I found Gemini to keep asking the same follow-up questions regardless of my responses. In discussing a health topic, it repeatedly offered recipes for healthy snacks - 4 times, before I finally affirmatively said “no, I do not need snack recipes.” It dutifully stopped. Not quite clickbait, but it had very clearly decided where it wanted the conversation to go.
At least with Gemini, I found the trick is to add anything in any system instruction about a task list. Then the follow-up prompt will always be, do you want to add a task for that? Which is actually useful most of the time.
I had this experience when I was trying to find an apartment - multiple different buildings very clearly had AI-generated responses. (To all you builders out there: quick replies are great. Instant replies are suspicious.)
I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?
This is more or less the go-to standard in the usa. One property manager handles possibly hundreds in an association, or dozens of townhomes, and will refuse to speak to you directly, except through a maintenance request system. Its incredibly depressing
The electrical panel beeps an alarm constantly. Sent an email to the property management company. Guy comes over and presses a button to silence it for 24 hours. Rinse repeat for months on end. No method of escalation beyond the automatic replying inbox. I’m fine. twitchtwitch Welcome to 21st century distopia!
Whatever that panel is responsible for, that thing isn't working properly, its just set to be silent temporarily. Find out what regulatory body in your town deals with that panel's responsibility, contact them telling them that of the issue and say that you have contacted them when you submit your next ticket.
I had some serious struggles with the delinquent landlord and property owners, and the dangerously incompetent builders that plagued our building in Alameda for years. While they were not always legally empowered to come and stop the skulduggery, the Alameda city council offices of planning and compliance were the only people who consistently and professionally responded to phone calls and emails and were available if you went to their offices. People complain about public servants, but at least in Alameda they were really good people doing their best.
The Republicans have spent 40 years with their intentional policy being to make government services worse so that the Republicans can then point to that and say 'we need to get rid of government'.
It's hard for government to function well when half of it is trying to sabotage itself. The fact it works as good as it does after 40 years of that is a tribute to public servants.
Generally public sector employees are pretty good. Demonizing them is part of the movement to tear down the machine of state that we spent the last few hundred years building, so that a select few can grab chunks of the burning wreckage on the way down.
Call your building's insurance company. That will get you a very precise response pronto because they're going to use this as an excuse not to pay out if anything should happen to the building.
Minutes of HOA is where I would normally get that kind of info. They have to justify the amount you pay and the insurance invoice is normally divided across all of the tenants.
I don't know what you're trying to achieve with your endless stream of 'but' 'but', but in general if there is a problem you find the right door to escalate and you keep bugging them until they fix things.
Resetting an alarm is going to look 'real good' if at some point the place burns down and for sure the building is insured somewhere and for sure that information is something you could dig up. If there is no unit owner and no HOA then multiple tenants will need to band together and get something going, initially we weren't talking about tenants at all, you brought that up and since then you've been tilting at windmills because nothing satisfies your needs. Obviously I won't be able to come up with workable scenarios for each new restriction that you impose because you can keep that up forever.
I'm not in the 'oh, I will just give up because I can't be arsed to solve this safety issue' group, if it really is an issue - and I'm going on the assumption here that it is - then someone will care about that. The key is to locate the someone and then to state your case, and when one method doesn't work to come up with another one that gets you closer.
Learned helplessness is not a solution to anything.
What a weird comment. I don't know what you're trying to achieve with your endless stream of useless suggestions but @arctic-true stated above that they're an apartment tenant.
Called the fire department's non-emergency line. Got a bot. The bot sent out someone who said the noise isn't a safety issue, and left.
Called the police department's non-emergency line. Got a bot that told me it's a civil problem and that there's nothing they can do.
Scouted out the fire department and chatted up the fire chief in person while he was walking back in after lunch. He was very concerned about all of this (finally, progress!) and called the management company while we stood there, but his call was answered by a bot that said someone would be out in less than 24 hours to silence the noise again.
Yes oh my god. I'm trying to rent right now and the application has me doing this fucking approveshield bullshit where they request every document you've ever had and direct access to your bank account before they'll approve that I'm not a criminal or liar. Whatever happened to bank statements?! Why does some random company need to know that my closest grocery store is kroger and i went to miniso for my girlfriend birthday, among hundreds of other small details of my life. And they weren't even satisfied with that, i had to send in a picture of my driver's license (standard these days) but the webpage opened up a qr code, to open on my phone which took me to the appstorr to download some other bullshit app to give every single permission and piece of my data to! I JUST WANT AN APARTMENT, I'VE DONE IT DOZENS OF TIMES, WHY ARE YOU TREATING MY LIKE I'M ON THE FBI MOST WANTED!
This is just an artifact of the legal environment in many jurisdictions which makes it almost impossible to build new apartments (supply shortage) plus ridiculous tenant protection laws which make it nearly impossible to evict deadbeats.
You've got to follow incentives. It's almost certainly a code violation, which comes with escalating fines until it's corrected. The local building, zoning, or whoever-enforces-codes authority will be interested in collecting that if they can, and the owner will want to avoid them, so that's where I'd start.
Called legal aid. The bot that answered the phone submitted a complaint to the court and the management company which cited the correct historic documents and demanded compliance with them.
