Comment by tptacek
1 day ago
Waze does not answer my commute question for me. Waze finds what it believes to be the quickest route from west loop to my house, but that route is virtually never reasonable. There's only 4 reasonable routes; I just need to know which one to take.
You're right, "tell me which of these four preconceived routes is fastest" is much nicher than "telly me the fastest route"
It’s not the fastest route, because the algorithm is stupid as a result of trying to be smart.
It sees a small side road and thinks “I will take the user down here because there’s no traffic” But it doesn’t consider that the side road is empty because you’ll have to turn across four lanes of traffic in rush hour. So you get stuck for twenty minutes.
How would an LLM know not to take that road then?
If your answer is you tell it, then the obvious solution to improve the app is to provide a way of specifying a road exclusion list, and that is extremely feasible.
So it's wrong about the fastest route. Fix that instead of inventing a new type of app.
You get that this is a commute, right? Not charting a course through unfamiliar territory. A drive I've done thousands of times. I don't care if Waze thinks I should be on Harrison or Race. Fuck you, Waze. There's 4 reasonable routes; I just want to know which one.
It's an app with an audience of just me. That's the point. You're not supposed to want it. You have your own problems.
FWIW I do kind of see your point. I have lots of software / hardware with a user base of one to a handful of people. I also know it sucks having to maintain software that drives your life, even if that maintenance is AI supported.
Just with the bit I quoted above, that seemed like a big misread of the market and the implications of everyone writing their own apps.
In this future, are people paying the API pricing of traffic providers? In this future, who's supplying the traffic data if no one is using their mapping apps?
Apple literally has automatic commute notifications that tell you the optimal route (15 minutes via Easy St.), in this hypothetical world where your agent knows enough about you to suggest today's route, why doesn't your digital panopticon purveyor (be it Apple, Google, your car manufacturer) automatically pull that info the second you get into your car?
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