17 Comments
User's avatar
Kurt's avatar

Per the "it'll never be able to do that" debate...what was said and written only a few months ago is already...and clearly...outdated. I thought those assertions were premature, and I think I was right.

Moses Sternstein's avatar

"lawyers worrying about the billable hour" is not a thing. Billable hours are an imperfect solution to a highly variable and unpredictable set of services that requires neurotic attention to detail of the most boring stuff, where every chink in the armor is a potential exploit that can never be patched.

Yancey Ward's avatar

"Of course, in a competitive market with price transparency, the law firm that extends billable hours by doing without AI will not keep getting clients."

Lawyers will pass laws protecting their billable hours. Have a nice day.

Chartertopia's avatar

My jaded mind says it's more likely judges will discover new common law protecting billable hours.

Tom Grey's avatar

The Claude Code example from the Zvi, following the praise & experience of Dean Ball make me want to start playing with it this year. Unlike last year when I was underwhelmed with the current state.

My retired career programmer friend Ed has also started chatting more with chatGPT, finding it interesting and fun.

I’ll see how long it takes to make a karaoke version of an official video, maybe Yungblud’s The Funeral.

Lots of other personal projects, too.

luciaphile's avatar

Is there a setting in Gmail to turn off the brave new service of “summarizing” my banal emails? Because I much prefer food to data centers and dislike being an inadvertent driver of the latter.

E.g. “You said you read that he’s made a new documentary and the premiere is tonight and maybe she wants to go. Mary said she is tired and will wait for it to come to Amazon Prime.”

That I lived to see such marvels.

Handle's avatar

Some of the other email services are making it even harder to turn off.

Laura Creighton's avatar

I think protonmail is still good. But I run my own email server, so this is hearsay.

Chartertopia's avatar

Paywalled. Care to summarize it for us cheapskates?

Laura Creighton's avatar

Hmm. wasn't for me and I do not have a subscription. Let me see if I can do better...

Chartertopia's avatar

Huh. As soon as I see a popup wanting an email for a "free" subscription, and nothing obvious to click and make the popup go away, I assume a paywall. But I suppose there might be some other way to find it. Thanks.

Laura Creighton's avatar

I didn't get that, either but I have a pop-up blocker that might be responsible.

luciaphile's avatar

The link was good, I taught Gmail not to get smart with me, no more summaries or offer of summaries but it turned out having a primary inbox was a smart feature. So for now I’ve reinstated them … will consult dreddit.

luciaphile's avatar

Thanks for looking into it. I will try later tonight.

stu's avatar
1dEdited

"By the end of this year, the least important thing you will be able to do with frontier AI systems will be getting chatbots to answer questions, but this is still how most people will think of “AI.” Expect cognitive dissonance as a result."

Maybe the first sentence here is actually true but if it is, it's still unimportant. Even if it's how most people think about AI, it's not what anyone is worried about. They are most worried about it taking their job or maybe their children's job prospects. That doesn't result from a chatbot answering questions. Additional concerns include deep fakes, students using it to "cheat," and copyright/Nil/intellectual content.

I don't see how or why cognitive dissonance results. At least not from that issue.