Source (Bluesky)

TranscriptHere’s an example that Google’s Josh Woodward, VP of the Gemini app, Google Labs, and AI Studio, shared in a blog post about how Personal Intelligence can work. Google also put together a similar example in a video that I’ve embedded below:

For example, we needed new tires for our 2019 Honda minivan two weeks ago. Standing in line at the shop, I realized I didn’t know the tire size. I asked Gemini. These days any chatbot can find these tire specs, but Gemini went further. It suggested different options: one for daily driving and another for all-weather conditions, referencing our family road trips to Oklahoma found in Google Photos. It then neatly pulled ratings and prices for each. As I got to the counter, I needed our license plate. Instead of searching for it or losing my spot in line to walk back to the parking lot, I asked Gemini. It pulled the seven-digit number from a picture in Photos and also helped me identify the van’s specific trim by searching Gmail. Just like that, we were set.

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[–] 140 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Working so hard to find a problem for the solution they've invented.

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  • [–] 63 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    And they are going to destroy even the tiniest amount of progress we have made in countering carbon emission climate change. All progress complelely gone because their datacenters will use 10x more energy than we did before in a time where we should be looking to reduce our energy spending.

    They will literally destroy all of us for the sake of shortsighted billions to their already huge pile of billions.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    in a time where we should be looking to reduce our energy spending

    Data centers are definitely a problem, but all progress in curbing carbon emissions points toward increasing energy use. The problem (that has been put off for too long) is that power generation itself relies too much on carbon heavy products. We should have carbon neutral, or even negative, power generation by now, but it's been fought and put off for decades now, so this is what we get to deal with.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago

    people are forgetting how insanely power-hungry daha centers running crypto and HPC was/is. nevermind that all DCs were already replacing their equipment every third year. ai dcs aren't magically more power-dense, so blocking the building of new ones goes a long way.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago

    For some of the situations they put forward, if you just imagine that at one point they had a personal assistant do this for them in the past, then these stupid scenarios start to make more sense.

    They think it's great because it replaced the only underling they ever directly interacted with and they assume that's going to work with all the other jobs

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  • [–] 78 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    That screenshot is such pyscho behavior. "Our algorithm will access any and all data it can on you to answer your question, whether you ask it to or not! Isn't that great??"

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago

    I mean the reality is the major problem is that they already have all that data. This is just making you aware of the fact.

    I remember probably 12 or 15 years ago my phone popped up a notification informing I'd last been at a restaurant I was in a year prior and would I review / update the info about it...

    That's when I went and disabled location tracking (for whatever that's worth)

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  • [–] 60 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    i love people describing use cases for ai because it’s always like "a good use case for ai is incredibly niche situation that will happen to you like maybe once a year if we’re generous where a problem presents itself that could be solved very easily without ai"

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  • [–] 49 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Good thing the person working the tire counter wouldn’t be able to recommend tires or be able to look up the trim on your vehicle

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  • [–] 42 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Lol at the article, yes tyre shops are often extremely busy with very long lines and also the people in line would definitely not allow you the courtesy of taking 10 seconds to go check your number plate in the parking lot.

    These AI use cases people demonstrate are so braindead.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    yes tyre shops are often extremely busy with very long lines

    You can't get appointments at your tyre shops? I just book a slot in their agenda a few weeks before. Show up, put the car on the bridge, wait 15-20 minutes and I'm off.

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  • [–] 35 points 5 months ago

    Wow the article, giving up that much info and privacy just for a stupid 5 second convenient. Tyre size is available on the sidewall, car number plate should be the thing you remember and commited to your memory or taken picture and then put it on "favorite", tyre brand and type should be recommended by the shop that sell them instead of Gemini. Billion dollar project for this dumbass tech and dumbass public is buying it. Next we throw away our critical thinking so billionaires can control us very easily.

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  • [–] 27 points 5 months ago* (4 children)

    That's... Not how getting tires works? You pull up to whatever garage you go to, ask to get your tires replaced, and it's done in a few minutes with literally no other input needed (if it goes smoothly anyway). Even if you're going to a weird corporate place they're going to check over your car instead of asking you anything.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    with literally no other input needed

    Wait, you just let them put on whatever they can get the highest margin on?!

