> Maybe they care about you, and want an excuse to talk to you, and free associated from their problem to you because they think of you as generally competent.
This is why I hate when people paste a response from Claude/ChatGPT to me when I ask them a question.
I think the only people I know that complain of this are the ones that don’t use the tools. And the only people I’m inclined to reply are also the people that don’t use the tools.
For people that do, the question is usually formatted differently - either it’s obvious Claude wouldn’t help, or they explain why it wasn’t helpful.
> I think the only people I know that complain of this are the ones that don’t use the tools.
Could we stop doing this? There is nothing in the world that every single person likes and LLMs are definitely not something that everyone who uses it turns off their brains to valid criticisms.
It is perfectly congruent that you might use AI tools but not want AI answers pasted back at you, just like it’s perfectly congruent that you may enjoy playing music in the privacy of your home but don’t appreciate strangers (or even friends and acquaintances) blasting music in public.
We've seen this song and dance with Google already.
Clearly, for some people, "type into a search bar" is some sort of cognitive obstacle, and "go bother another person" isn't.
Now that I'm thinking about it: maybe the likes of OpenAI have the right idea when they invest into conversational models? Does it meaningfully reduce the workload of flesh proxies?
It even updated to let you choose the search engine. Surprisingly they haven't updated it to include OpenAI/Claude/Copilot/... guess he should've named the domain "lmFtfy" (s/Google/find/g)
The fact that I can get (and consistently use) 120+ hours of 2160p/1440p video every month for $10, on a platform with extremely high quality, deeply researched videos/shows is a modern marvel.
Youtube music is also serviceable enough if you're not picky about mobile UX. Comes included with a basic yt premium subscription.
I'll always tell people, no other subscription - software or otherwise - comes close to providing the real-world value that yt premium does for that little money.
It's not easier for everyone. It's a tradeoff, like anything.
If you are one person with one or two devices that you use YouTube on, and you're willing to make certain sacrifices, then yes I agree.
If you have a family of a few people, all with multiple devices that they might want to use YouTube on, that also use YouTube Music, then I don't personally think it's easier. I'd rather part with $30/mo and have back the time I'd spend dealing with the nonsense resulting from trying to do the ad block or alternative app route
Youtube premium also works on my phone, Chromecast, and importantly, all of my wife's devices, all without needing to fuss with anything. It also supports the creators who put work into my entertainment, and more than watching ads even would have (something I care about, and think other people should as well).
5 people in my family each with multiple devices. To get them all to use FireFox which isn't even actual FireFox on iPhone/iPad, ditch the native apps, install specific extensions, figure out how to get it onto their TVs, how to get YouTube music to work in CarPlay with an ad blocker, probably other things I'm not thinking of... would be much more effort than paying.
Installing an ad blocker takes fewer clicks than subscribing to YouTube.
And less mental effort as well, since the subscription forces to stay in guard for enshittification (are there now ads in my tier? Did the price go up?).
Yes. For everyone saying just install this or that, it’s not straightforward for the TV and every other device in your house, including your family’s. Sometimes just paying brings a lot of convenience.
> it’s not straightforward for the TV and every other device in your house, including your family’s
The principled position behind "you should install something" is that in the scenario you outline, you cannot just install something, and this is a kind of power over you that you are relinquishing to both YouTube and the TV manufacturer. You will not get it back.
I realize I could use these tools, but I feel I should give Google "something" for using their services. I get value from YouTube, both for entertainment and professional purposes, not to mention gmail, docs, etc. Maybe I am a fool!
Google needs some money to pay for youtube. I don't begrudge them their income to pay for the hosting costs and some small profit above that and you shouldn't either.
OTOH, I do begrudge them all the scams they have accepted ads for in the past.
I was thinking the other day as a kid I would always pester my parents with questions like "how does lightning work?" etc etc. My world view was formed with answers based on what they understood. And sometimes I'm sure they'd just make something up when they didn't know the answers.
Anyway, I guess that's so different now when kids have internet devices in their hands and now even moreso with an AI assistant that has the worlds knowledge
I've found that many "skills" with regard to using AI become obsolete very quickly. It's really hard to stay ahead of the curve, IMO. I was using agents over 2 years ago and felt way ahead of the curve [1]. Today, Claude will spin up agents without even having been asked.
You'd be surprised how many people, and I'm not talking about 80 year olds, have a hard time using search engines, or general knowledge of finding information.
If you're not careful, it is also super easy to extrapolate your own skills - and your peers skills - to the rest of the population.
Try being technical support to some non-tech people over the phone, it'll really open your eyes to the general computer knowledge of people.
Except when the question is actually interesting and has less about it written, whatever frontier model you are using may confidently give some partially correct or completely wrong answer. Unless you're an expert who wouldn't need to ask AI in the first place, you cannot tell if it's false. "Oh but it's good enough, it's correct most of the time."
This gradual accruing of more and more falsehood will hurt us in the coming years, big time.
EDIT: I just asked Claude a very basic question on an area I'm an expert in and it gave me a partially true and misleading answer. I drilled in on the false part and it wiggled and gave more confusing, incorrect, poor justifications for why it gave me the clearly wrong information. If someone was not an expert, there is absolutely no way they could fact-check this. Instead, the falsehood would be written, published somewhere, and would serve as a base for more falsehood in the future.
Do you think AIs are really much worse than humans in this respect?
Go check out the collective social knowledge of some political groups, and it's clear that we don't need to wait for "coming years" to be hurt by misinformation and disinformation. AI had very little to do with this.
Also, a good Claude-asker should be capable of a decent level of fact-checking, and shouldn't in fact be a pure meat proxy.
