michaelbuckbee

I like your analysis, but wonder about this line:

>> The only viable business model for a web browser is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default.

Mostly, it's just that giving away browsers for free as a source of garnering search traffic distorts the market.

I'd mentioned this on HN last month, but I took a picture of a grocery list and then pasted it into ChatGPT to have it written out and it worked flawlessly...until I discovered that I'd messed up the picture when I took it at an angle and had accidentally cut off the first character or two of the bottom half of the list.

ChatGPT just inferred that I wanted the actual full names of the items (aka "flour" instead of "our").

Depending on how you feel about it, this is either an absolute failure of OCR or wildly useful and much better.

These games were great. They really pushed the style and creativity of first-person shooters forward with their level and mission design.

I have kids, there's no need for simulation. We have Roblox.

Which has been a surprisingly useful [1]real-world/low-stakes financial literacy course for them.

- They have been scammed.

- They have blown money on stupid useless stuff and cried with regret.

- They've applied for jobs (seriously, there was an application process and interview).

- They've made hundreds if not thousands of decisions balancing entertainment, commerce, utility, and budgeting.

It's all of the true feel-it-in-your-bones financial literacy that the article advocates for being delivered to them in the guise of blocky figures and them playing with friends.

1 - You buy Robux (the in-game currency) with real money, and for years, it's been the number one thing they've asked for as a gift.

Trying to wrap my head around this - are you saying that those models are trained around the concept of fingers (some kind of physical manipulators with set dimensions)?

fwiw - you can do this right now with Grok 2.

In the game Civilization, there are different ways to achieve victory, one of which is a Cultural Victory.

A lot of the foreign aid the US does is kind of like this, where we're attempting to shift other countries to our way of life through a mix of direct aid, loans, news, and other methods.

There's a real long term ROI on these things where it's inarguably to the US' benefit that other countries want to speak English, use USD, operate businesses similarly to how we do, etc.

I like how much the EV interfaces gamify using the regenerative braking to encourage its use: regen indicators, miles per kw per trip, etc.

I took a picture of a grocery list and then pasted it into ChatGPT to have it written out and it worked flawlessly...until I discovered that I'd messed up the picture when I took it at an angle and had accidentally cut off the first character or two of the bottom half of the list.

ChatGPT just inferred that I wanted the actual full names of the items (aka "flour" instead of "our").

Depending on how you feel about it, this is either an absolute failure of OCR or wildly useful and much better.

True...but so is Google, right? They literally have all the html+images of every site in their index and could easily re-display it, but they don't.

What is the https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/attributions endpoint doing (or responsible for when not crushing websites).

One interesting prediction category in the Venn diagram overlaps of Rodney's predictions that is missing is drone deliveries.

Where I live (in suburbia Virginia), we now can get items from the local WalMart grocery via DroneUp, which kind of blows mind.

You're right and wrong.

While they're very expensive to me in my everyday life, they were originally 10x cheaper than the alternative: getting custom photography done for ads, websites, brochures, etc.

This is highly dependent on what particular professional niche you're in.

Hollywood actors are now routinely cast (in part) based on how many social media followers they have, leading to a lot of weirdness around their agents and agencies buying followers, accusing other competing actors of buying followers, etc.

A bit closer to the HN crowd, there is definitely a correlation between speaking at conferences and having an "audience" and being a well-known figure online.

Similarly, the "build-in-public" indie folks are active on social trying to break the build it and they will come cycle.

There are ways to participate and filter through the noise that are positive, but certainly a lot of negative as well.

What was the AI search tool?

I've used the Vimium chromium extension for years and it has a keypress to activate the search links and you can also disable it per domain.

I remember an episode of Dirty Jobs where there was an old candy plant or something that bees had gotten into, and they made blue honey from the syrup that was left over in the plant.

Rare, but possibly the bees were doing a swindle.

Hosting service that has a lot of interesting distributed features.

Well, doing experimental history like this at least establishes the bounds. There are limits to how hot you can make an oven given the different fuel sources.

In the original paper they made replica ovens and measured how hot they got:

"The parameters on which the trials were based were drawn from the results of a long-standing experimental activity previously conducted13,14. Solid doughs made from stone-ground organic flour mixed with other ingredients were baked in replicas of HTs. These were placed in dome-shaped ovens, similar to those found in the settlements where these types of vessels were discovered, at an initial temperature of 420 °C for about two hours. In the former case, the resulting products resembled large bread loaves, while in the latter case, the presence of lipid ingredients made the products softer and more flavorsome, akin to a sort of ‘focaccia’ type bread (Fig. 3a) (SI Appendix, Fig. S1)."

As categories:

- Language translation: is, in general, much better with the ML models than prior automated attempts.

- Internal search tools (GPT + all your internal docs, private)

- Voice-to-text transcription in lots of medical and medical adjacent fields. HN tends to be skeptical of this ("It's going to hallucinate diagnoses!"), but it has a lower error rate than traditional speech rec and human transcription. I met someone who built their own no-code speech to text for their partner's veterinary practice and saved them an hour a day of notetaking.

There's a bunch of businesses in all these areas.

Right now you can get an Amazon Kindle Fire 10 HD for $75 - it has a screen ~3x the size of the CarThing. Spotify works out of the box on it. Same with Web Apps. You can put it in Developer Always On mode in about 10 seconds via the menus and it works great as a dashboard.

I heard someone describe it as "The System of Theseus" that it's not an object but a set of things that lead to usefulness.

I don't work at Google, but I do something similar with my code: write comments, generate the code, and then have the AI tooling create test cases.

AI coding assistants are generally really good at ramping up a base level of tests which you can then direct to add more specific scenario's to.

There was a question raised but not really answered about "what do these extensions what with all this browsing data?" - while it may be that they're used for direct ad targeting (like real time ad buying against your IP address) it's more likely that they're selling "click stream" data.

In its most innocuous form, this is stuff like SimilarWeb (which is like a more advanced Google Trends), but in the B2B world, it's also custom enterprise reports that are like "how many people that use our bank at xyz also use any other bank at this array of domains and which are most common?"

It's in there but buried, I think it's really hard to overstate that Gen AI is Meta (and Amazon's and Apple's) opportunity to wrest search away from Google.

Google search results (and ads) are location and user-specific - the Youtuber is in the UK and looks like he got UK-specific ads.

Facebook lost this wave of mobile smart devices (anyone remember the Facebook phone?)

This $10B bet is that they're the leader of the next wave where smart glasses replace smartphones.

That's interesting, but it probably wouldn't work for our use case as we'd need to ship that binary utility to the platforms (unless I'm missing something).

It's a little YAGNI - I think the biggest driver of Redis in community was for exactly what you described aysnc jobs and the tool most folks reached for was Sidekiq.

The 2024 Rails community survey just came out and Redis is still listed as the top datastore that people use in their apps.

FWIW - we found that while many folks are _using_ Redis in their apps, they're just using it for things like Sidekiq and not actually taking advantage of it for holding things like real time leaderboards, vector db functions, etc. so it's a little fuzzy the actual usage.