Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

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> No one is shopping for clothes using AI

Tangental rebuttal, but I shop for food using AI every day. Grab app (Asia's equivalent of Uber Eats/DoorDash) has an option "Translate using AI". It (attempts to) translate dishes and ingredients. The app gives a prominent warning (in corporate speak): "these AI translations can be horrendously bad" - and some translations are indeed way off (often hilariously!) but although scrappy, this AI feature is incredibly useful.

Before this feature, I'd have to laboriously screenshot (since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS) then open the screenshot in Google Translate. This only gets you one screen's worth of translations making browsing too arduous.

A shitty AI feature that actually solves a problem is great, whereas a polished AI feature that doesn't is "gross" :)

That's not really "shopping using AI" in any meaningful sense. Or at least it's not in the same spirit as what's being discussed.

Well the other day I used my computer to do a sum, I didn't even know the result, it just gave it to me! Isn't that AGI/ASI? /s

At the risk of going slightly tangential here...

> since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS

This is all you need to know about mobile to understand we're in a complete duopoly that desperately needs a modern "ma bell" style breakup.

The fuckers who make these devices have zero interest in allowing you to do anything other than spend money with them, of which they will take their cut.

The whole thing feels optimized for trapping users, not enabling them.

To be fair to the fuckers who make these devices, that anti-feature is a choice made by the fuckers who run the delivery apps. Whether text is selectable within an app is up to the app maker.

Have you tried learning the local language?

No

There isn’t a local language - a quick scan of Grab in Kuala Lumpur shows menus in Mandarin, Bahasa Malaysia, Tamil, English.. Items are entered in a language that suits the food vendor, not necessarily “the local language”. It’s obviously nice if you don’t need translation, but learning a language in five minutes casually scrolling a menu is a tall order, and most locals don't speak 4 languages so they benefit massively from translation just as foreigners do.

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