I can't agree more. I was once catching a flight, went to my gate and found no one there and the flight status monitors saying "Cancelled". I couldn't find an agent at any desk, so went back out of security to check-in to figure out what was going on. The agent proceeded to act like I was the biggest idiot in the world for leaving the gate because "we don't control those boards, your flight isn't cancelled, the gate was changed". So I had to run back through security to barely catch my flight.
Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.
> Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.
Ugh, the industry still needs to do so much work to this end. There are good shops out there, fwiw, but the elitism is real. Totally counterproductive for a means of conveyance that is so elegantly classless (in the positive, egalitarian sense).
I design and build things 100x[0] more complex than any bicycle, yet I don't know the jargon and feel like an idiot when I got into my local bike shop to ask simple questions. They are mostly nice and understanding, but the jargon and elitism is still very real that my wife doesn't like going there.
[0]though adjusting the tension spring on the brake levers still puzzles me sometimes... Looser should mean it travels more when you squeeze and release the brake lever, right? Stiffer spring has less displacement for a given force. Not quite. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/canti-direct.html#parallel
There was a focused effort to "professionalize" the hobby by researcher (crank) John Forester. Thousands of cyclist deaths can be attributed to his efforts, which included promoting "serious" cycling over accessible and casual transport, and personally destroying early plans for widely-available bike lanes in California a la in the Netherlands. Though not as infamous, you can think of him as a mini Moses.
I bought my wife's bike, which she'd purchased back in England while on a fitness kick, to a local shop in Manhattan for a brake service years ago. I have never forgotten the interaction: the hipster douche who greeted me launched into a multi-minute tirade about how Decathlon was "ruining cycling in Europe" and how I was complicit in doing the same in the USA by bringing this abomination into his store.
I'm pretty sure I know who is more responsible for ruining cycling.
Fortunately my local shop in the suburbs here couldn't be more different. They're patient and lovely with my kids, efficient and non-condescending with my wife, will even send a little car to your house to collect a broken bike for service - whether or not they sold it.
That's interesting. I have a Decathlon bike (UK) and was thinking there's not much elite jargon or such like and they are quite straightforward and reasonably priced for fixing things. Different strategy I guess.
They are probably a good choice if buying a bike as they are reasonably cheap but have decent availability of spares and servicing unlike no name Chinese bikes.
Yeah they're basically fine. The hipster's main complaint, I think, was that Decathlon was very big in France and that size was causing local bike shops to close. So I have some sympathy for the argument, but certainly not the way it was presented.
Catering exclusively to snobbery is everywhere in commissioned sales.
The only bike shops that aren't this way are going to be relatively small and new establishments where the owner is the only guy there. Do not expect the advice or inventory to be all that great.
If you just want the advice, catch the salesman that he's eventually forced to hire when they're off work at the bar.
Speaking about elitism/classless - in some german towns, there are more and more non profit self help bike repair places. Good concept I think, but sadly not for E-Bikes it seems. At least I was told that much, so I had to start getting my own repair gear.
Most of them live and breathe biking. They choose to make close to minimum wage to "do what they love", they don't own the store. I think it's genuine excitement and enthusiasm that you take as elitism. Often, it's a big part of their identity... "how could anyone else _not_ care as much"?
I used to bike with a few bike shop employees and they were only in it to eke out a living doing something adjacent to the thing they love, selling bikes was not their passion, riding them and talking about the tech was.
At least 10 years ago, wages in the whole sector were pretty low, so you'd only work there if you really wanted to and valued perks like buying bikes at wholesale (hey, that's half off) and having access to tools or a mechanic buddy.
I'm very familiar with the type of people you're talking about and they're not the elitists I'm talking about. There's a separate segment that, while they may also live and breathe biking, use their specialist knowledge to gate-keep and make people not on their level (customers) feel "less than". It's very shortsighted, because independent bike shops can't afford to be turning off customers- these kind of experiences push people to corporate shops (e.g. Trek), which at least have formalized oversight/training in how to treat customers.