The management company bot responded to the court declaring that they're doing all they're required to do to correct the noise, and concluded with "the issue is not ripe for adjudication" -- whatever that means.
The court's bot agreed and binned the complaint "with prejudice" -- again, whatever that means, and sent me a fine for wasting their time.
Every day, the noise still happens.
And every day, the man from the management company still shows up to silence the noise.
I've come to know him fairly well.
It turns out that his name is William, although everyone calls him Bill. Bill is a nice guy who once studied computer programming, but the best-paying job he ever managed to get was slinging packages for Amazon back when that was still a thing that people did.
Most Thursday nights, if we don't have anything else going on, Bill and I go bowling at the AMF that's not too far down the road. It was his idea. We've been doing this about every week for long enough that I've learned to become a pretty proficient bowler. And while I still enjoy that part, we spend most of our time having a few beers and solving the world's problems.
A few months ago, we started talking about pinsetters and Bill mentioned that he read once that this was once a job that people did manually -- that rather than having a machine at the end of the alley, there were people behind the wall who would collect the scattered pins and put them back onto the painted dots on the floor. That sounded pretty archaic compared to the machines that I've seen doing this work for my entire life, but it seemed likely enough.
I started thinking about some other things about bowling: These days, we just walk in and our shoes are ready for us by the time we make it up to the front. We pick our own lane and just start bowling. After that, the machine sets the pins, keeps the score, and returns the ball. Pretty normal stuff.
And then, Bill pointed out the other people: There were a couple of small groups of people who were bowling, and one grizzled old fellah nursing what looked like a White Russian at the bar, but that was it. Nobody else was present; nobody actually worked there at all.
How long had it been since I asked for a pair of size 11 shoes, I wondered? When was the last time I talked to a bartender to order another beer? I hadn't paid for a thing using a card, or even carried anything like that with me for what seemed like eons. The self-cleaning bathrooms were certainly a welcome change, but how long ago were those put in and what happened to the person who used to clean them?
Neither of us could pick an exact timeframe for when these things changed. We both agreed that it wasn't important at the time, and that it seemed like a natural-enough progression.
Anyway, it was getting late again. After we put our shoes onto the mat for the sanitizer bot to deal with and started to walk out, the screens by the door told us what our tabs were, debited our accounts, and told us that it would see us next week.
I'm sure that Bill will stop by tomorrow afternoon to push the button and silence the noise from the electrical panel for another 24 hours, just like he always has.
I have not heard of a beeping panel box before. The only thing I can imagine are some newfangle AFCI or GFCI breakers that are either nuisance tripping, tripping from actual faults or plain defective.
I once called a hotel to book a room and the voice AI bot told me that it does not have a room because it is an AI model and does not have a physical location. I booked a different hotel.
A delayed response doesn’t mean it’s not automated, just that it wasn’t built to not feel automated.
I worked on an automated reply system like this previously and we had intentional delays with randomness as well as variance in our responses to make it “feel more human”.
Well, there can be an advantage in a bot too, if it can actually resolve some subset of problems faster and allows for more timely escalation of what is left. The problem is of course that is far too often not how they are used.
> The problem is of course that is far too often not how they are used.
The underlying problem with today's world is that people only want to solve their problem at the cost of everyone else. Everything else (like bot's, ai) is only a tool which is used on the way to enrich an individual.
I think it runs deeper than that. Customers are overly swayed by the up-front cost of a product or service. They don't want to pay a little more for a product that has good customer service, at least not until that customer service is legendary in the industry, and often not even then.
We could have the Swiss model, which is a bit of a culture shock: the customer support line is a paid service like a premium rate 1-900 number. It's very hard to wrap your head around as an American, but it does result in customer support that's very fast, and they either solve your problem quickly or not. And there is an incentive alignment, where you pay for the good support as a separate service, so it should not affect the base price of the good.
In a competitive industry, paid support would be a win-win. High support customers pay for the support they use, and less demanding customers don't pay anything. And if the product needs lots of support because of quality, then customers can choose a competitor.
> I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?
I will go out on a limb and suggest that they are probably happy that you’ve self-selected out of the process.
I’m not saying your expectations are unreasonable, but you have higher expectations than most consumers, and that ultimately becomes a pain in their ass.
I feel like it's not higher than most consumers, if I have a problem that is serious enough then that's the benefit and direct trade-off of renting - it shouldn't be my problem and my landlord should take it seriously. If everyone self-selects out we are just making the rental market even more hostile.
I do Rover for extra fun money and I get to watch other peoples dogs when I don’t have one myself right now.
Several folks have noted that my immediate reply threw them for loops. One told me she thought it was spam that I responded so quickly.
Rover has a “Star Sitter” designation and response time is one of the metrics. Star Sitters show up at the top of the algorithm’s results so I’m incentivized to keep it up. Plus; I absolutely despise waiting forever for others to reply and I want to make sure I get bookings, knowing there are MANY available sitters in my area.
I never would have thought it was spammy or suspicious AI behavior. Thank you for cementing it in my mind that maybe I’m a little too eager. Considering I’m entirely booked out until mid-October, I’m either doing something right or people are that desperate for a good human to watch their pup for them.
