This is what it has come to? This is artificial intelligence? Billions and billions of dollars spent to narrate a recipe? Something that can be written down on a piece of paper?
I have a copy of the classic "Joy Of Cooking" in the kitchen. It was a lot cheaper, works perfectly every time, and doesn't get ruined if (when) I spill foodstuffs on it.
To their peers, i.e. their golf billionaire buddies from Fortune-500. They talk with each other and I strongly suspect propagate a whole set of alternative reality ideas among themselves. Like this obsession on the voice activated and controlled everything. Billionaire CEOs probably find it very convenient to pretend to multitask constantly and make voice recordings and commands while doing other CEO tasks or during endless meetings. After all their human secretary can later verify information without taking his time. Meanwhile almost no one from my peer group or relatives uses voice activated anything really, no voice mails, no voice controls, no voice assistants. And I never see people on the streets doing that too.
> Meanwhile almost no one from my peer group or relatives uses voice activated anything really, no voice mails, no voice controls, no voice assistants. And I never see people on the streets doing that too.
Could also be that however your peer group uses things, isn't the only way that thing gets used?
For example, voice messages seems more popular than texting around me right now, at least in Europe and Asia, where people even respond to my texts over Whatsapp and Telegram with voice messages instead. I constantly see people on the street listening and sending voice messages too, in all age ranges.
I don't think any of those people would need an AI assistant to recite cooking recipes though, but "voice as interface" seems to be getting more popular as far as I can tell.
Why you wouldn't just transcribe your message (which most keyboards and messengers support) instead of sending minutes worth of meandering audio full of "uhm" is beyond me. I use voice all the time (assistants, LLM, etc.) but voice messages can die in a fire.
So, the obvious answer to me is that voice communications accurately include tone and inflection. But other than that, there are "edge cases" (I mean, they're more like "people") that make it more appealing, especially after Google made their keyboard transcription worse for the people who get the most use out if it (aforementioned "edge cases").
My dyslexic friend's experience with software transcriptions has changed recently. No longer can they say, "What time do I need to pick you up, question mark, I'm just leaving now, comma, so I might be a little late, period." and have it use the punctuation as specified. Now, it's LLM-powered and converts the speech without really letting the user choose the punctuation, except manually after it's been written out, which is difficult to impossible for both dyslexics and blind people.
(As a side note, if a person is an "edge case", it's actually that person's every-time case.)
They don’t want to spend 30 min explaining domain knowledge required to understand a certain super specific case.
Instead they show tech’s quality on a basic highest common denominator use case and allow people to extrapolate to their cases.
Similarly car ads show people going from home to a store (or to mountains). You’re not asking there “but what if I want to go to a cinema with the car”. If it can go to a store, it can go to a cinema, or any other obscure place, as long as there is a similar road getting there.
But those are things cars make sense for. When would I stand in my kitchen with a bunch of random ingredients strewn about the counter wondering what to make with them and conclude that an LLM would have a good answer? And what am I supposed to extrapolate from that example? I guess they were showing off that the system had good vision capabilities? Okay, but generative AIs are notoriously unreliable, unlike cars. Even if the demo had worked, it would tell me nothing about whether it would help me solve some random problem I could think up.
A better analogy would be the first cars being advertised as being usable as ballast for airships. Irrelevant and non-representative of a car's actual usefulness.
The sociopaths pushing this kinda crap don't live the same lives you or I do. They have people they pay to make decisions for them, or they pay people to do shit like buy their weekly groceries for them or whatever other stupid crap they're trying to sell as a usecase for these useless AI tools. That's why all these demos are stupid shit like "Buy me plane tickets for my trip", despite the fact that 99.9% of people need very specific criteria out of their plane tickets and it's more easily done with currently available tools anyways.
They literally think "What does a regular Joe need in their day-to-day?" and their out of touch answer is "I have all these ingredients but don't know what to cook" or whatever. It's obvious these people haven't spoken to anyone who isn't an ass-licking yesman in a looooong time.
Hey, that recipe is worth trillions of dollars of investment, the destruction of the natural environment and the displacement of huge numbers of talented and skilled people. Show some respect for our billionaire class.
> A Korean tasting dressing. It's 2025, anyone living in a modern country should probably be able to make something that tastes Korean with just a small amount of effort...
What an awful, condescending attitude. No, not "everyone living in a modern country" can make Korean food without a recipe. And tools that reduce the barrier for learning and acquiring new skills should be applauded.
Almost half of Americans cannot cook today. And the number 1 cited reason is a lack of time.
That said, I agree with the grandparent that this isn't really a "killer feature". Nor am I interested in the product. For so many reasons.
