Asklemmy

Regarding the job application, most companies and sites are using shitty AI to rummage through the piles of resumes they receive.

The whole job application process is frankly one of the worst real world use of most technologies, not only AI

I've used it to help me set up a home server. I can paste text from log files or ask about something not working and it tells me what the problem is. It gets things wrong a lot, but this is the perfect low risk use for AI....for sending me in the right direction when I have no idea why things aren't working. When it's completely wrong, it doesn't really matter.

The real test for AI is: "does it matter when it is completely wrong". If the answer is yes, then that's not a suitable use for AI.

Creating low-effort images for ideas that don't warrant effort, like silly jokes.

I see it as a toy. No different from the Slinky or Silly Putty I had as a kid. Just something to play with.

I self host Deepseek R1 and it's been pretty helpful with simple Linux troubleshooting, generating bash commands, and even programming troubleshooting. The thinking feature is pretty cool and I do find myself learning stuff from it.

What took it from gimmick to actual nice to have for me is when my jerry rigged home network broke and wouldn't connect to the internet. Having what is entially an interactive StackOverflow/ServerFault running on a local machine was really helpful.

Running the model locally makes it easier to not overly rely on AI because of the limited token rate.

Inspiration for writing emails, letters, text messages. I always check what the thing wrote though.

I'd love to have an AI assistant that does shit like call service providers and wait in queue and take care of business for me

My take on it is that it's just a tool, and as with most tools you can use it in a sensible way that's positive, although many people choose not to. So as an example, I work in a creative field and I see a lot of people relying on it to do their creative work for them, which I don't really agree with. What I use it for is kind of like an assistant to handle all the admin crap that usually gets in the way of doing creative stuff. So sometimes you have to write form letters, grant things etc. - basically formal stuff that wouldn't require any creative thinking if you did it by yourself anyway, but still eats up time and brain power. I just give that stuff to the AI, make sure it sounds vaguely presentable, and send it off. I could also see a use case for it in areas where I'm weaker like marketing my stuff, maybe for at least coming up with an outline strategy of some sort, although I haven't really tried that out yet.

Essentially, AI will do your creative stuff for you if you let it, or you can just use it to handle the day-to-day piddly crap to free yourself up to do the creative stuff yourself. It's up to you really.

LLMs trained exclusively on documentation and ran locally seem like they'd be nice. Basically the next step in search algorithms. Do note that I am not talking about having an AI summary at the top of every web search page, that's harmful.

In short, teaching myself simple stuff.

For engineering... Get me a script that calculates the length of a window based on a similar size. Or calculate the tip velocity of a turbine blade given the speed of the gas going into it and the diameter of the turbine. Basically things we would have to take a month to design so as to answer other questions. Cuz nobody pays you to make quick calculation tools.

I used it to extract thousands of rows from tables in PDFs and generate enumerations for them in various programming languages. I had to do some pre-processing with the Python script, and review all the output to make sure it didn't screw up, but it saved me a lot of time.

For image gen I don’t have a good use but it is very complex which means sometimes I can just lose an hour or 2 fumbling around in a complex network of nodes.
What I found fascinating was how strangely good the results were when I created an image, then fed the result back as input, and repeated that process.
The only useful thing I used image gen for was creating references for an artist to create a PFP for me that looks rad as hell.

As for LLMs, also not really. I think about 90% of the time LLMs either give a useless or just wrong answer. I can’t seem to find the thing that LLMs are supposed to be good for. One thing all LLMs I tried have failed consistently at was finding a movie from a vague description I gave.

I don't use it for writing code because that's what I love but I use it for documentation and other stuff I hate.....😂

Best (or at least most addictive) use of AI I've seen so far is https://anycrap.shop/

It's good for rapid output of plausibly human text that can then be sorted or assessed for adequate validity or utility. That's all.

I used to spend days rotoscoping people in videos. Generative infill for background painting and automatic rotoscoping have saved probably a year of my life at this point. Image generation relies on CLIP, which needs a language model for conditioning.

I have a workflow that translates English srt files to my desired target language. It’s a great use case bc LLMs are proficient at picking up the nuances of language translations, especially related to idioms and the like.

I think there are many thousands of folk in fields beyond IT that use it all the time. It's by no means perfect, but for many of us managing teams or doing boring AF admin, working with procurement, writing user documentation or trying to navigate basic system configs then it's immensely useful.

I have some Hone Assistant automations, that creates some todos in Habitica for me. These todos are ai generated, so they sound like quests in a rpg 😎 this really motivates me. Also it's funny

I ask for information sometimes that I cannot find in few minutes of googling (I use a lot of this information in writing fiction). I generate images once in a while for role playing and storywriting. (Not sure if it is AI but) I turn some text over to speech, to listen at my stories.

bash scripting, light python programs, fixing software and hardware issues, learning Japanese, learning other things, writing applications, all the boring stuff and stuff need extreme repetition or data mining. Ideas comes from me, work is done by machine.

I had ai write a python script for me that checked a directory for zip/rar files that don't also have video files, unzip them and if it fails retry at a doubling interval. It would have taken me an hour or so, took the ai 5min+15min of me fixing it. I also had it add logging which is definitely something I wouldn't have been arsed to add otherwise.

It isnt very helpful at my day job writing professional code though, and I dont think someone who didn't already know how to do it themselves could make use of it.

We have a got at work that’s trained on all our internal docs and handbooks. It’s useful because you can ask it operational stuff like, “how do I request time off?” or “when are performance reviews?”

It’s good for stuff where you might not know who to ask or where to find the answer on internal stuff

I took AI courses in college and it was fun to learn about then when it was a bunch of toy examples that showed the potential of these systems, but it was clear enough to anyone in those classes or doing that research how not ready they were for real applications because of all the known flaws with how model training worked. And then some ceos just ignored all that and started blowing up the bubble.

So my answer is the research models that could play video games kinda good. Everything after that was getting ahead of ourselves.

I use notebooklm to act as my research assistant when it comes to labour law and union contract. Claude has helped significantly with compiling the chapters for my upcoming book. Deepseek has created several courses for me to further refine my skills and education.

1 - usually they come up with bullshit for me, not dissimilar to the seo slop.

2 - same as 1, its easier to google and at least know where the info is coming from.

3 - i will just machine gun apply to everything. they are the ones making it hard on us/themselves. i'll let them filter their candidates.

I've tried learning digital drawing before, but my programmer brain finds prompt engineering to be much more intuitive, so i've been doing that a lot lately.

Also its surprisingly good at upscaling in "image-to-image, 0.1 strength" mode. I thought I would need a dedicated upscaling mode for that. The result looks noticeably better than with normal bicubic upscaling.

I've found lots of great uses. I find LLMs are great for grammar and spellchecking, acting as a sounding board, doing translations, writing shell scripts, digging through unfamiliar code bases, figuring out configurations for tools, finding relevant stuff in large documents, and they can be helpful for coding in languages I'm not well versed in.