    There's a vast difference between different tire types in terms of stopping distance, wet handling, wear, road noise, comfort, ... When I walk into a tire place, you can bet I come prepared with a short list of tires that I'm willing to consider, and a pre-estimation of the price of those tires in my tire size.

    Also, the tire size is literally just 3 numbers, and it's literally there on the tire. Why wouldn't you know that about your car?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    There's definitely middle ground there, if you rock up to a tyre place near me they'll generally ask if you want a cheapo, mid range or premium tyre, you're welcome to preorder off the website or they'll get something for you if you have something in mind. Mom pootling around town in her 3 door euro hatch doesn't need a set of Toyos.

    I will say, it never ceases to amaze me the sheer number of no-name Chinese tyre brands that exist. I must've put 30 different brands of cheap tyres on cars over the years.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago*

    I mean there are multiple different ways tires get replaced. My process involves taking the bad wheel off of my car and having a friend drive me to the shop. The tire guy looks up the specs on my tire and I tell him to put the cheapest possible replacement on it. He takes the wheel in the shop, performs his profane black magic ritual (I have no idea how tires go on wheels), and comes out with a shiny new tire attached to the dusty old wheel, that I then take home and slap on my car.

    That said, there is no situation where you'd lose your place in line. Worst case scenario, the tire guy is going to walk out to your car with you to check what tires it needs

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  • [–] 19 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    I've bought new tires from all sorts of places and people, and nobody ever asked for my license plate number. Is this an American thing?
    In fact, these days, I simply order tires online and tell the company to deliver them to one of their many "partners," i.e. car repair shops. They notify me when the delivery is done, I leave the car there overnight and collect it the next morning. That's all there is to it.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I’m in Europe and some places ask you for your license number to auto detect what car you have. Helpful for less car minded people.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Exceptionally useful for the kind of person who knows they have a 2019 Honda minivan, but can't for the life of them recall whether it's a Passport or an Odyssey

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    I'll take them over self-proclaimed "car guys" any day. Useful idiots so confident in their skills that they insist that "any moron" can look up the headlights and wiper blades for their "Cummins", "Duramax", or "Hemi". These are the same ones who will also yell at the service manager because the technicians "under-inflated" their tires because they weren't inflated to the sidewall pressure. Hell, I've even had them insist that major issues that could cause an accident if not corrected are "perfectly fine". Honestly, it wouldn't be a problem except that everybody else has to share the roads with their rolling death traps.

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    It is someone with AI brain, so I can totally picture them walking into a tire shop expecting to buy tires without having brought wheels to put those tires on.

    If you don't know the difference between tires and wheels, ask your favorite LLM

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I understand the point, but in a real situation in 2026, it's likely the restaurant has a qr code menu, and with respect, equally fuck that.

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  • [–] 32 points 5 months ago (16 children)

    Shit, I get pissed off when the menu is behind a QR code i have to scan.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (15 children)

    I literally don't have a QR-capable app on my phone, they can direct me to a written menu if they expect me to order something.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (9 children)

    binary eye on fdroid barcodes and qr codes

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (8 children)

    Good example of an app that I intentionally do not install on my phone.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (6 children)

    It's not a technology standard that I want to normalize by acquiescence. QR codes can be used as social engineering anti-patterns, particularly against normies (Encode a shortened URL that sends your phone directly to malware), while the most common brick and mortar uses have been both anti-labor and anti-consumer. They're abused as a marketing tool that pretends to be novel while effictively just adding technological cruft and overhead to everyday life. I already have a URL bar on my browser and I would much rather just type your website into it myself.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    isolate your browser, use urldna.io and binary eye lets you see the link

    if you have a browser that downloads random content or even has download perms, what are you doing man

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (4 children)
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    literally doesnt put a dent on the actual insecurity of your browser if it allows you to download random stuff from redirect links

    if youve ever visited a website, if your browser was THIS insecure, it was probably more dangerous than a qr code

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  • [–] -4 points 5 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    I have multiple different phones, and none of them are capable of doing such. I’ve had to install a 3rd party QR code scanner app.