A real example that would have resonated was asking “what can I make with these ingredients?” No one is asking how to make a specific thing when they already know exactly what ingredients they need. If they knew what ingredients they needed, they probably already had the recipe. It feels out of touch at a basic level.
They just need an emotionless android without conscience, who does whatever is in the best interest of raking in money. They don't need technological excellence. Whether people at his company technologically succeed or fail, what matters is, that the company processes all the PII and feeds the algorithms. The rest is just for show.
I think such an emotionless android would have diligently prepared numerous backup scripts, sets of lenses, actors, demonstrations etc. to cover any failure contingency, since the cost of that is infinitesimal compared to even a slight change in their brand value.
It's funny because he spent so much money on hair and clothing stylists, jewellery, BJJ coaching, surfing lessons , really made an effort to come across as "cool" and the end result is...you cannot fake who you are, and your actions are what define you and make up your character, he is prime example of that. He cannot escape who he is.
I wouldn't say he's one of the best CEOs. He's been "successful" by
- selling an unhealthy addictive product
- burying research on its mental health impact on children
- engaging in anticompetitive behavior
Oh yeah, add stealing the original idea for facebook from the Winklevoss twins. I'll take being a loser if that's what it takes.
Yes he's rich and influential and blah blah blah blah blah and he's also AN ENORMOUS FUCKING DORK with the intellectual depth of a half-empty bottle of salad dressing. For all his money I'd rather be me than him.
Tangent: if you like cringey social awkwardness comedy (not my usual cup of tea, but in this case it's extraordinary, and hilarious), try "I Think You Should Leave".
How strong does a company's reality distortion field have to be for people to think your friends are going to want to come over to play with a new version of Windows?
I mean, why not "Let's all have wine and cheese and do root canals on each other!"?
I honestly was excited about Windows 95. Win98 was underwhelming, and WinME was a joke that I never bothered to install on my own machines. Win2K brought back some of the excitement, but not much.
Then Vista came out, and it was a total flop at first. Win7 fixed most of those mistakes, but the damage was done. Vista basically killed any chance Microsoft had at building excitement for an OS.
FWIW, I think the last macOS version that I was really looking forward to was High Sierra.
Yeah, younger folks don't remember that new operating systems used to be a thing of excitement -- what cool new features will we get? -- and not, like today, a thing of distress -- what did they break this time, and which new ways have they found to piss me off
I remember my dad driving us to the local Windows 95 pre-launch event by Microsoft. I was 10 and had learned the ridiculous and useless skills of DOS memory configuration and bootdisk juggling to get all of the games to run. Win95 was so cool! I remember spending hours on the multimedia catalog and demos on the CD-ROM and marvelling at the possibilities.
Here's one of my favorites, of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over connectivity hiccups. For some reason it evoked a lot more empathy from me...
I was on the Wave team! Our servers didn't have enough capacity, we launched too soon. I was managing the developer-facing server for API testing, and I had to slowly let developers in to avoid overwhelming it.
Neat, thanks for sharing this tidbit of history. Hey, what did the team think of the decision to build it on GWT at the time? (From the outside, seemed like an enabling approach but a bit like building an engine and airframe all at once).
Hm, I didn't work on the frontend but I don't particularly remember griping..GWT had been around for ~5 years at that point, so it wasn't super new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit
I always personally found it a bit odd, as I preferred straight JS myself, but large companies have to pick some sort of framework for websites, and Google already used Java a fair bit.
It was fun! Now we still see Wave-iness in other products: Google Docs uses the Operational Transforms (OT) algorithm for collab editing (or at least it did, last I knew), and non-Google products like Notion, Quip, Slack, Loop from Microsoft, all have some overlap.
We struggled with having too many audiences for Wave - were we targeting consumer or enterprise? email or docs replacement? Too much at once.
This will also not change much, since they want you to use their centralized services for data collection, not local or onsite processing. So you will always have roundtrips and shared resources. For IO this is pretty unacceptable, people get annoyed by millisecond delays.
Nah, more like a 1D chess move. Investors will pay them to invest in AI, so invest in AI, make the stock go up, sell, and leave the dumb investors holding the bag.
2D chess if they're smart: start a new company that competes with the one they just sold to dumb investors. Jack Dorsey is particularly fond of this move.
Something I like about that scene is Seinfeld (the actor) clearly struggles not to smile at Kramer's delivery of the punch line despite that he (the character) was supposed to be irate with Kramer.
If you're taking about the R&D provisions in the OBBBA, that only changes the schedule of the deduction (immediately vs over several years). R&D, like most business expenses were was always deductible. Whether it's prudent or not isn't a factor.
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nkbqyk/...