

Youth: "How can you tell, where's your phone?"

Once they have you hooked they’ll start jacking up the prices.

It's a race to the bottom for pricing. They can't do shit. Even if the American companies colluded to stop competing and raise prices, Chinese providers will undermine that.

There is no moat. Most of these AI APIs and products are interchangeable.

OK, so they won't raise prices, they'll simply EOL their too expensive to maintain services and users won't feel the impact on their wallets, they'll just lose their tool and historical data and what ever else of theirs was actually the property of the company.

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