It's like the Google¹ advert “if your phone can answer your friends text, shouldn't it, instead of them waiting or you”. No, it 'king shouldn't. And if I find they are using automation to talk to me, I'll talk to someone else. Or I'll bot up myself and have my people talk to their people…
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[1] I think it was one of theirs, could have been one of the Android phone makers that has gone all-in on nagging me to give their bot something to do with itself.
> If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?
Most people fail to come to a conclusion by induction so they'll find enough customers.
In the past 20 years I've noticed a trend of companies making it harder and harder for me to give them my money.
For apartments, when I would look they wouldn't even bother to tour me half the time. I couldn't believe it.
I'm trying to give you thousands of dollars a month. In a CONTRACT. And you won't even show me the product I'm buying?
One place told me it was dark outside (4pm...), and they didn't feel comfortable touring me around the apartments. Jesus Christ, are we in Gotham? Many just ghosted my touring requests. One turned me down because it was raining (???). I would show up in person in the office, and many would still refuse to tour me.
> In the past 20 years I've noticed a trend of companies making it harder and harder for me to give them my money.
They want your money, they are just getting stricter on how they will accept it in order to limit liability and meet compliance, and also maximize profitability.
Much, much better tools these days to address both of those than there were 20 years ago.
> And you won't even show me the product I'm buying?
They'd rather rent to someone who is desperate enough to rent without seeing it. It's not that they don't want money, it's that they don't want your money, they want someone more abusable instead.
I see this as well. Part of the appeal of any crafting hobby is that it doesn’t matter and you can just mess around, but the flip side is that nobody is breathing down your neck to get it done and you can take the time to realize your vision.
The conditions are either an IPO or achieving AGI. I’d be curious to know how the contract defines AGI. If I recall correctly, the OAI-Microsoft deal just defined it as “AI-shaped tech that can generate $100 billion in annual profits”, which I think is actually close to the correct answer, insofar as we will have AGI when the markets decide we have AGI and not when some set of philosophical criteria seem to be satisfied.
> If I recall correctly, the OAI-Microsoft deal just defined it as “AI-shaped tech that can generate $100 billion in annual profits”, which I think is actually close to the correct answer
So if they hit 100 billion annual then it's AGI but if Kellogg's launches “FrostedFlakes-GPT" and steals 30% of the market it's no longer AGI at 70 billion?
I am much more interested in how headcounts compare to 2019 than to 2025 (let alone 2022). Certainly, this is not a comfort to anyone who is losing their job. But I don’t remember anyone panicking about an unemployment crisis pre-pandemic. A lot of people are getting their lottery ticket taken away, which is less than ideal, but we’ve got a long way to go before breadlines.
They may be victims of their own success here. At a certain point, if you can consistently make perfect images indistinguishable from reality, you’re done improving. All that’s left to do is make it faster or cheaper or better-aligned - but these aren’t going to show up readily in ways the typical user can understand.
One thing I notice is that the voices in video AI are absolute hogwash. Voice AI is great, video AI is great, but AI videos where humans speak give me the feel of really poorly dubbed foreign TV - the timing is not quite right and the facial expressions don’t always match up with the words being spoken.
When OpenAI starts requiring a payment, or showing an ad before it starts translating, will they continue? Or will they use the Google Translate app, which can do this locally? (Or for that matter Gemini or Grok or whatever?)
That’s a fair point. But in most markets you don’t have a half dozen competitors jumping down your throat trying to give you the same service ad-free. Netflix can introduce ads without major quitting because you can’t watch their content elsewhere.
Netflix has a moat in the form of IP licensing restrictions.
Google and Youtube are preinstalled everywhere. Instagrams like 10 minutes old and has a major competitor in TikTok that they had to have eliminated/captured by the US government.
People wouldnt stay with Netflix if there was a cheap, legal alternative with the same content library.
To go vertical they’d need to illustrate the value-add, a problem that the vertical competitors already have. Why use Claude for Accountants at $300/month when regular Claude will do the same thing for much less? The stock answer is that Claude for Accountants keeps your data more secure and doesn’t train on it. But a) I think the enterprise consumer is much less likely to trust a model creator not to stick its hand in the cookie jar than a middleman who needs the trust to survive, and b) the vertical competitors typically don’t use the absolute most up-to-date models in their products anyway, so why not just go open-source and run everything in-house? 6 months is a long time in tech, but it’s the blink of an eye in most white-collar professions.
Once the majority of work at a company can be done by AI, Anthropic has an alternative revenue stream to selling AIs to that company--directly competing with that company with a completely integrated AI system. There's of course many barriers to entry/various advantages of incumbents--but it's possible to see a world in which the company selling the AI has a huge advantage too.
The point is that in this hypothetical you can get public access to Claude Opus 6, but they internally use Claude Opus 7 (Accounting Finetune) which is both cheaper to operate and higher IQ.
So they (or their wholly owned subsidiary) can sell accounting services cheaper than anyone on the outside.
Regarding the diffusion/distillation time, I assume it gets harder to distill in the world where frontier labs don’t give API access to their newest models.
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