YHK - yet another hacker news clone

None of this seems new. Maybe polished, but useless to anyone who is seriously using AI for anything important. I imagine this is effectively a toy for boomers who want to feel like they're keeping up with the latest tech by tapping a few buttons in Facebook.

And none of that even touches that fact that nobody should be OK with Meta having this kind of access to their life. But I'll leave that to others to harp on lol

I think Meta limiting factor for this product was lack of agentic capable models which they fixed now with aggressive RLHF focused data gathering.

The account you're signed into doesn't have access to this page. Please log out and follow the steps in your email."

there is no logout or instruction whatsoever on email, so zero tech support definitely not true

They had the FAIR, and Yann Le Cun.

I dont think anyone knowing full and well would be comfortable with it. At least that would dumbfound me.

If you can't understand how the general population, the target customer for Meta, would think of using something like this, then it almost certainly means your entire social circle is within the same tech-aware bubble that you are in here. ;) I have a few non-tech people that I talk bounce this sort of thing off of, periodically, as a reality check.

And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of anything that some trillion-dollar tech company, or the FBI, or the FSB, would ever want to do to them specifically.

It's the same reason why the market share for Firefox is a rounding error.

It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive?

People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.

That’s the godawful truth. The other thing you need to realize is not only do people don’t care, but people like you know exactly why meta makes billions. It’s obvious. You seriously expect me to believe you don’t know why a company like meta makes billions? Come on.

It’s sad but thats the way things are. I see someone pretend they don’t get it but if you take the time to think you’ll realize… We all get it. We just can’t face it.

2015 story: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/magic-the-startup/

Thread seeking a follow-up in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148402

I asked it to check once a day for the next week and notify me of any price changes

If 1,000 people need to approve the User Journey, you get flights, reminders and docs... because that is what 1,000 big tech employees mutually share as easily understandable common problems within their own corporate zeitgeist.

Disclosure: I work for Meta, and run into this phenomenon daily, but I do not work on Muse.

If Muse could actually just show me content that I want to see and cut out all of the other crap, I'd be willing to use it. Of course, there's no way Zucc will pay for an expensive AI service that will undercut his main revenue stream.

It can do file organizing and wrangling when needed, it has simple web access with the curl tool, it can analyze media file contents. It's analyzed my local data and written several little tools (cli, TUI, GUI) to manage it automatically or give comprehensive reports. I can create new media through ComfyUI and Krita AI.

Sure, it can't book a flight or organize the family calendar for the next month, but I don't have any need for those.

edit: llama.cpp LLM model and ComfyUI image/video models can't live in the VRAM at the same time, but I let it code a little KDE widget with two buttons: one unloads the llama.cpp model and another one unloads the ComfyUI models.

There is already evidence of groups setting websites and "think tanks" that aren't for human but for influencing AIs scraping them.

I wonder if having the contributor model read and summarize your propaganda would be even more effective. Instead of astroturfing reddit, just feed it to the model directly. Give it generated threads and ask it loaded questions.

Then says "checking alternate routes" then shows them a card with their original flight details (it does have "Delayed" in red at the top) and asks them if they would like to change their flight.

The user responds with "Yes please! :thumbsup:"

The AI does not provide any information about the new flight, and only displays a card for the original flight, which being the original, is the day and time the User likely wanted to travel.

Between it being the only piece of information on the screen and the status of "checking for alternate routes" it will certainly be a surprise for the User when their Sept. 17th 5:45 departure has been rescheduled for Sept. 19th to avoid a two hour delay. Helpfully replaced with a 2 day delay, thanks Muse!

i've gone on many trips before, and one of the most fun parts of it is doing the actual planning and finding stuff

i'd much rather AI do the boring shit, like when it comes to insurance with multiple parties and service providers involved that don't talk to each other at all, making things 10x more complicated than they need to be

(at least, this is what ive seen)

Shopping is another classic. I personally don't want to trust an AI agent with checkout. research is fine, but I don't want the AI to go on a shopping spree or Amazon added some subscription into their checkout flow and suddenly, I'm paying for Prime because my AI agent thought it's a good idea or just missed it.

It's not unheard of that Amazon bundles a subscription into your checkout. So I don't think it's too unrealistic.

