And as far as checking CT images go, I do have a medical consultant. It is a question of curiosity, to see how capable LLMs are.

As far as researching Pubmed papers goes, I do what good PhD advisors do - use free labour if you have access to it.

Looks like I have set off your LLM allergy. Or is it simply an Altman allergy? Well, there's no accounting for taste.

Yes, I have a learning difficulty, you insensitive oddity! I don't understand that things like whey and sodium caseinate derive from milk if the entire ingredient panel is in Korean. And have you ever seen the *amount* of ingredients in Korean processed food? Pages! Your typical 'Whole Foods' product it is not.

  So ... I just tell the AI my allergy, take a picture and have it sort everything out and give me a yea/no answer. And move on to the next product. I could lovingly decipher Hangul or/and brush-up on food chemistry. But I don't like unnecessary cruelty, especially on myself.

:-) Different strokes for different folks. My 3-year old $200 Android phone does nothing of that sort you experience with the default camera app. Moreover, I don't have to interpret "denatured whey protein" as pertinent to my diary allergy -- the AI picks it up and warns me.

My experience has been to successfully use plain text to instruct AI LLMs to:

generate poetry -- even blending unrelated genres that I am sure no one attempted before)
summarize documents
research diseases, medication and side-effects
review CT scan images for issues of concern
generate tour itineraries
translate languages (Hebrew , Korean, ...)
explain code
generate code (Perl, Bash, VBA...)
generate an Excel document with ISBNs and book summaries from pictures of my physical library

That's general enough for me. It should be general enough for you too - LLMs pass the Turing test.

Like you, I have more own interest in my experience than OpenAI's or other AI vendor claims. And my experience has been to successfully use plain text to instruct AI LLMs to:

1. generate poetry -- even blending unrelated genres that I am sure no one attempted before)
2. summarize documents
3. research diseases, medication and side-effects
4. review CT scan images for issues of concern
5. generate tour itineraries
6. translate languages (Hebrew , Korean, ...)
7. explain code
8. generate code (Perl, Bash, VBA...)
9. generate an Excel document with ISBNs and book summaries from pictures of my physical library

That's general enough for me. It should be general enough for you too - LLMs pass the Turing test.

Yes, LLM AIs tend to behave like a skilled, over-confident intern, whose work is useful but must be double-checked. Call it slop if you want, but its useful slop. It got me past the initial inertial friction with VBA for my test analysis project. I had to correct flaws in code structure and parsing strategy. But it ended my 20-year procrastination. Now I have a 1000-line VBA codebase that I am familiar with enough to reuse in other projects.

You ask how does "checking multiple slop hallucinations against each other" help? Comparing two hallucinations will cause the "disagree" alert to light up, won't it? It's not like the two AIs are coordinating via seance.

I was in Bali, Indonesia earlier on, and OpenAI translated to Balinese. Also, OpenAI claims it can translate Turkmenistani food labels. And Google indicate Turkmenistan seems to be catching up in food labelling standards. Entities in the world move ahead of the pigeon holes we slot them in :)

Of course AI makes mistakes. That's why you must exercise your judgement. Also, use multiple AI to check each other's work where important.

Yes, 20 years. What can I say? I really hate VBA. They made me employee of the month after I turned it in.

If AI can translate between me to VBA, Balinese and Korean, what else could I call it but general purpose?

Hmmm..thanks.. isn't a microsoft account the default now for home users?

Dude, with that low a UID have you superceded mortal talk and moved on to communicating in Haiku?

I get your point. But my point is LLMs are truly general purpose. I don't need "an app for this" or "an app for that" or an app for something no one thought of yet. It is intellect on tap. If the question deals with general knowledge and logic, you can ask it and typically get a decent answer.

Standing in the Korean convenience store after my flight came in at night, searching for food after everything around had closed, I didn't need to research OCR and label translation apps for Korean products. And then interpret the output. I could take a picture, ask a 1-sentence question and get the answer I wanted. And do it for a couple dozen products. If I go next to Indonesia or Turkmenistan, I probably will be able to do the same thing there. And a few months ago, I used Claude to write a 1000 line VBA script for Excel. It analyses results of automated software testing and does 'bisection analysis' of results (comparing result before and after a change date). I had been putting this off for 20 years, because VBA is not my skillset.

I dunno about that bro..I am paying OpenAI and Claude subscriptions.

I've given them as much money in a year as I paid Google for a quarter century of use.

Having a general purpose intellect on tap is very handy. I was in Korea recently and it was handy to take pictures of product labels of groceries and ask AI if it contained the things.i was allergic to.
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If windows pop-up an unwanted app-store screen and I click on 'X' to close, am I an active user?

"Nice business you got there. It would be too bad if 2000 bad reviews happened to it"

As the other guy suggests - there are better ways. One is to trust neighbours over strangers.

So you have a browser plugjn or AI tool to review the reviews.

One heuristics is that eviews by a friend, or a friend of a friend (FoF), or a FoFoFoF.. get more credence the closer they are to you. Or the more their tastes match yours.

Of course, this requires some way to authenticate each review. But that could be as simple as a byline at the foot of each review. An identifier, followed by a digitally signed message hash.. automatically added by a browser plugin just after you click post.

The authentication could be based on the PGP web of trust model

Is this legal in the US? The driver receiving "turn-by-turn navigation on a small embedded screen.'" using AR glasses.

Won't that occlude some part of the driver's view of the windshield?

eSims are convenient when they work but they are an exercise in holding your breath, because if something goes wrong they say you cannot reinstall.

I just installed an eSim on an iPhone and had this frustrating episode a few hours before the flight. Eventually, a phone restart seemed to fix it.

I agree with you -- it's gotten too hard to make money in any sort of physical venue. But nickel and diming your customers does not solve the problem.

I think the biggest part of the problem is the increase in property prices, speculation and the resulting unpredictability of rents. For if you cannot predict rental outgoings in 3 years time with confidence, you will end up with a misconfigured offering.... too big, too small, too flash, too spartan, too much inventory, too little choice. I see so many owners over-investing and failing.

The right solution is to not have to pay rent at all. Own the property and then start a business. Or start a modest business with the aim of buying the land it's sitting on in a few years. When your cashflow is no longer subject to the vagaries of rental payments, you are in a much more stable place.

Too many business owners got greedy and cashed out on properties they owned. Not realizing that a physical business must operate somewhere and rents follow property prices. Many who bought a business also falsely assumed rents would stay low and didn't properly negotiate a discount in the purchase price to factor in higher rents in future.