What do you actually mean? Bikes have parts with names that are not common knowledge, do they use these names instead of showing you pictures or something? It's same with every trade: a car mechanic, a carpenter, a plumber etc will use the proper names for the things they work with. If you don't know what these names mean - just ask.
I'm not sure what you mean. My comment isn't about people using proper terminology- that's not gatekeeping. By gatekeeping in this context I mean things like being dismissive to people because they have a lower-end bicycle or treating them like they're stupid because they didn't know not to use WD-40 on a bike chain. Experts that use their narrow field of authority to demean rather than to educate/assist.
I see. It's how they stay in business - even if they pay minimum wage to the mechanics they are still not going to make rent servicing Walmart/Amazon specials. And even if the owners agreed to pay the labor/parts, which are more expensive on these than on bikes from reputable manufacturers and definitely more than the bike itself costs, they are still going to be priced out of their insurance in the long run (especially on Amazon e-bikes).
My auto mechanic doesn't expect me to know what a catalytic spanner housing is. I say "it's going WUMP WUMP WUMP when I turn left at highway speeds", and he diagnoses it.
> Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shop
This is my personal favorite story about bike shops (from circa 2008).
At the time, I both lived and worked in Manhattan. I was lucky that biking was an option for commuting but the only bike I had was a 20 year old Giant Acapulco (not a fancy bike at all).
I worked down in Tribeca and one day on the way to work my shifters just broke. Thankfully, there was a bike shop near work so I dropped of the bike in the morning and said I would be back that afternoon.
Fast forward to the afternoon and I come in to pick up my bike (as I assumed it was an easy fix and they would just charge me). The repair counter guy looks at my ticket, checks something and says he has to go get the manager. This is somewhat confusing as this was a simple fix or repair.
The manager comes out and several of the staff are arrayed behind him. Now I'm a mixture of concerned and fascinated as to what could possibly have happened to my bike given this deployment of bike shop personnel.
Manager: "Sir, the repair for your shifters is going to cost $40"
Me: "Ok, is there an issue with that?"
Manager: "Well, a quality used bike would cost you about $60 so we weren't sure how you would want us to proceed"
(I should add that the staff behind him all seemed as though they were holding their breath here).
Me: "That's cool. I'm good with the repair"
Everyone visibly relaxed, the manager turned around, pointed at one guy, then turned back to me and said "Your bike will be ready tomorrow."
My only thought on this level of nervousness is due to the shop being near a lot of investment bank offices that had a very type A guys who were also into bike racing. I myself dealt with a lot of those folks so it's not hard to imagine the shop staff assuming I would be that way too.
I had in internship in San Francisco and had a ~$100 bike. My bike seat and post were stolen one day. I didn't know anything about the "levels" of bikes shops, so I just went to the nearest one. Turned out to be extremely high end, probably not a single bike under $5k. The guy I talked to was so helpful, rummaged around there storage room for 20 minutes, and found me a used seat & post they had down there and just charged me $10.
I had an older/seemingly quite skilled bike mechanic look at my bike, who was happy to deal with my vague gestures about squeaky doohickeys and answer any questions. They knew enough to know what normal people don’t know, though, and how to get from there to what matters.
I think the sort of lingo-centric scoffing “expertise” is a defensive posture that near-novices tend to take, to scare off further questions. You see it in every field, and we should all be careful not to replicate it in our own.
sadly, the best way to get data on flights it to use the airlines app - not anything you'd find at the airport
also, it's easiest to use that same app for the boarding pass too these days
once I printed them out (with the provided pdf) thinking it would be easier, the printed paper didn't work and they said I HAD to install and use the app or go back to a kiosk and use one of their printouts and lose my place in line...)
Oh the last minute gate change is always ridiculous. I never find it happens at really busy airports either. It's always at the airports that have around 40 gates but only around 6 flights an hour.
I wish bicycle shop workers all the best, but man, they really don’t want to have your business… Everything is sold out, all maintenance is expensive, and there’s never any helpful way to do anything.
There are quite a few comments here talking about how comparing images from feb/march isn’t useful. Here’s data on what’s going on. This snowtel location is within the Utah picture in the article.
