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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2639 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI? For me, it just kind of seems "internet-of-shit"-like, both in that it often seems like a gratuitous application of technology and that it seems to combine multiple of the internet's worst problems.

Sure enough, I eventually tried to make an account for Claude, because I thought it might help me procrastinate more effectively. Despite Anthropic giving lip-service to privacy, they not only require a unique phone number per account, but wouldn't accept my VoIP numbers. And I couldn't even get that far in the process, without allowing Google's third-party javascript! Why not just make people go through a dozen recaptchas, if it's actually about spam!? I then decided to see if I could make an OpenAI account, but the page kept giving errors, even with a bunch of third-party javascript allowed.

I've never used it for anything personal, so I've never made accounts like described above. I do work for a large corporate tech company though who has its own AI offerings. I use this one for work a modest amount and its been helpful but not game changing. I review a number of very large speadsheets on a regular basis. 95%+ of the data in these sheets doesn't really concern my immediate duties. AI has been great in digesting these and presenting me with just the information I need to see. Its also good at reading my many, many emails and flagging ones where people are asking me to do something specific, or touch on a number of topics I've flagged at important. Its also really good at reviewing the recordings of long meetings, converting them into text transcripts, and extracting the valuable information (if there is any), finally turning the meeting into the email it should have always been.

Its also good at reading my many, many emails and flagging ones where people are asking me to do something specific, or touch on a number of topics I've flagged at important.

Do you use a specific service for this, or something custom?

Its our in-house AI tool. I understand that microsoft has build something similar into Outlook, but our IT sec teams have blocked it on our work accounts.

Oh, neat. Your people don’t waste any time.

I’ve occasionally used ChatGPT as a glorified search engine to help find specific building codes, or to make suggestions for specific things like a roof cap suited for a certain CFM. It’s pretty effective, better than google for the kind of case where you know what you’re looking for but can’t remember where to find it. You just need to make sure to double-check what it’s saying, of course.

Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI?

Because what would I use it for? None of the common use cases I hear people here put forth for AI are anything I do with any frequency.

It's not about spam. It's that the models they give you access to for free are expensive to run and they throttle you pretty fast. They don't want people creating tons of free accounts to circumvent the limits.

They should say that, rather than claim it's about spam. Also, don't they limit model choice and some proxy for "compute-per-conversation," anyway? What's the multiplier for the utility of n accounts, over 1 account?

Is there a clear quantification of cost/man-hour-replaced? Proton charges $9.99/month for proof-reading and shortening emails, which seems steep for such basic (presumably low-token-per-use) functionality, but they have to make things E2EE and their use-case doesn't really allow limiting per-month usage...

don't they limit model choice

I'm not really sure anymore. I think they were at first but this led to people trying the free version, seeing how crappy it was, and deciding AI was a fad.

I was about to say that I've never used AI, but then I realized that would be a lie - I've used AI before to put together a long string of fluffy bullshit for work in order to save myself the aggravation of putting together said fluffy bullshit.

...and I will likely use it again this week to, yet again, put together a few paragraphs of fluffy bullshit to appease the MBA types in my office.

I haven’t and I don’t know what I would use it for.

That really depends on what you mean by "non-toy AI".

Do things like AI noise reduction and music stem separation count? I use both regularly. DeepL is very convenient for translating random languages to English.

I don't use LLMs as I have little use for very limited tools that require massaging long prompts that might or might not kinda-sorta do something helpful if I spend a lot of effort at it.

Maybe you would know, but are there good “AI” piano music transcription models nowadays?

Unflortunately I haven’t looked into that. I suspect they wouldn’t perform particularly well unless it was almost a solo piano piece.

I use Ultimate Vocal Remover to remove vocals and reduce the volume of drums and bass to make it easier to hear what the guitar is doing and I combine that with Zplane Decoda (shows rough chords and allows transposing and changing speed on the fly) for practising playing along to songs.

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