>How it works # YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about

okay, but how does it work? how does it check the status of things?

There are two general options:

1. Scrape a google search for the question, feed that into OpenAI with the additional prompt of "Given the above information, is the answer to <user prompt> yes or no". Or give the AI a "google" tool and just ask it directly.

2. Same thing, except instead of OpenAI feed it into underpaid people in the global south (i.e. amazon mechanical turk). These people then probably feed it into ChatGPT anyway.

Given there's a free tier, and when you use it it produces very ai-sounding text, I think it's pretty clearly 1.

Also, if you enter a clever enough question, you can get the system prompt, but this is left as an exercise to the reader (this one's somewhat tricky, you have to make an injection that goes through two layers).

	▲	krackers 29 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My favorite part about the spread of AI/LLM stuff is that it opens up a new kind of reverse engineering. Trying to fetch the system prompt that was used. Trying to deduce the model that was used (there's lots of ways to do this: glitch tokens, slop words, "vibes", etc.)
	▲	4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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JimDabell 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I built something very similar a few months back and I just asked an LLM. You could optionally specify a CSS selector for HTML or JMESPath for JSON to narrow things down, but it would default to feeding the entire textual content to the LLM and just asking it the question with a yes or no response.

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jotaen 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Their “About” site is (just slightly) more insightful:

> Using AI-powered web search, we continuously monitor your questions and send you an email notification when the status flips to what you're waiting for.

via https://yesnotice.com/about/

Without knowing whether they actually do it that way, if you give ChatGPT the following prompt, it returns `No.`:

> Please answer the following question with just “yes” or “no”: Is the new iPhone 18 available for pre-order?

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alwa 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

…and how frequently?

	▲	hacb 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		the frequency is specified later in the doc[1]: > We check free accounts daily and premium accounts up to every 15 minutes. [1]: https://yesnotice.com/about/

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esafak 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You just curl the site or use its API, if it has one? Then you store the result in a database and see if its value has flipped. I don't get the question; this is trivial.

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scubbo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Additionally, YesNotice will provide an estimated availability timeline for the question, so you can have some information about when to expect the change.

How is that trivial in the general case?

	▲	esafak 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Let's see how accurate those predictions are before worrying about the how.

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DougN7 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And how exactly does it call any arbitrary API or know which site to curl for any arbitrary question a user might ask? Your answer doesn’t contemplate the how this actually works.

	▲	esafak 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		According to https://yesnotice.com/about/ it uses "AI-powered web search" so the heavy lifting is likely outsourced.

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zahlman 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about (e.g., product stock, website availability, domain status) and comparing it to the previous status. When it detects a change from no to yes, it sends you a notification via email.

How does it generalize arbitrary indications of status into yes/no?

How does it know how to use arbitrary APIs to obtain arbitrary indications of status?

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dylanowen 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's if the website you're querying is a static html file but the web is much more dynamic and varied. Some of the questions I have: does yesnotice execute js, does it handle an answer appearing on a different page, does it handle ambiguous launch language. In essence: how does it work?

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notatoad 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

what site does it check? what api does it call?

one of the examples is to see if a new coffee shop is opened in town. what's the API to call for that?

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esafak 5 hours ago | parent [-]

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/web-...

You could use an LLM to pick the right API.

	▲	notatoad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		which is, of course, what i mean by "how does it work"

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meindnoch 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

From a database!