Comment by wavemode
3 days ago
> Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical input.
That doesn't sound ideal at all. And in fact highlights what's wrong with AI product development nowadays.
AI as a tool is wildly popular. Almost everyone in the world uses ChatGPT or knows someone who does. Here's the thing about tools - you use them in a predictable way and they give you a predictable result. I ask a question, I get an answer. The thing doesn't randomly interject when I'm doing other things and I asked it nothing. I swing a hammer, it drives a nail. The hammer doesn't decide that the thing it's swinging at is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct.
Too many product managers nowadays want AI to not just be a tool, they want it to be magic. But magic is distracting, and unpredictable, and frequently gets things wrong because it doesn't understand the human's intent. That's why people mostly find AI integrations confusing and aggravating, despite the popularity of AI-as-a-tool.
> The hammer doesn't decide that the thing it's swinging at is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct.
Sawstop literally patented this and made millions and seems to have genuinely improved the world.
I personally am a big fan of tools that make it hard to mangle my body parts.
sawstop is not AI
Sure, where's the line?
If you want to tell me that llms are inherently non-deterministic, then sure, but from the point of view of a user, a saw stop activating because the wood is wet is really not expected either.
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I mean, I wouldn't want sawstop to hallucinate my finger is a piece of wood.
But... A lot of stuff you rely on now was probably once distracting and unpredictable. There are a ton of subtle UX behaviors a modern computer is doing that you don't notice, but if they all disappeared and you had to use windows 95 for a week you would miss.
That is more what I am advocating for, subtle background UX improvements based on an LLMs ability to interpret a users intent. We had limited abilities to look at an applications state and try to determine a users intent, but it is easier to do that with an LLM. Yeah like you point out some users don't want you to try and predict their intent, but if you can do it accurately a high percentage of the time it is "magic".
> subtle UX behaviors
I'd wager it's more likely to be the opposite.
Older UIs were built on solid research. They had a ton of subtle UX behaviors that users didn't notice were there, but helped in minor ways. Modern UIs have a tendency to throw out previous learning and to be fashion-first. I've seen this talked about on HN a fair bit lately.
Using an old-fashioned interface, with 3D buttons to make interactive elements clear, and with instant feedback, can be a nicer experience than having to work with the lack of clarity, and relative laggyness, of some of today's interfaces.
> Older UIs were built on solid research. They had a ton of subtle UX behaviors that users didn't notice were there, but helped in minor ways. Modern UIs have a tendency to throw out previous learning and to be fashion-first.
Yes. For example, Chrome literally just broke middle-click paste in this box when I was responding. It sets the primary selection to copy, but fails to use it when pasting.
Middle click to open in new tab is also reliably flaky.
I really miss the UI consistency of the 90s and early 2000s.
Serious question: what are those things from windows 95/98 I might miss?
Rose tinted glasses perhaps, but I remember it as a very straightforward and consistent UI that provided great feedback, was snappy and did everything I needed. Up to and including little hints for power users like underlining shortcut letters for the & key.
I miss my search bar actually being a dumb grep of my indexed files. It's still frustrating typing 3 characters, seeing the result pop up in the 2nd key stroke, but having it transform into something else by the time I process the result.
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The only one I can think of, literally the only one, is grouped icons.
And even that's only because browsers ended up in a weird "windows but tabs but actually tabs are windows" state.
So yeah, I'd miss the UX of dragging tabs into their own separate windows.
But even that is something that still feels janky in most apps ( windows terminal somehow makes this feel bad, even VS code took a long time to make it feel okay ), and I wouldn't really miss it that much if there were no tabs at all and every tab was forced into a separate window at all times with it's own task bar entry.
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I remember seeing one of those "kids use old technology" videos, where kids are confused by rotary phones and the like.
One of the episodes had them using Windows 98. As I recall, the reaction was more or less "this is pretty ok, actually". A few WTFs about dialup modems and such, but I don't recall complaints about the UI.
> But... A lot of stuff you rely on now was probably once distracting and unpredictable.
And nobody relied on them when they were distracting and unpredictable. People only rely on them now because they are not.
LLMs won't ever be predictable. They are designed not to be. A predictable AI is something different from a LLM.
> There are a ton of subtle UX behaviors a modern computer is doing that you don't notice, but if they all disappeared and you had to use windows 95 for a week you would miss.
Like what? All those popups screaming that my PC is unprotected because I turned off windows firewall?
I want magic that works. Sometimes I want a tool to interrupt me! I know my route to work so I'm not going to ask how I should get there today - but 1% of the time there is something wrong with my plan (accident, construction...) and I want the tool to say something. I know I need to turn right to get someplace, but sometimes as a human I'll say left instead: confusing me and the driver where they don't turn right, and AI that realizes who made the mistake would help.
The hard part is the AI needs to be correct when it doesn't something unexpected. I don't know if this is a solvable problem, but it is what I want.
Magic in real life never works 100% of the time. It is all an illusion were some observers understand the trick and others do not. Those that understand it have the potential to break the magic. Even the magician has the ability to fault the trick.
I want reproducibility not magic.
It is magic that I can touch a swith on the wall and lights come on. It is magic that I have a warm house despite the outside temperature is near freezing. we have plenty of other magic that works. I want more
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