Where can I find similar data for the Columbia River basin? That's where we're going to see large impacts on hydropower production come mid-to-late summer, I suspect. Impacts for the PNW and CA.
I've been vibe-coding a Plex music player app for MacOS and iOS. (I don't like PlexAmp) I've got to the point where they are the apps I use for listening to music. But they are really just in an alpha/beta state and I'm having a pretty hard time getting past that. The last few weeks have felt like I'm playing wack-a-mole with bugs and issues. It's definitely not at the point others will be willing to use it as their daily app. I'm having to decide now if I keep wanting to put time into it. The vibe-coding isn't as fun when you're just fixing bugs.
Genuinely curious: are you actually vibe coding (as in not writing or looking at the code) or are you pair programming with a current model (eg. Sonnet or Opus) using plan -> agent -> debug loops in something like Cursor?
I think it's great that you've gotten back into coding, even if you're hands-off for the time being.
However, I strongly urge you to leave not touching the code behind as a silly self-inflicted constraint. It is pretty much guaranteed to only get you to about 40% of the way there for anything more than a quick prototype.
Hardcore cyclists can confidently ride without touching their handlebars, but nobody is talking about getting their handlebars removed. It's just a goofy thing that you might try for a few seconds now and then on a lark.
This has been exactly my experience too. I switched from Spotify to Plex, but discovered there really isn't a music focused desktop player. So I vibe coded one, exactly how I want my music player to work (albums not playlists/tracks as the central item). I was so happy with my desktop app, I built a mobile version to use instead of PlexAmp. There are some bugs I'm ironing out, but they are both I've stopped using PlexAmp and Spotify entirely.
I very much like the no LLM output in communication. Nothing is worse than getting huge body of text the sender clearly hasn't even read. Then you either have to ignore it or spend 15 minutes explaining why their text isn't even relevant to the conversation.
Sort of related, Plex doesn't have a desktop music app, and the PlexAmp iOS app is good but meh. So I spent the weekend vibe coding my own Plex music apps (macOS and iOs), and I have been absolutely blown away at what I was able to make. I'm sure code quality is terrible, and I'm not sure if a human would be able to jump in there and do anything, but they are already the apps I'm using day-to-day for music.
I often give ChatGPT simple tasks and it gets them wrong. Yesterday I took a picture of a video game and told it I was stuck, only to be given instructions that lead down a bad path in-game.
I also often retest new models with tasks old models failed, and see some improvements. I really liked “format this SQL generated by my ORM and explain it” last week.
I honestly have no insight on if the tasks it is failing to do are right around the corner or if they are decades away.
Great question - similarly, I've seen posts recently (Fly.io's comes to mind) where people are talking about how "swarms of AI agents are using our service".
I'd love to learn more about what that actually means - does that mean tool usage from LLMs? Cursor agentic mode? Command-line hints for how to do a deploy?
We're entering an era where PR/the press is talking a lot about "AI agents" and I'm not sure that fully matches with the reality of what's going on out there en masse (at the moment).
I would if I didn't think people on the selling side were paying to get in my shopping basket. In that case, it feels like it would be too easy to get ripped off. Knowing how the world works that is exactly what will happen.
Me: "Chuck and Lisa are coming over tonight with the kids. Find me a recipe for dinner they'll all like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it. Remind me to turn on the pellet grill if we're using it."
It: "It looks like it's going to be a beautiful afternoon. How about reverse seared tri-tip? There's a sale at FoodMerchant..."
This is a deceptively difficult problem. Food is incredibly messy -- grocery delivery is very far from being a solved problem even with a human in the loop. You have to deal with stockouts and sensible replacements, and driver/picker error, and quality variance. Quality variance is a huge issue in perishable categories and a major reason why foodtech is tremendously difficult (and fun, IMO).
Simple quality variance examples: banana ripeness. Or size of items that can only be ordered by each instead of by lb. Or one of the two onions you needed looking mostly fine on the outside but rotten on the inside.
