This is what we were building in 2018 with Ayvri, starting from 3d tiles with the aim of building a real-world view by using AI to essentailly re-paint and add detail to what was essentially a high-resolution and faster loading Google Earth (for outside cities, we didn't have building data).
We saw a very diverse group of users, the common uses was paragliders, gliders, and pilots who wanted to view their or other peoples flights. Ultramarathons, mountain bike and some road-races where it provided an interactive way to visualize the course from any angle and distance. Transportation infrastructure to display train routes to be built. The list goes on.
How many software engineers are also cinematographers or directors?
I know that AI will democratize these roles and everyone can be a director, but why does it make sense to use JSX as the means to do that? It would require people to learn a new skill.
There must be a better abstraction for creating video that provides the granularity of providing direction to individual objects in a scene that doesn't require someone to understand JSX.
I think the answer is in the tagline: AI Agent writes JSX, you get videos.
Sounds like a decent approach for today. LLMs are overtrained on JSX (Claude in particular, due to Artifacts feature IIRC being originally based on React), which makes them particularly good at translating from natural language to JSX, and that in turns makes JSX a decent choice for a structured description format.
JSX is just ugly Lisp anyway, so it's not half bad a choice for something that's structured, general-purpose, flexible and well-supported by tooling.
Peaceful protests do not work when the government that you are opposing shoots protesters in the street and/or jails & tortures them. Didn’t work so well in Syria either. Only the government has guns in Iran and they’d rather rule over a hellish cesspool of their own countrymen starving and drying than lose power.
And quite relevantly to the analogy, in Iran, the regime controls most of the economic links to the outside world, including the ability to convert the rial to dollars or euros.
When someone is arrested, the police can get a subpoena to enter your house, right?
There they can collect evidence regarding the case.
Digital protections should exist, but should they exist beyond what is available in the physical world? If so, why?
I think the wording of this is far too lenient and I understand the controversy of "if asked" vs "valid legal order", neither of which strictly say "subpoena", and of course, the controversy of how laws are interpreted/ignored in one country in particularly (yes, I'm looking at you USA).
Should there be a middle ground? Or should we always consider anything that is digital off-limits?
Crazier question: what’s wrong with a well-intentioned surveillance state? Preventing crime is a noble goal, and sometimes I just don’t think some vague notion of privacy is more important than that.
I sometimes feel that the tech community would find the above opinion far more outlandish than the general population would.
tl;dw: A well-intentioned surveillance state may, in fact, love the beings they are surveilling. They may fall in love so deeply, that they want to become like us. I know it's a revolutionary concept.
As the founder of https://ayvri.com, I thought/hoped you were taking over where we left off.
You're maybe on the path, but I'd recommend smoothing out the camera movement when going from point to point, and rather than go direct from point to point, you can calculate smooth arcs between almost any point.
This may be difficult in the Google Maps API, we built our own renderer, camera, etc.
I'm VERY surprised that the Google Maps API is priced in such a way that you can actually afford this if it got any amount of scale.
It's all vibe coded, so getting the AI to understand the camera movement and start/stop angles is challenging. Initially I planned for a subscription model with 1-3 free maps/tours, then paid for more tours and/or higher volume. Google gives a pretty generous free tier for small projects. I'm just trying to get users and awareness.
I like the way you've framed the problem, and it's actually an issue I bring up with designers that I work with, not that they go directly to screens, but that they go from problem to ideation too quickly.
We work in hardware, so we don't have UI to work with.
UX isn't just UI, which I'm sure you know. I'd like to see something like your product to help guide people through the right questions, rather than finding the solution.
One of the challenges I have with many AI subscriptions is that when you price in credits, I have no idea how many questions, or what kind of workflow that gives me. 10 credits. That could be 3 questions.
This was actually the business model issue we had with our last business, where we had to pay for map tiles, and we loaded thousands of them. For our B2B customers, we came up with a pricing model which said "per 1000 scenes" and they knew what a scene was. We still had no idea how big their scene was going to be, but we priced so that they could understand what they'd get, and they could verify, yes we opened 40,000 scenes.
For our B2C customers, we had a simple monthly subscription because they would only likely use so much. We barely made any money on the consumers, but it helped offset the costs.
This isn't just a you problem. But it is what prevents me from using a lot of, what may be, very good tools.
Hey,
"I'd like to see something like your product to help guide people through the right questions, rather than finding the solution"
This is exactly what we do, we ask you very deep question to collect context and make the results much better. We see by using Figr users become much clearer on what and why they want to build.
I understand on Credits bit, its hard to explain simply. Mainly defined it like one hour of design work or 1 screen.
That this is the state of "science" is very disappointing, and whenever I see the domain sciencealert, am pretty much trained that it is going to be nonsense.
