Comment by timr
18 hours ago
I'll assert that 99% of people don't have any application for personal assistants, outside of work (perhaps). Most of us aren't so buried in personal obligations that the value of a half-assed "assistant" (which might violate our privacy) is worth the tradeoff in complexity or security.
The pitches for Dots, Grok Bot, etc., have been spectacularly uncompelling for me as a civilian. I don't need or want a bot to book my flights or read my inbox. I'm not so busy that these things have a value high enough to be worth the effort.
As a worker or an entrepreneur...maybe. Depends on the task, and how many other people were flinging slop at me on a daily basis. I could see the value of a calendar bot, or an expense reporting bot or a bullshit paperwork bot or a slop-return (slop jai alai?) bot, but there's no way in the world I'd give a bot access to the information necessary to, say, do my personal taxes.
Well, you can't run a personal AI assistant with 640k of memory.
i'd argue any parent, especially of a young child, could use 20 personal assistants lol. So that's just false. There's SO many appointments to keep track of in baby's first year of life, and that's if you have a healthy baby.
And once they start school there's an endless amount of deadlines and "reminders". A personal assistant that can automatically keep your reminders + calendar up to date based on your inbox would be very nice.
It gets even more fun if you have an aging parent at the same time as you have young kids. Then you get double the appointments to scheduled, coordinate and keep track of.
So when you say people don't need a personal assistant, i feel like you're living on a different planet. I suppose when i was single things were more "simple". Your mileage may vary of course...
> I'd argue any parent, especially of a young child, could use 20 personal assistants lol. So that's just false. There's SO many appointments to keep track of in baby's first year of life, and that's if you have a healthy baby.
I understand the need. I have a calendar. I put appointments in it. It provides alerts. What value does having a lossy/inaccurate/fragile robot in the middle give me? Data entry?
Now look...if I were in a position of power with literally everyone in my life, and I could somehow justify the social cost of requiring that they interact with a robot to negotiate demands on my time (the actual hard part), then maybe there would be additional value. Some people can do this! I'm sure one must deal with Mark Zuckerberg's PA to schedule his time [1]. It is very nice indeed when you are the kind of person who can defer your supplicants to a representative who manages the hoi polloi for you. If you can delegate these irritations to a robot, well, so much the better, I suppose.
If I tried this, as not-Mark-Zuckerberg, I would be what normal people refer to as "an asshole". I would also like to see you try this with your child's teacher, or the PTA, or doctor, or...
The response you will receive, an alarmingly high percentage of the time, will rhyme with "buck off". This stuff reminds me a lot of how valley folks keep trying to push spy glasses on the proles (silly normies never understand the genius of that technology, either...)
> And once they start school there's an endless amount of deadlines and "reminders". A personal assistant that can automatically keep your reminders + calendar up to date based on your inbox would be very nice.
Let me introduce you to...Gmail, from like, ten years ago. It looks for appointments in my mail and put them in my calendar. Somewhat to the point, it is often wrong, requiring more work to correct than it would to just enter the data myself.
[1] Somehow I doubt his wife is in this group.
Here are some examples from a Normal Person: https://www.eleanorkonik.com/p/muse-was-my-gateway-drug-to-g...
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What countless appoinemts with a baby? It is genuine question I have kids and the regular checkups were not all that difficult to track.
And with school, this is issue if your kid struggles a lot, maybe. But otherwise they track that stuff through school portal or notes.
Well, it's not strictly about baby, but in general there's lots to keep track of.
my spouse had a vaginal delivery and had some tearing. So she goes to pelvic floor therapy for that. Once a week. She's also a breastfeeding mom and has a lactation consultant that comes to the house a few times a month. As the father i need to make sure someone (or I) can watch baby during those appointments.
then of course, for baby, there is the occasional pediatrician appointment. my kid needed some physical therapy due to a neck issue (always leaned head toward one side). The physical therapist was amazing with that, but during that process we discovered that he had a very weak core, and so we continued physical therapy for a couple months afterwards as well. so that's about 4 to 5 appointments a week just for baby.
Then there are regular appointments you also need as a functioning adult… Dental cleaning, PCP appointment, etc.
then, while all of this is happening, you are somehow trying to schedule a tour with various daycares (via email usually) so that your child has some place to go if you eventually need daycare. and all of this is happening while one of you is probably trying to work a 9 to 5 job.
so in summary, maybe I'm crazy, but that's a lot of shit to deal with when you also have to deal with poor sleep and learning how to be a parent at the same time. I'm burnt the hell out and i have an "easy" baby. Heaven help you if you have a difficult kid.