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I am getting pissed off with the AI assistant crap being suggested to me at work (no, Adobe, I do not need the inbuilt AI assistant to "simplify this document for me" when I'm reconciling a blinkin' bank statement) and I think much of the enthusiasm over AI is because it's all software engineering.
It seems to be useful (not perfect but useful) if you're writing code. Or if you're dumping your homework on it to write your essays and cheat your exams for you. But for use by ordinary people otherwise? Apart from the slop art and extruded fiction product you mention, I don't yet see it doing anything useful.
I don't need it to write a shopping list and order online for me, just in case someone wants to use that as an example. That's for people who only buy the same things over and over and have more money than time.
If anyone has an example of "this is how I use it for work/at home and it really saves me time and mental energy", I'd be glad to hear.
I've fed prose I've already written into it to make refinements or check for quality. I just wish you could get it to stop glazing everything put in front of it.
I prompted Deepseek with:
and it replied dryly enough, although don't quote me on the quality of its advice.
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I've used AI to write cover letters on job applications. One of those applications got me a teaching job which paid $20,000 more than what I was doing before, so if the cover letter made any difference ChatGPT Plus has more than paid for itself.
On the same job, I used it to generate a slogan which the administrators liked, and some images including the school mascot which had a very positive reception.
Sadly, it didn't save me from getting fired at the end of the year for failing to control the kids.
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I wanted to make slow-rising pizza dough from scratch. The online slow-rising whole-wheat bread recipe I liked gave all proportion in weights. I don't have a cooking scale. So I uploaded it to Claude and asked it to convert the recipe to cup measurements. I noticed the water-to-flour ratio has changed, so I had it explain why, and learned quite a bit about the role protein plays in dough. Then I had it re-do the recipe, substituting semolina for a quarter of the flour. Finally, I had it scale the recipe for two particularly sized pizzas I planned to make. Time: about 10 minutes, because I side-tracked into the protein thing and had to check it out elsewhere.
Two days later, I get two delicious pizzas.
I would love to hear more.
Higher-protein flour absorbs more water, and that protein is what makes the dough elastic. All-purpose flour is 9-11% protein, bread flour 11-13% (depending on brand), semolina 12-13%, whole-wheat 13-14%. Recipes with the higher-protein flour will need more water.
I have learned, through trial and much error, never to make bread either from all-purpose flour, or from 100% whole-wheat.
Also, it seems that bakers really do rely on ratio-by-weight, rather than ratio-by-volume. When I asked Claude to convert the recipe from 1000 grams of "Typo 00" flour to have a quarter of it be semolina, it gave me:
Noticing that the cups did not add up to a quarter of semolina, I asked it to re-check its calculations or explain its results, and it did, explaining that semolina is denser.
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I don't, but I have a related observation. Because there are differently capable LLMs available, we have not a "one screen two movies" a situation but reverse, "nominally same movie in two screens". One screen is 4k ultraHD and other is camcorded VHS tape. In this thread and other forums, savvy people truly test this shit, constantly trying out which is the current state of the art, and enthusiastically adopt it, and report amazing results. I almost believe it is that good. Meanwhile, at work, my coworkers are not savvy at all yet enthusiastically adopt the default-tier ChatGPT. Which is shit. I call it ShitGPT.
I have watched how "senior" engineer who used to bit perhaps above his skill level but quite okay starting do quite stupid stuff, like in live code review call call copypasting ChatGPT outputs without looking at it, including the time when ShitGPT decided it wants to write the answer in C# instead of C++. Another engineer caused a week of mayhem because he uncritically trusted ChatGPT "summarization" of library documentation, except halfway the ShitGPT had stopped summarizing documentation and switched to hallucinating, causing the most curious bugs.
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I occasionally find it useful for queries that don't work well in ordinary Internet search engines. Here's my Gemini history.
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