Meta’s ideal parent is too busy to spend time with their kids, so they let the AI pick sponsored garbage for their cart and check out with their Link payment details.

AI itself is a product that could only come from the mind of a corporate executive: It's a cheerful, helpful sycophant, who always does what it's told and stays in its lane, has infinite energy and memory, and allows the user to concentrate on his golf game instead of all those mundane other things. It's the perfect employee, from their perspective.

And my mom doesn’t use AI products like chatgpt because she’s not a student, nor agents because she doesn’t work in tech. To her AI, is no different from those chatbots websites pop up in the corner, the ones you never seek out or interact with intentionally, because you don’t need what they offer.

So I actually think this kind of marketing is quite helpful for regular people who mostly just use their phones to buy stuff, looking things up, navigate life, and entertainment. My mom doesn’t give a shit about APIs or sandboxing, or benchmarks and to her it literally is a hassle to manage a million one-off accounts and confirmation codes and receipts when she just wants to buy something on her phone. She would not assume AI is capable of that or know how to set it up locally.

that’s not even getting into the fact that the top 10% controls 50% of consumer spending in the US and primarily purchases convenience + health + experiences, whereas the other 90% primarily prefers to buy aspirational/identity based goods that evoke their mental model of a higher status lifestyle. It’s why the same bustling lifestyle archetype you criticize is literally used exclusively in car ads, housing marketing materials, consumer electronics, home goods, etc. Because normal people want to feel and/or look good not spawn subagents

My favorite part is that I'm in full control. All that caution about giving an app phone permissions? Gone. I could track my physical location in a table recording all the DB changes if I wanted to.

All it's missing is a local model.

Also the swiss army knife approach feels wrong. Too much choice. It can connect to everything, ok great, so I could chat with it on telegram, discord, email, whatsapp, etc. For a person who comes along and wants to configure great. But for someone who just wants to use it and get a web ui and maybe some sane defaults it's a bit overwhelming. If we can go from super highly configurable does anything to sane defaults with an opinionated interface and its open source we might get somewhere. Not only that but if we can get to like Proton/Notion sort of equivalent alternatives where everything is not controlled by one player that would be good. Proton did mail. Notion did docs. Maybe someone else will do chat.

I can't wait until we have drastically better models we can run locally that don't cost as much as a car.

"I'm sorry simon, your request for purchasing milk this week doesn't correspond with Zuck's milk positions in the market. I've rescheduled that for next week."

Regex! It was you all along!?

Do you know of any other commercial implementations based on CaMeL?

The paper was published 16 months ago (an eternity in this age), so I'm surprised that it isn't, to my knowledge, more widely implemented.

A lot of people think that chat.com is an AI called "chat". Most people don't know acronym "LLM". Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.

I see lots of posting about using AI to create patches to get new apps working in wine, or reverse engineering firmware. But every time I’ve tried it it’s been quite a lot of work to set everything up. Even more so if you want VMs and some level of isolation from your sensitive data.

Having something that’s just a one click product that just works is more important than the smartest model.

She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.

I am trying it now. It let me name my muse as Satan. I appreciate that it understands my humor, but I'm also not joking at the same time.

i'd really like to see some analytics on what proportion of users have ever switched the model in chatgpt because I anecdotally believe it is < 5%

You're driving a home kit car, they're driving something out of the factory.

Eventually - we'll probably drive factory variations as well.

That said, I've got more time for projects this week so flew through my Claude max plan. Now I'm trying muse spark 1.3 with opencode which is free with pretty generous usage allowance. First time I've been impressed by meta's AI products. It feels not far below opus 4.8ish

All ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Microsoft have/want to have their own assistants.

Oh, your grandma doesn't know which android version her phone is running? Or the build number of the Windows on her laptop? You just realized this?

For what it's worth, maybe that would help people who struggle with technology in general? Because as far as UI/UX goes, a chat interface for an agent is about as easy as it gets (not every site having its own crappy assistant that can't really do anything useful for you, but is slapped on there for the sake of a checkbox).

I watched the marketing video and to me it seemed pretty nice and practical for the average person.

You know it? I sincerely hope you don’t and that it’s not really “most” of us. That would be incredibly sad. Tracking model releases and discussing “every parameter weight” is very far from intellectually curious discussion (what HN is ostensibly about).

> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with (…)

> Curse of knowledge and all.

If there’s one thing many of us on HN suffer from, however, is intense hubris. The juxtaposition of claiming “curse of knowledge” while admitting to not having known the most elementary principle of designing for people is a tad tone deaf. Yes, of course most people just stick with the defaults, that’s why dark patterns work and hiding settings is a thing. The industry has been using those strategies to manipulate people for years and years.

> Meta's strategy

Meta has no strategy. The people that made llama work left two years ago. MSI are a bunch of charlatans who are trying to change the culutre and tooling of meta from the outside (I can see their point, trying to work outside of the defaults is incredibly hard.)

its basically a bun fight, with all of your productive workers being poached by frontier labs, and everyone else is either a new grad, burnt out, or a master bullshitter.

Words to live by.

The rest of the users just use whatever the default is and get their work done.

That's why Google already captured such a big part of the market with Gemini: they're now integrating it with just about everything. GMail? Gemini. Search? (asnwer by and "do you want to continue discussing this with") Gemini. Workspace? Gemini.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/on...

They may not have yet the same number of MAU as OpenAI but the Gemini experience is much more streamlined than ChatGPT: when people are presented with it, they just use it.

And to be fair Google's flash model are just amazing.

Grok Bot doesn't have direct access to Twitter like Grok on x.com does, for no good reason, but it does have an API plugin which gives you free $20 credit if you install it.

When these companies want to lock you into their platforms it seems kinda dumb to not give their own products access to their own products.

Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.

I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.

Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…

> Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.

I think this is a foregone conclusions. Traditional internet marketing is dead - including funnels and dark patterns.

I agree. The time to launch something like this would have been during the OpenClaw hype cycle (although, obviously, Muse is much more limited in the types of tasks it can accomplish).

I thought about installing it, but I realized I couldn't think of any real uses for it in my personal life.

I absolutely want a general purpose assistant.

I absolutely don't trust Facebook with the necessary data.

Do the same thing for recipes and buying groceries.

Or "order me take out from a bunch of places I haven't been that you think I'd like." The AI can ask follow up questions and see your ratings.

"Make a music playlist for my daughter when she enters the car based on the conversation last month. I remember vaguely her mentioning what she liked"

These are things that 100% people want AI to do -- imagine if you had a personal assistant, is something people have asked for since forever.

Now, I kind of agree on the minimal use compared to business, because in business everything has always been highly integrated. That said, that's changing rapidly.

Whenever I try to do something with ChatGPT or Gemini, it just refuses to do things citing limitations in its web browsing capabilities. An everyday LLM that can actually fill forms and do stuff for you on the Internet without having to run on your computer, write programs or interact through special harnesses is what normal people actually need.

It's a different need from the agentic coding type of LLM, where you provide the environment where it can write and execute arbitrary code.

The only problem is, like someone else pointed out, that I don't trust Meta.

My personal anecdote - we had a complex family travel in the summer, with 6 ppl and 6 separate flights booked (some multi-leg). SAS messed up on one booking - they decided to cancel the flight we had from Oslo, and rebooked us to an earlier date (2 days shift). That wouldn't work for the rest of our schedule, so I had to rebook, overpay extra money for now longer & more expensive flights - but to add the insult to the injury, when I did this through their website, they didn't transfer the food that I paid for the earlier reservation. Calling them in roaming and trying to get it fixed with a human support agent didn't help - the agent said he just can't fix it on his end, and suggested that we just file for reimbursement on their site.

I never had time to file it since July.

But today I had a reason - to test Muse - and asked it to handle it for me. To my surprise, it dug through all of the SAS emails and actually found the emails confirming that the food fees were reimbursed exactly the same date when SAS moved our original flight. Apparently I didn't notice those notifications since they were spamming with all kinds of notifications that day. But, if not some tool like Muse, I wouldn't even find time to handle this and either file a claim or figure out my miss on their earlier reimbursement.

People shop a lot on the internet, actually. Between that and ads for the things people shop for, it’s pretty much the backbone of the Internet economy.

