We tend to think that markets reflect consumer choice. But the artificial-intelligence boom has been powered by the investment decisions of concentrated capital rather than by consumer demand.
In order for AI to have a market there would need to be a large scale demonstration of the uses and benefits of AI in many various industries, most of which do not involve image generation or writing a single line of computer code.
I’m so sick of asking people for demonstrations of AI use and it being 100% programmers going “oh it’s really good at writing functions”, now I have no idea if it is, or isn’t, any good at writing functions, but since I don’t write functions, that example is of no use to me.
I want to know how good it is at writing technical documentation for proprietary hardware solutions that the AI will have no experience of in its training set, because I suspect it sucks at it. How good is it at taking poorly written guides in Chinese, translated into English via Klingon and ancient Babylonian, how does it handle it if it comes across the sentence “absolutely do not ever warning” with no additional information as to what I absolutely should never not do. Because that’s when thinking is involved, and AI doesn’t think.
OK, here’s a real life use case, small time as it is, that has nothing to do with anything rarefied.
I have a TCL Android TV that, after some “unapproved measures”, runs without a Google account - FLauncher as the front end, telemetry blocked, home media streaming, YouTube ad-free. The yar har har works.
Two days ago the kids come in. TV’s not working.
Jellyfin: fine. Nova Player: fine. Stremio, YouTube, anything hitting the net: dead.
We’d had a brownout that day, so I figured the router was scrambled. Reset it, re-added the network… and YouTube now launches, plays for 30 seconds, then hard-locks. Just weird JSON vomit and then dead.
At that point I’m thinking the TV is fried. Options:
factory reset and reinstall the workarounds - 2-3hrs of pain-in-the-ass fuckery
crawl the net decoding cryptic error codes,
take it in for repair
fall down a TV diagnostics rabbit hole.
Instead, I chose option 5)
I told my local LLM: "This TV is on this IP. This laptop has ADB access. I’ve given you MCP tools with ADB libraries. Here’s the issue, here’s what I tried. Check prior history of what I did, figure out what’s wrong and fix it, or tell me the WiFi is fried so I can repurpose the tv.
If it looks like the brownout caused memory corruption, factory reset, adb stream install the back up .apks, sign in my accounts, get it back up and running.
Failing that, if it’s looking like a hardware issue, push diagnostic tool, test tv and tell me which part/s I might need, as well as likely part costs using eBay or Amazon. I’m happy to spend $50 on this shitbox and not one cent more.
Present everything as markdown in usual folder, using house style. Ping me on my phone when you’re done with the TL;DR"
The agent ADBs in, pokes around, tests the WiFi, and figures out the brownout had corrupted the date and time.
Wrong clock = certs flagged as invalid = no net.
It reset the time. Everything comes back.
Could I have twigged it myself?
Eventually. But the agent already had the tools, knew the TV’s prior state, and had a record of what I’d already tried.
It could’ve reflashed the TV, sideloaded all my apps, re-signed into my accounts - the whole lot - if needed.
This is not the only time I’ve had real world use of my local, and it had very little to do with “writing functions”.
I had a problem. Over time, I’d stored enough context in the llm so that it would do what I would have done, faster.
People that call these things “spicy autocorrect” are demonstrating a skill issue.
In order for AI to have a market there would need to be a large scale demonstration of the uses and benefits of AI in many various industries, most of which do not involve image generation or writing a single line of computer code.
I’m so sick of asking people for demonstrations of AI use and it being 100% programmers going “oh it’s really good at writing functions”, now I have no idea if it is, or isn’t, any good at writing functions, but since I don’t write functions, that example is of no use to me.
I want to know how good it is at writing technical documentation for proprietary hardware solutions that the AI will have no experience of in its training set, because I suspect it sucks at it. How good is it at taking poorly written guides in Chinese, translated into English via Klingon and ancient Babylonian, how does it handle it if it comes across the sentence “absolutely do not ever warning” with no additional information as to what I absolutely should never not do. Because that’s when thinking is involved, and AI doesn’t think.
OK, here’s a real life use case, small time as it is, that has nothing to do with anything rarefied.
I have a TCL Android TV that, after some “unapproved measures”, runs without a Google account - FLauncher as the front end, telemetry blocked, home media streaming, YouTube ad-free. The yar har har works.
Two days ago the kids come in. TV’s not working.
Jellyfin: fine. Nova Player: fine. Stremio, YouTube, anything hitting the net: dead.
We’d had a brownout that day, so I figured the router was scrambled. Reset it, re-added the network… and YouTube now launches, plays for 30 seconds, then hard-locks. Just weird JSON vomit and then dead.
At that point I’m thinking the TV is fried. Options:
factory reset and reinstall the workarounds - 2-3hrs of pain-in-the-ass fuckery
crawl the net decoding cryptic error codes,
take it in for repair
fall down a TV diagnostics rabbit hole.
Instead, I chose option 5)
I told my local LLM: "This TV is on this IP. This laptop has ADB access. I’ve given you MCP tools with ADB libraries. Here’s the issue, here’s what I tried. Check prior history of what I did, figure out what’s wrong and fix it, or tell me the WiFi is fried so I can repurpose the tv.
If it looks like the brownout caused memory corruption, factory reset, adb stream install the back up .apks, sign in my accounts, get it back up and running.
Failing that, if it’s looking like a hardware issue, push diagnostic tool, test tv and tell me which part/s I might need, as well as likely part costs using eBay or Amazon. I’m happy to spend $50 on this shitbox and not one cent more.
Present everything as markdown in usual folder, using house style. Ping me on my phone when you’re done with the TL;DR"
The agent ADBs in, pokes around, tests the WiFi, and figures out the brownout had corrupted the date and time.
Wrong clock = certs flagged as invalid = no net.
It reset the time. Everything comes back.
Could I have twigged it myself?
Eventually. But the agent already had the tools, knew the TV’s prior state, and had a record of what I’d already tried.
It could’ve reflashed the TV, sideloaded all my apps, re-signed into my accounts - the whole lot - if needed.
This is not the only time I’ve had real world use of my local, and it had very little to do with “writing functions”.
I had a problem. Over time, I’d stored enough context in the llm so that it would do what I would have done, faster.
People that call these things “spicy autocorrect” are demonstrating a skill issue.