Comment by timr
19 hours ago
> 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...
This is interesting, but only convinces me more of my argument. The writer gives a bunch of examples that basically boil down to “deep research + logins”, and only two examples - a persistent search for date night, and unspecified monitoring of email - that truly requires a bot. After that, roughly half the post is about managing the complexity to control cost of grok bot!
I didn’t say that there’s nothing that could potentially be useful, just that the tradeoff isn’t worth it for most people. This post inadvertently makes the case that at least some “normies” who are excited about this stuff are just easily sniped by the new shiny. Said differently, I am pretty certain that if Muse weren’t free, this lady would quickly lose all interest. There’s only so much money you’re willing to spend finding library books and cheap stuff on facebook marketplace.
Persistent searches might be the one area where I broadly agree that there’s a use (i.e. sniping tickets) but how often do I do this? Not enough to justify a subscription. And for the truly valuable stuff (hotels, airline tickets, etc.) I don’t trust the bots to execute without my attention.