Sadly, other science publications seem to be following a not dissimilar trend.
I work in health (neurotech/sleeptech) and am in the process of writing a post which hits on the health aspect.
The things that most people ignore when thinking about AI and health is that 2/3rds of Americans are suffer from chronic illness and there is a shortage of doctors. Could AI really do much worse than the status quo? Doctors won't be replaced, but if we could move them up the stack of health to actually doing the work of saving lives rather than just looking at rising cholesterol numbers and writing scripts?
It's encouraged me towards getting diagnosed for my probable ADHD. Now I'm mentioning this to people I know and they're all giving me:
> you're undiagnosed? I thought it was obvious.
guess I was the last to clock it.
It was people that made me think of it first: a hookup that was adament I had it and then a therapist that mentioned in our first session. I started the diagnosis like over a year ago and completely forgot about it. Its only been asking gipity about some symptoms I have and seeing it throw up ADHD a lot as a possibility, that encouraged me to go back to sorting out the diagnosis.
I'm just suggesting it has a positive impact in preventative care by giving people an outlet to discuss their symptoms and consider possibilities. Obviously the trade off might be more hypochrondriacs but its good for people who are the opposite.
Prodding you to seek help from a doctor is different than what the OP was saying
> Doctors won't be replaced, but if we could move them up the stack of health to actually doing the work of saving lives rather than just looking at rising cholesterol numbers and writing scripts
I presume your AI assistant did not prescribe medication to you.
sure but this is part of preventative care. I'm one of those people who are happier to shrug off symptoms than go through the effort of seeking medical diagnosis and I doubt I'm alone in this.
There's a trust problem for that use case, though.
I don't have a primary care physician because in the area I live in, there are no doctors that I can find that are taking new patients.
Regardless, I wouldn't want any of my medical data exposed to an AI system even if that was the only way to get health care. I simply don't trust them enough for that (and HIPAA isn't strong enough to make me more comfortable).
The human element has already been lost in medicine in many cases, unless you are willing to pay a lot for it. Many people need that when they are sick. They want genuine support and something resembling sympathy.
My friend died last weekend from cancer. Human support/contact was very important to her. AI can't do that.
I don't know if this is a common experience, but the first time I really needed a doctor, they spent the whole time typing on a laptop. Since that didn't result in any follow up questions or anything beyond a referral to a specialist, I suspect it was all about getting paid by the insurance company. There's a blindingly obvious fix to that part of overworked doctors.
I know a couple of doctors and they both told me the same thing (this is likely dependent on exactly where you are): the amount of time they can spend with any given patient is less than 15 minutes. In practice, they have to "rob peter to pay paul" and try to minimize the amount of time they spend with patients who have lesser medical needs so they can spend more time with patients who have more complicated situations.
OK, AI could be used transparently to fill out forms and write down what the doctor talks to into a microphone, assist in the health staff with some tasks in the form of interchangeable tools. What we don't need is another layer of blackbox magic making everything even more murky.
"But a whole lot of that loss of the human element isn't about AI one way or another. It's about doctors being ridiculously overworked."
My suspicion just now is that while there is a long term pattern of neglect and overwork, we are being nudged towards AI medicine in order to avoid paying out wages. (I think a similar thing will happen in law enforcement, where facial recognition networks and machines will be used in future in place of human police in many cases.)
This is common where I live also (Sydney, Australia).
However, I'm not suggesting the existing AI systems. There are health specific platforms such as Superpower, or in Australia Everlab, which are doing the blood-work, early detection type stuff. Then if there is something to address that gets handed off to a doctor.
Yes because the act of "moving them up the stack" could have the opportunity cost of preventing real change that would actually improve health outcomes.
AI could allow the whole system to kick the can down the road.
We should fix the shortage of healthcare practitioners, not hand folks a fancy search engine and say "problem solved." Would you put forth "Google your symptoms" as a solution to this same problem? The token output is fancy, the confidence in accuracy is similar.
The US was a safe place with consistent returns for decades.
Now the US has increased risk. It isn't a calculation of "where do we put $100B", it's a calculation of "what is the balance of managing risk and returns".
Canada and Australia are low risk, but don't have the returns of the US. Brasil, Argentina, have higher risk.
The allocations get spread across different risk profiles, and the money gets spread across different investments. Of course, this is on the assumption the majority of this money stays in Treasuries. These large funds have options beyond that. It's a mathematical calculation where every asset in the world is an option. $100B can be spread around pretty easily I'd think.
We saw a very diverse group of users, the common uses was paragliders, gliders, and pilots who wanted to view their or other peoples flights. Ultramarathons, mountain bike and some road-races where it provided an interactive way to visualize the course from any angle and distance. Transportation infrastructure to display train routes to be built. The list goes on.
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