• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle




  • About 15 years ago I was giving a presentation at a technical conference. This was me giving a presentation in front of a room full of about 50 other engineers. At this point in my career this was still pretty new to me, so I was nervous. It was getting time for my presentation and I needed to do a last minute nervous pee before I did my presentation.

    I went to the bathroom, peed in a urinal, and then went to wash my hands. I pushed down the bathroom faucet and it exploded sending up a geyser of water about air a foot or two into the air. Now had I really been on a TV show, my pants would have been soaked in the crotch area, but luckily in real life I stepped back and didn’t get wet. However, this was the perfect setup for a young nervous engineer giving a technical presentation to be thoroughly embarrassed. Luckily I’m either not on a TV show, or I’m not the main character.


  • The script doesn’t go away when you replace a helpdesk operator with ChatGPT. You just get a script-reading interface without empathy and a severally hindered ability to process novel issues outside it’s protocol.

    The humans you speak to could do exactly what you’re asking for, if the business did not handcuff them to a script.

    But they do handcuff them to a script… at least 1st and 2nd level tech support. That’s the point. It’s so fucking awful. It’s a barrier to keep you from the more highly paid tech support people who may actually be able to answer your questions. First you have to wait on hold to make sure you think it’s worth wasting their time on your annoying problem, THEN it’s a maze you have to navigate, and then whoops you just got hung up on… so sorry, start all over! LLMs are (can be) so much better at this!



  • That’s 99% of what I’m looking for. If I’m figuring something out by myself, I’m not looking it up on the internet.

    I’m an engineer and I’ve found LLMs great for helping me understand an issue. When you read something online, you have to translate from what the author is saying into your thinking and I’ve found LLMs are much better at re-framing information to match my inner dialog. I often find them much more useful than google searches in trying to find information.


  • I already use LLMs to problem solve issues that I’m having and they’re typically better than me punching questions into Google. I admit that I’ve once had an llm hallucinate while it was trying to solve a problem for me, but the vast majority of the time it has been quite helpful. That’s been my experience at least. YMMV.

    If you think LLMs suck, I’m guessing you haven’t actually used telephone tech support in the past 10 years. That’s a version of hell I wish on very few people.


  • Spent $800k on a house remodel. We gutted it and rebuilt it.

    I did all the plans myself, I got them approved by the city, I made all the interior design decisions (my wife had veto power but left 90% of it all to me). In theory, in my area, the house has gone up in value by equal to or more than what we spent… but realistically I overspent. The amount I pay for loans is enough to make my very hefty salary seem low, but I don’t regret spending the money (It didn’t help that interest rates went up right before we pulled a $500k loan!). The house is awesome and it’s MY/OUR house since I did the design myself and I worked with the contractors throughout the entire process. I know every trade off we made and I can tell you why we made every decision. Doing this was a bucket-list item… but yeah… I overspent.


  • I am totally looking forward to AI customer support. The current model of a person reading a scripted response is painful and fucking awful and only rarely leads to a good resolution. I would LOVE an AI support where I could just describe the problem and it gives me answers and it only asks relevant follow up questions. I can’t wait.