As an experiment, try ordering all the ingredients to make a specific recipe several days in a row. You'll tend to hit an failure rate between 15-30%. That failure rate is usually fine if you're just restocking for home -- you can always pick up milk/sugar/whatever tomorrow -- but it's pretty awful if it means that something like 1 in 5 of your dinner plans are ruined or you have to leave your guests to rush to the store to pick up some missing ingredient
Also: the LLM will need to be aware of your home inventory, unless you're fine with it ordering lots ingredients you already have
So there's lots of hidden complexity here. If they turn this on, it will be a fun party trick that will work once in a while, but getting burned with ruined plans causes people to churn out fast.
all you've done is outline a series of mildly tricky but completely solvable problems to a use case that most humans would find incredibly useful. its very strange that you cant extrapolate 5 years down the line and see that this is completely reasonable.
Underestimation of the problem space is why foodtech is a tarpit for tech companies. Many have tried and failed to solve these very problems over decades. I don't blame you, to a green outsider the food industry seems like it would be simple, but the devil is in the details. I'd love for you to prove me wrong though
None of this is to say that LLMs have nothing to offer here. There would still be value in being able to tell an agent "Here's my list, get this ordered for me". But being able to say "find me a recipe for dinner that my guests will like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it" without getting burned every other time is actually a much harder problem.
I tend to agree with you overall. Think about a small case study with avocados; what’s the confidence level you could order 3 avocados that you need to use for a recipe upon delivery and that you’d be satisfied with the quality and ripeness level? I’d put it at probably 20%, which means it’s a non-starter.
Literally tonight I ordered heavy whipping cream, strawberries, and biscuits from Doordash's dashmart store to make strawberry shortcakes, having forgotten about this thread. Until I saw the whipping cream was puffy and expired nearly a month ago. Haha
10lbs of ribs ordered at the pickup only bbq shop an hour away. 20 gallons of coleslaw ordered from another place delivered to your old address. It sent an improper command to your smoker which is now targeting 900F for the next 20 hours. Perfect for your party of eight people.
Don't get me wrong, I truly agree there will probably be a point things will be an agentic future. The same chain of events could have been said about booking travel arrangements a couple of decades ago. But until the rest of meatspace actually moves towards those things being normal these things are still in the realm of fantasy on average.
Did I give a number? I just said "until the rest of meatspace actually moves towards those things being normal". Is that next year? 5 years? A decade? More? I don't know. But it's not going to be normal tomorrow, I'm pretty certain of that.
I realize you probably wrote that yourself, but that apology is way too short. You're also missing the context where the previous recommendation was the same sourdough.
Buying, absolutely not. But I could see a use case of describing your requirements to a product in natural language and it searches matching products and finds places to get them. So using the AI for the thing it's good at: transforming natural language. And not for what it's bad at: making reliable decisions.
I use AI to explain brand options in spaces I'm not well versed in (for example, I don't really know how to trust Home Depot's positioning of certain brands, and I just don't trust their store purchasing teams as much as I trust Costcos or Targets). It does OK. It gives me a list that I can branch out and Google from.
I had two friends give their credit cards to ai agents nearly a year ago and were flabbergasted that anyone else in the group wasn’t immediately hyped to adopt the technology, much less have a problem with it
Pizza and shit on Amazon from what I recall. They had some belief that any mistakes “would be fixed” with no further explanation or really ability to even respond to further questioning on who would be doing the fixing, why they would be fixing a mistake caused by someone else’s complete lack of fear of risks, or how that “fix” would mechanically function
Yes, I use LLMs to help me buy gifts for friends. It works really well. You type in their personality and interests and a price range and you get several good ideas.
Maybe a naive question but I don't really understand the why of this? Why do I need ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence? Shouldn't Apple Intelligence just do what it's asked? Is that Apple saying it's Apple Intelligence isn't that good? Is this some business dealings I don't understand?
It sort of parallels setting a default browser on your phone. Do you want to use Safari or Chrome? Do you want to use Apple Intelligence or OpenAI? But that's really not what it is, because everything is still funneled through Apple, then to OpenAI.
my understand is that apple intelligence aims to be a tiny model that runs locally, and when it identifies that a request is complex it sends it off to chatgpt
though it looks like this is just the first of many 'extensions' that can be added to apple intelligence
Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.