Another comment: you can just tell the person asking you that you don't know the answer. You don't have to look it up for them in any way; it's nice if you do, but you're allowed to just say "Sorry, I don't know! I'd look online, or maybe ask an LLM or something."
You don't have to start doing their research for them, or copying and pasting or transcribing Claude's answer.
A certain type of person (quite common in tech) really dislikes saying "I don't know". They seem to have a strong need for always having an answer, even if that answer is from google or a chatbot or simply pulled out of their arse.
Exactly. I'd rather have a quick "I don't know" than wait for them to generate a reply that is likely to be wrong because I already asked the same models myself before consulting a human. If they generate a reply, I get to tell them exactly how the response is wrong, since the core content is usually the same. Only then do I get the "I don't know."
There are a few people I can tell are better at prompting than I am. Them, I'll tolerate this from, though most of them do more than function as an AI proxy anyhow and usually will say "I don't know, I'll check X" first.
There's another problem with people who know enough to ask an LLM to do something, don't know how to actually turn that into something useful, but want to act like they already did the heavy lifting.
"I had an idea for a new app. Here's a set of screen mockups and a requirements doc I did with Claude. Can you go ahead and finish that off now that I've done the design?"
I think we have the moral imperative to document all "out of distribution" information somewhere. By this I mean anything that is tribal knowledge or principles that just exist within our heads.
That’s not the point I made actually. Most writing is redundant. Our moral imperative should only be to document the out of distribution information - stuff that you can’t elicit from model.
If your writing is compressible, you are doing it wrong.
EDIT: I see your point. Same mechanism, different substrate.
This is why I hate when people paste a response from Claude/ChatGPT to me when I ask them a question.
I think the only people I know that complain of this are the ones that don’t use the tools. And the only people I’m inclined to reply are also the people that don’t use the tools.
For people that do, the question is usually formatted differently - either it’s obvious Claude wouldn’t help, or they explain why it wasn’t helpful.
Could we stop doing this? There is nothing in the world that every single person likes and LLMs are definitely not something that everyone who uses it turns off their brains to valid criticisms.
It is perfectly congruent that you might use AI tools but not want AI answers pasted back at you, just like it’s perfectly congruent that you may enjoy playing music in the privacy of your home but don’t appreciate strangers (or even friends and acquaintances) blasting music in public.
Clearly, for some people, "type into a search bar" is some sort of cognitive obstacle, and "go bother another person" isn't.
Now that I'm thinking about it: maybe the likes of OpenAI have the right idea when they invest into conversational models? Does it meaningfully reduce the workload of flesh proxies?
Youtube music is also serviceable enough if you're not picky about mobile UX. Comes included with a basic yt premium subscription.
I'll always tell people, no other subscription - software or otherwise - comes close to providing the real-world value that yt premium does for that little money.
If you are one person with one or two devices that you use YouTube on, and you're willing to make certain sacrifices, then yes I agree.
If you have a family of a few people, all with multiple devices that they might want to use YouTube on, that also use YouTube Music, then I don't personally think it's easier. I'd rather part with $30/mo and have back the time I'd spend dealing with the nonsense resulting from trying to do the ad block or alternative app route
I don't have the time and energy for that.
And less mental effort as well, since the subscription forces to stay in guard for enshittification (are there now ads in my tier? Did the price go up?).
The principled position behind "you should install something" is that in the scenario you outline, you cannot just install something, and this is a kind of power over you that you are relinquishing to both YouTube and the TV manufacturer. You will not get it back.
OTOH, I do begrudge them all the scams they have accepted ads for in the past.
NewPipe/PipePipe are free
You are welcome
Firefox with uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the correct move.
If on mobile, Duckduckgo app has Duck Player.
I have trouble saying "I" when an LLM has done the leg work.
"I found a report with this info..." turns into "There's a report with this info". heh.
Anyway, I guess that's so different now when kids have internet devices in their hands and now even moreso with an AI assistant that has the worlds knowledge
Feels a bit like a fools errand.
[1] https://www.loom.com/share/aa6e55acb18c445e9186637ac763c08d
If you're not careful, it is also super easy to extrapolate your own skills - and your peers skills - to the rest of the population.
Try being technical support to some non-tech people over the phone, it'll really open your eyes to the general computer knowledge of people.
This gradual accruing of more and more falsehood will hurt us in the coming years, big time.
EDIT: I just asked Claude a very basic question on an area I'm an expert in and it gave me a partially true and misleading answer. I drilled in on the false part and it wiggled and gave more confusing, incorrect, poor justifications for why it gave me the clearly wrong information. If someone was not an expert, there is absolutely no way they could fact-check this. Instead, the falsehood would be written, published somewhere, and would serve as a base for more falsehood in the future.
Go check out the collective social knowledge of some political groups, and it's clear that we don't need to wait for "coming years" to be hurt by misinformation and disinformation. AI had very little to do with this.
Also, a good Claude-asker should be capable of a decent level of fact-checking, and shouldn't in fact be a pure meat proxy.
Corrupt actors have always existed, of course, but AI automates, normalizes, and scales this to a fundamentally different level.
You don't have to start doing their research for them, or copying and pasting or transcribing Claude's answer.
There are a few people I can tell are better at prompting than I am. Them, I'll tolerate this from, though most of them do more than function as an AI proxy anyhow and usually will say "I don't know, I'll check X" first.
"I had an idea for a new app. Here's a set of screen mockups and a requirements doc I did with Claude. Can you go ahead and finish that off now that I've done the design?"
This is more or less why writing was invented thousands of years ago, the amount of knowledge exceeds human memory
If your writing is compressible, you are doing it wrong.
EDIT: I see your point. Same mechanism, different substrate.