    All those phones are recent enough to still be used by a significant amount of people, so it’s not even an “ancient” tech thing, only very recently did it change.

    The only mobile device I have that has it built into the camera app is my iPad, for which I have no use case for actually scanning QR codes.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago

    Someone check Seattle FB Marketplace to see if he's selling 4 wrong-size tires yet.

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  • [–] 27 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Knowing gemini it told him the wrong size of tires and it hallucinated the options and the plates

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  • [–] 27 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    The number of competent experts who are impressed by an LLM wielded in their qualified field is as vanishingly infinitesimal as legitimate and justifiable invocations of the term ‘AI’.

    Those who have expressed the greatest enthusiasm for ‘AI’ are typically the farthest removed from actual, nuanced comprehension.

    It’s a grift economy built on statistically luke-warm, vibe lobotomised corpses.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I'm a professional that works with software dev and I can say that LLMs and all the agent stuff keeps flipping between "surprised at what it can do" and "oh another big sign that it's just a really fancy text predictor".

    At best, it has reduced the number of times I reach out to colleagues for a problem I solve myself in the process of explaining it and has helped me find obscure settings to fix obscure issues. For coding, I'm still not sure whether or not it saves time. It can write things quickly but it embeds all kinds of assumptions in there and might not even follow instructions.

    Like it's safer to think of it as a conversation partner who can pretend to be many different people, including experts in the topics you discuss, but also has ADHD so severe it can switch what it is pretending to be mid-sentence. Even when you ask it to explain what happened after the fact, it just makes up more bullshit because it doesn't have thoughts or awareness, it just predicts tokens.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I ask a question, they give me the wrong answer. I tell them they gave me the wrong answer. They apologize, and then repeat the same mistake in the next answer. Or they give me a different wrong answer. I eventually give up and solve it with a web search.

    I don't know if my questions are about really obscure stuff or what, but it's really annoying. Like, I know that they're only predicting tokens, but how hard is it to program them to go "Okay, we've already established that this pattern of tokens is wrong, so I'm not going to include it in the next answer".

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    They have no sense of "truth", it's a complex graph and weights that predict the most likely next token. You can change the output by doing training or adjusting the context by changing the prompt (also temperature that affects the randomness).

    The training data affects what it will predict, but if the training data includes a debate, then both sides get encoded into the weights and the context is what determines what "side" of the debate your response gets. It can't determine the truth; the truth doesn't even factor in to what its output is (even if it "talks" about the truth in that output).

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Not knowing your own licence plate number is indicative of being out of touch. Normal people need to know it to operate many parking ticket machines, when paying their registration, car insurance, parking in hotel car parks.

    I can imagine when you have assistants to do all this you might think it's a boon to have a digital assistant help you with basic world skills. Even just the arrogance of asking an LLM for tyre information instead of asking someone at the tyre shop.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    If you're a good company drone and get a leased car, you switch license plates every free years.

    The example is still bs where I live. You have to show your registration papers that has the license plate on it and they'll register the odometer in a database to prevent fraud. Using AI to get your odometer doesn't work.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago

    That blog post is pure hilarity.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Are there people out there that actually act like this?

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Yes, watch any kick streamer.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Why would I want to watch that?

    I barely watch streamers and I don't know much about kick, but isn't that where a lot of conservative streamers went?

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    It's the answer to your question. Yes, people are dumb enough that they treat AI as their own brain instead of attempting to find any information whatsoever, even when the information is directly in front of them. This phenomena is most visible on kick streams, where the dumbest possible people make more money than you ever will being a worse person than you (assuming you are not any of type of mentally ill that could be described as psychopathy) could ever be.

