I know its a bit of a hot topic but I’ve always seen people (online anyways) are either a hard yes or absolutely no on using AI. There are many types of “AI” that have already been part of technology before this hype, I’m talking about LLMs specifically (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc…). When this bubble burst its absolutely not going anywhere. I’m wondering if there is case where you’ve personally used it and found it beneficial (not something you’ve read or seen somewhere). The ethics of essentially stealing vast amount of data for training without compensation or enshitification of products with “AI” is a whole other topic but there is absolutely no way that the use of the technology itself is not beneficial somehow. Like everything else divisive the truth is definitely somewhere in the middle. I’ve been using lumo from proton for the last three weeks and its not bad. I’ve personally found it useful in helping me troubleshoot issues, search or just use it to help with applying for jobs:
- its very good at looking past SEO slop plaguing the internet and it just gets me the information I need. I’ve tried alternative search engine (mojeek, startpage, searXNG, DDG, Qwant, etc…) Most of them unfortunately aren’t very good or are just another way to use google or bing.
- I was having some wifi problem on a pc i was setting up and i couldn’t figure out why. i told it exactly what was happening with my computer along with exact specs. It gave gave me some possible reasons and some steps to try and analyze my computer it was very very useful.
- I’ve been applying for so many jobs and it so exhausting to read hundreds of description see one tiny thing in the middle that disqualifies me so I pass it my resume with links and tell it to compare what i say on my resume and what the job is looking for to see if im a fit. When i find a good job i ask rewriting tips to better focus on what will stand out to a recruiter (or an application filtering system to be real).
I guess what I’m trying to say is it cant all be bad.
I see it as a toy. No different from the Slinky or Silly Putty I had as a kid. Just something to play with.
Best (or at least most addictive) use of AI I’ve seen so far is https://anycrap.shop/
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.
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 it’s limited to like 1 token per second.
You self host the full Deepseek R1? What’s your hardware?
Also, you might enjoy !localllama@sh.itjust.works
No I host the 70b version because I’m limited by my RAM.
You know those business books that combine flimsy pop psychology and self help literature with personal development and business goals? Yeah, those books with 300 pages and only one good idea per 100 pages if you’re lucky. Rest of it is just fabricated stories, ideas copied from other books and regurgitation of ideas from the previous chapters to fluff up the page count. Yes that category!
Well guess what? GPT can generate precisely that level of quality without any effort. In fact, it seems to gravitate towards that style unless you specifically work hard to steer it to aim higher. It has never been easier to become a business book author! Zero editing required. Just prompt and publish.
It feels like this is the one area where GPT excels.
Solo roleplay. You can make a character and interact. Generate fake conversations etc.
With generative images you can create custom backgrounds, portraits and landscapes instead of having to lookup for them or doing it yourself.
You can also do some interactive story telling that it’s kind of fun.
Generating quick test questions over a certain topic. It’s another use case I’ve seen it being quite good at.
Wow, what a cool idea, I never even considered this. Any other suggestions to this idea to add some fun?
Try aidungeon - it does exactly this.
I had no idea this existed, my mind is blown. Looking it up later today.
If you want it to go unhinged try to get an uncensored llm. Dans PersonalityEngine by bartowski is my current favorite.
Yeah I think dialogue for videogame characters so they don’t all just repeat the exact same thing again and again would be great.
Works in theory for written dialogue anyway. Spoken would be a bit ropey.
I use it at work for stuff where it would be inefficient for me to pick up entirely new side skills to only be used rarely and sporadically.
For example, I made a spreadsheet tool to compose ordering spreadsheets in Excel for a system at work that needs them. Most of it uses basic macros that you can record with the basic macro recorder in Excel, with no special skill required, but every now and then I need to introduce functionality into it that’s far more complex.
Instead of learning obscure VBA coding for something I do once every two months, I can just tell ChatGPT that I have spreadsheet A called this and spreadsheet B called that, assume that they are both open, and write me a macro that does A and then B and then C and then D between them.
It does it in five seconds, I plug the code in, test it, and then go about my day. That’s its positive use case for me.
Same here. I also like to use it to save time on things. My work has all my info and their policies anyways so i use it to make meeting minutes, make emails summarizing policies or announcements, finding mutual scheduling times, etc. I can do all these myself but its so much faster.
I only really use AI at work and keep my work off my personal devices.
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.
I personally use generative AI for thumbnail art (Stable Diffusion models locally downloaded, with LoRA for the 1.5 models I use), and so does my producer. We disclose when we use the models, and our prompting is actually really good (just inpainting is something we don’t do).
I’ve been stuck in the Adobe ecosystem for 25 years, and until there’s an After Effects equivalent on Linux, I don’t really see getting out. But silver lining, generative fill and harmonize in Photoshop make inpainting breezy. And generative extend in Premiere is great for persnickety edits. I’ve generally found visual AI more useful than the LLMs.
I think Natron is pretty decent from what I heard. I don’t think it’s in production, but some people tend to use it as an alternative.
this might be of interest, it’s a model that generates svgs that work really great for stuff like icons https://github.com/OmniSVG/OmniSVG
That is certainly interesting, but I’ll have to look at it later, for I have no idea how that could be usable for my machine.
the 3B version should need fairly modest hardware
If modest is 17GB of GDDR6 required, that isn’t modest-sounding to me.
That’s not a lot by LLM standards. :)
I might’ve been thinking about something else, thinking it was something to do with SD.
• I use it for research and then verify its findings.
• It’s excellent at summarizing quickly.
• It’s great at idea creation for specific needs and outlining it.
• While it’s good at writing I enjoy that and do it myself to keep my specific tone.You can’t steal data, only illegally copy it. The original data holder still has the data, just you do too.
It’s got lots of uses:
- driving up fossil fuel revenues
- providing a solid excuse for laying off a bunch of employees
- disciplining labor
- offloading blame for unpopular decisions
- increasing surveillance and nonconsensual data collection
Creating low-effort images for ideas that don’t warrant effort, like silly jokes.
There’s only a few use cases where I’ve found I prefer it to doing things the hard way.
- As a thesaurus, since it’s great for going “what’s that one word that sort of means all encompassing, commonly used in reference to research/studies?” and it’ll end up giving me “holistic.”
- As part of other software, such as how Linkwarden automatically tags bookmarks by category when I add them
- Double checking the answers I’ve come up with in regard to hyper-specific questions (usually about how a given piece of software can/can’t be used, or how it’ll interact with something else) just to make sure I’m not blatantly missing anything.
However, I try to avoid using it for anything that otherwise requires productive mental effort, because I find that I end up being a lot more informed and capable if I spend 5 minutes going through sites, learning about a topic, identifying wrong answers, and being able to put together better new queries in the first place, than I do if I ask a chatbot, even if it pulls from those same sources.
When you have a chatbot summarize or combine/condense information, you’ll always lose nuance and additional context, and very frequently that context will actually be helpful to your overall understanding. There’s also many cases where, for example, someone on a forum explains an issue a bit, and their profile has more related information on it that an LLM simply wouldn’t go for, only summarizing from their one response on that page. This can lead me down a rabbit hole that then leads me to finding other good sources. Maybe someone mentions that a particular site is helpful for what I’m looking for, and that then becomes something I use more frequently when I do searches for things, whereas an LLM would have just ignored that comment.
I find it good for music and film suggestions. You feed it a set of ( I want a suggestion like these ) and it provides a good result.
Also good at building mermaid code for diagrams, just tell it write me mermaid code for this, and drop in a descriptive paragraph, then copy paste the code into mermaid.live
That use case became very useful so there is a paid mermaid page to automate that manual process.
