Mobster

joined 5 days ago
[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 1 points 5 hours ago

Yes Mistral. Not too sure about the brand other than they are French, so chose over OpenAI.

Ultimate aim is to host my own local small model on phone or home server, but not quite there yet. Could then use for this and other purposes.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 1 points 11 hours ago

Yes, the screenshot was the first time I used it. Will know to edit in future

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 1 points 12 hours ago
[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 4 points 12 hours ago

Thank you for that. I thought it would be blocked where I live, but seems to work.

Here is a link to the source document

https://files.catbox.moe/jtmcb5.pdf

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 0 points 14 hours ago

yes you probably could just search ctrl+f. I'm quite lazy so imagined that if I could upload the document (46 pages PDF of companies and their brands), I could then just chat with the bot/or perhaps take a picture of a fridge/products and it could quickly give me the answer.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

not sure how to upload PDFs, sorry.

Edit: turns out I can’t upload PDFs to lemmy.

If you wanted to make a list yourself it’s a bit of a hassle but not too hard, I just searched for the Wikipedia pages for each of the following companies, type in something like “List of brands for [company name]”. The companies I picked were:

  1. General Mills
  2. The Coca-Cola Company
  3. Mondelez International
  4. Mars
  5. Procter & Gamble (P&G)
  6. PepsiCo
  7. Nestlé (not a US company, but have avoided for years)

Once you have the page you can just select the list directly from the page, copy, and then paste into a text doc or something. You could then search from it, and add to it as well. It may be a bit untidy, but search should still work.

Hope that helps, and sorry I couldn’t share the document directly and save you the hassle.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 2 points 14 hours ago

not deliberately, however when run it did automatically identify a brand (Hellman’s) owned by a multinational NOT in the list (Unilever). I hadn’t included Unilever in the source doc as it is British/Dutch. So it must have used its own knowledge base.

Perhaps it interpreted my preference as wishing to avoid multinationals? This is what it output:

“Based on the list you provided and the document, here are the brands you should avoid if you are following the list:

  1. Doritos: Owned by PepsiCo.
  2. Tropicana: Owned by PepsiCo.
  3. Mentos: Owned by Perfetti Van Melle, not listed in your document, but worth noting.
  4. Hellmann's: Owned by Unilever, not listed in your document, but worth noting.

The other brands you mentioned are not listed in the document as brands to avoid. However, it's always good to double-check with the latest information or packaging details, as brand ownership can change.”

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 2 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

May help if I clarify. The document is ingested into the chat, so acts as a local knowledge base. When I put some random brands into the llm it uses the info from the doc to respond.

I probably could manually search the document (ctrl-f), just find it easier to use the llm approach, especially if inputting in an unstructured/messy way.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 4 points 16 hours ago

Sorry, I’m not familiar with the reference.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Important perspective. Admittedly I use AI all the time for work so using it in other areas has become second nature (for bettter or worse!)

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 5 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

Agreed. I was speaking into the phone while looking in the cupboard, and this was how it recorded it.

 

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to share something that I’m hoping will help me when it comes to making better choices about what I buy. While this isn't about promoting European products in the first instance, it's designed to help me figure out which brands I currently use, but may need to avoid, so I can find better alternatives that are local, European, allied countries, or even values-led US brands if no other option exists.

Here's what I did:

  1. Got the idea from Reddit: I saw a post on Reddit with a visual of all the brands owned by big multinational companies. Really helpful to see the visual but there were literally thousands, and I wanted a text list I could feed into an AI chat as a reference document.

  2. Did Some Research: I looked up these multinational companies on Wikipedia which seemed to have a relatively updated list of subsidiary brands, focusing on the parent companies I wanted to steer clear of, like PepsiCo, Nestle etc.

  3. Cleaned Up the List: I used AI tool to organise everything into a neat PDF.

  4. Made It Easy to Use for me with AI: I added the PDF to a chat in Mistral so I can quickly check any products I see in my fridge or cupboard. The AI helps me spot any brands I should avoid. I can also just list the brands off using voice for ease/speed but accuracy suffers a bit. I may also be able to just take a picture but haven’t tried that yet.

The image is the output.

Anybody with access to a simple list and an LLM could do this. Been inspired by the excellent websites and resources others have made and posted here, which I will use to find alternatives - but I first needed to know where the problems were!

Im hoping this will make it easier to buy stuff that aligns with my values. Hope this makes sense and helps someone else too!

view more: next ›