    You could also just visit anywhere on the west coast of the US where younger gen z happens to exist in public and wait long enough. You'll hear a 'hey gemini' within 20 minutes followed by the dumbest possible question to ever leave the lips of a non-AI human form.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago

    Agentic✨.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    So the AI deeply violates your privacy, then guesses everything based on that. Omg fuck no. Keep that photo scanning AI as far from any of my devices as possible. Fuck google for even thinking this is ok. Holly shit.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I hate when restaurants go the other way, with menus on your phone through a QR code. Obviously much more convenient than having a physical menu, which is why so many restaurants in the past printed their menus on tiny phone-screen sized booklets.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    QR code menus seemed to really take off when COVID was around, which made sense, but I guess restaurants got used to saving on printing costs and now they're here to stay.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago

    The only time this makes sense, is if they have a whole digital order thing going, not saying that I like that, but then at least its consistent. What I hate most is if the fucking qr code is just a link to their website, and not even the menu section. Might as well have a sign on the table that says "just google it" or something...

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Waiting for all the people who call Pizzacake's comics "strawmen" to flock to this post and do the same.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I just don't think her comics are very funny. She isn't really wrong but she is preaching to the choir a bit most of the time. That's why her comics get up voted so much.

    That said half the comments in any pizza cake thread is people complaining about pizza cake so I don't really engage with them that much.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    “Google’s AI keynote in 15 seconds”

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Can we talk about the Transcript feature? How does that happen? As a frequent mobile user subjected to people 1920x1080 full screen text grabs, I greatly appreciate it.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    Met a dude like this at an after party a while back.
    As soon as me and my friends came there this random dude had something out for me, never met him before, and I couldn't handle how much he was staring at me so I sat down and started talking to him. I'm a very unagressive person and shy away from even heated discussions, just wanted to see what the deal was and see if just talking would help the mood soften. Almost immediately he brings up the, then very current, thing about the EU voting about banning the words sausage, burger, filé etc. for non-meat products and he's fully on the side of that being a good thing. I don't agree but also never go into full on debate mode so I try to talk with him in an "interested about your views" way, ask about his experiences around it etc.
    And I learn real quick that he's the kind of person who tries to find every single clumsy word choice, small hole in an argument and then goes on a completely uncalled for rant and personal attack through that. But I've learned to just continue doing what I do, I want to discuss and talk and not act like I'm superior and go for personal attacks. Of course he can't stand someone not getting angry or trying to do the same things back so after a bit he whips out his phone and says "Ok, let's as ChatGPT about these things" and I have never felt so much like bursting out in demeaning laughter as I did then. He sits there and literally just reads the answers he's been given from the obviously very skewed towards his view questions he's written. I just look at him and let him continue for a bit then stood him and say that I'm very much not ok with this, if you're gonna start a debate over something you should do that based on your knowledge and experiences, at the very most bring up a Wikipedia article but not a fucming AI chat bot. His answer is literally "I'm a junior lab assistant and have tech skills, I know that these answers are 100% correct and based on all available information online".
    I couldn't even respond to that so I just say I need to take a leak and ask where the toilets are and actually went and joined some other random people, who were very nice to talk to and even discuss and debate things with.
    After about an hour and a half some of them needed to go home so we go into the room where he was sitting and he's having the same fucking debate with two other dudes who are sitting there just as bewildered and annoyed as I was, I sit down next to them and join another conversation and the AI bot dude stands up, looks at us 3 he talked with like he's disgusted by our existence and just leaves.
    So fucking weird, I actually feel sorry for him more than I dislike him. I hope he manages to climb out of that hole.

    Sorry for the wall of text and certainly some spelling errors, gonna have to come back and format and correct stuff later tonight.

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  • "I know that these answers are 100% correct and based on all available information online"

    Okay, why'd he have to look it up, then? :p

    I know what you mean, though. Sometimes they get me. They'll say something like the Grand Canyon, a naturally forming geological phenomenon, is art, and I'm like... okay. We're operating from very different principles, here.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    More and more. My family members have started doing it and I'm afraid.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    dave, DMCA would like a word about your files 👁️

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    AI is basically the magic conch from SpongeBob. ALL HAIL THE MAGICAL CONCH

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I use it as my emotional dumpster

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  • [–] -4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    My friend uses "AI" to quickly find abnormal masses in radiology scans. If you're sharing contempt of "typical AI use cases" then you don't know how they're being used.

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