Imagine we were talking about soda (or pop, or coke, or soft drink, depending on your dialect). Personally, I find it absolute insanity to be regularly consuming so much dissolved sugar especially during our ongoing obesity and digestive health epidemic.

But, “most consumers” don’t care about that. The beverage industry is insanely profitable, especially with recent forays into “energy drinks”.

Do people who drink so much dissolved sugar live without consequences? Absolutely not. They have a significantly lower quality of life and die much sooner than people who do not drink dissolved sugar.

I don’t see your comment as a valid dismissal. Just one more way that individual outcomes in our society are increasingly K-shaped.

I asked my wife to not share any info with Muse and she said “Well they know everything already”. Well I was able to convince her not to with some stories about hallucinations of agents getting things horribly wrong as agents in the past, because the privacy concerns just didn’t phase her. Shes even more aware than most people since I’m very privacy aware. 100% it’s very echo chambery to claim that it’s not 1990 anymore. It’s like a historian saying that history won’t repeat itself because we all know what happened last time

I see a lot of validity in your reply, but I think there is still nuance in how these priorities are expressed. How would you compare this issue to the Flock backlash, for example?

How do you explain the brand segmentation Facebook is doing with Muse? They're keeping the Meta / Facebook brand very far away from the Muse product.

Doesn't that imply Meta itself believes users care?

This is only true as long as they don’t think about the future or do risk management.

If we’re talking about the average consumer, they’re increasingly hostile towards ML in general and Facebook in particular. The majority want the tech regulated stat, so you might want to think twice before appealing to the masses.

Most consumers absolutely care, why do you think the biggest bipartisan issue is a massive national backlash against tech companies and a clear majority of workers being against LLM tools in the workplace?

These types of comments just show what a massive bubble you're in.

Most consumers do not want or need agents which also shows how much of a bubble tech people are living in.

Well they will start caring when their teen with image issues starts getting targetted beauty ads[1], or when they get pregnant, want to abort, and get directed to an anti-abortion center instead[2], and afterwards they get served "abortion reversal pills" ads[3].

Or when they are hit by any other privacy fuckup like that.

[1] https://futurism.com/facebook-beauty-targeted-ads [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61320202 [3] https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/facebook-made-money-...

Big Tech's head is at "being evil is just being competent", "democracy is incompatible with freedom" (for me to do what I want). It is also at "humans are obsolete" point. And while Zuckenberg specifically does not have cool quotes, he was at the "who cares about genocide" and "let show weight loss ads to teenagers who we determined have low self-esteem" points in the past.

Notes: actual quote is "If you're evil, you're at least competent. And if you're evil, you're not bad. And therefore, maybe you're actually kind of good because you're at least getting something done"

Most of the planet refused to wash their hands or use basic sanitation until about 150 years ago even though they had clear reproducible evidence doing so saved countless lives 50 years earlier. Most just considered doing the bare minimum to save lives as too much work. Also we used to advertise cigarettes and alcohol for consumption by babies in the 50s.

It is reasonable to assume the majority of humans are intellectually lazy to the point of killing themselves and their families if told to with the right marketing.

We should all make our own individual well researched choices and not ever buy into the worthless argument of "everyone does it".

Not at all, if you are happy, go for it. I might look into something like hermes, that seems to fit my bill more.

I've sold a few things on marketplace and have got some strange requests from buyers that i think are AI. I was selling a piece of exercise equipment that has a screen attached to it (rowing machine) and got a request to take a picture with a tape measure to verify the screen dimensions. The product is only sold with one screen size and it was plainly visible in the listing pictures too.

I would call that kind of thing "a very structured framework and guardrails". You'd have to come up with entirely different solutions if you want the agent to receive payments or monitor your budget.

The Qwen models, especially when quantized, can be really bad about just trying things and seeing what works. If you’re not watching all the tool calls you may not see it, but it’s kind of scary to watch them just bump into wrong decisions and backtrack.

They also have a bad habit of accidentally building URLs that hit Alibaba infrastructure, likely because their training environment had them use those URLs. If you haven’t watched the outgoing network requests you might be very surprised at what your Qwen agents do sometimes.

I’m not talking coding agents. More so agent harnesses and using LLMs for decision making

heh I got a completely stupid error from gemini about some apache configs, when I pointed it out, the llm apologised, said the line(s?) should look like this, then posted the same two lines uneditted haha

My email is gigabytes of garbage and a few useful bits of information that are useful and have personal relevance to me. You personally, dear reader, could probably read all my emails and I wouldn’t give a shit. I just checked my sent mails for the last few years, it’s like 90% sending absence excuses to my kid’s school. Google already has it all, so I guess I could just wait for them to get off their ass and make a useful equivalent to Grok Bot and friends.

Once you have a local agent you can actually trust is not sharing your conversations anywhere, you just use it like a really smart search engine, and your need to use a web browser mostly goes away.

Some of my recent use cases...

Help me find cheap flights and a hotel and plan some interesting sights to see because I am speaking at x conference on x date.

Download all my favorite music from x streaming service as FLAC files locally, then convert them to OGG and put them on my portable music player.

Download all my youtube subscriptions locally to this folder and strip out any ads or sponsored content.

Here are a list of all the books I own. Can you find me DRM-free epub copies and put them on this e-reader for me?

Here is a picture of an object next to a measuring tape. Can you 3d print me a holder perfectly sized for it based on a openscad file i can easily tweak?

I am really stressed right now. Can you help me talk through everything I have to do and help me rationally prioritize? Can you remind me and keep me on track and be my fake boss for today?

Can you look through my email and keep track of any appointments or invites so I stop missing meetings?

You can transcribe in seconds on CPU for free. Check out yapsnap repo, its free and open source

I just have Hermes download the video using yt-dlp and transcribe it with a local whisper model using a local whisper server if the transcript is not available through the API, whisper base models works fairly well on CPU only servers nowadays.