I bet they would purchase more things than they currently do, and seriously break the economics of Google/Amazon search ads (about $300B of yearly spending just for those two), display ads, and internet-first e-commerce sites if they could just ask an agent working for them to help research/source/purchase things without all the navigation and dark patterns in the middle. Personally I would probably spend at least $1k/yr more on snack/beverage subscriptions alone if it had less friction.

> working class peasant consumer

You mean the majority of people in the world? Most people only their computers to entertain themselves, look things up, buy stuff, and complete tedious tasks (taxes, email, etc) they’d rather not do.

How much do you and your peers spend a year on online shopping and how much do they pay out of pocket for SAAS or AI tokens? And how many of your offline purchases had a significant amount of associated online research involved despite technically completing offline? (Houses, cars, schools, hardware) Yeah that’s pretty much where all the money in the global software industry comes from

They are big enough and pay well to have a competent team. Compared with momandpop.com (willing but too small) or equifax (big but unwilling) and given the kind of data they are guarding, they’re probably the best in the business.

"...and your conversations are not shared with Meta's ad systems".

I think they missed off "for now".

Like the announcement said, it's running in its own VM, but it's an impressively transparent system: You have access to its System Files right in the GUI, which surprised me. You can look at the AGENTS.md and other harness files it uses as well as some shell scripts, bash files, cronjob folder etc. It seems a lot more obvious to me how Muse works than say Claude or ChatGPT, which don't make it nearly as clear where stuff lives and how long its there for. I mean, I get they use VMs as well, but there's definitely no "System Files" menu option in those phone apps at least. The Muse bot seems much more "permanent" in my mind as a result.

The AI is quite helpful as well. It let me download its 350Mb "hatch" binary which runs the bot/harness/agent (written in Rust), plus it zipped up the library of skills it uses and all the system files in my VM for me to look at on my machine. Nothing extra special, but it was nice to browse through all the files and the binary strings to see how it ticked. It also explained the limits of the VM to me - for example, that I can't SSH into the VM as it runs through a proxy and can't be reached directly, but was willing to help me add itself to my Tailscale network.

It's basically a nice looking UI on top of a typical agent harness using standard Markdown files, all running in a little Linux cloud VM spun up just for you. And Muse Spark 1.3 is finally good enough that it was actually useful (and fast), so I can see why they launched the app/service now.

From a non-geek perspective, I asked it about selling my old Nintendo Switch on Facebook Marketplace - something I've been meaning to get around to for about a year or so now - and it said I can upload a picture of all the stuff I have and it'll check prices and create multiple listings for me. That alone might make me hate Meta a little less after this if it works as advertised.

But it's pretty niche and one-off for me. How do you market that? There are 20 of these random things per year, but no single one of them is likely to resonate generally.

> interactions being used to train Facebook's AI models

Yupp, the only "edge" Facebook could possibly have, is user data.

Part of the fun of holidays IS THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERY! Imagine wanting to kill that.

Business travel? Sure but Im sure solutions already exist.

Zuckerberg has ZERO vision - he has a catalogue of content he can leverage to do so much. What an abosolute bozo!

I distrust Meta but if I'm being honest, if their tools were awesome and cheap enough I might start using Muse. A lot of people are in my camp: aware of privacy issues, too lazy to be strict about it.

Then again, maybe I won't come crawling back. Privacy issues barely affected most people in democratic America. If it ever goes full authoritarian (and we're heading in the wrong direction), then they'll matter a lot.

When I look at businesses trying to turn this research and technology into profit, I think that this is a bubble that will burst. You are not alone, I am very doubtful of the current concoction of AI features being offered. The true winners and legitimate applications will emerge over the next 30 years. Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft could all become IBM, Xerox, and Kodak. Or maybe they find a way to pivot. Because truly, there is an amazing amount of nonsense BS in the AI hype train.

Acknowledging the outside chance that recursive self-improvement works and we just scale directly into a Kardashev 1 civilization within my children's lifetime, and K-2 in theirs'. Can't rule it out no matter how hard I try.

* Filling out tedious PDF paperwork with the same personal information over and over again

* Having it proactively scan my calendar to give me a heads up on potential traffic issues (like making plans and forgetting that a marathon was being held and running into detour after detour after detour).

An ai that is always at your reach and can interface with everything.

I don’t use these work apps because they don’t do anything that improves my workflow or computer experience