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0 pointsBoppreH2y ago0 comments

Assistants are cool, but I want better tools. Give me a timeline with all my emails, chats, documents, and pictures shown together. Full text search on my entire browsing history. Exporting my Booking.com search results as a spreadsheet. Controlling my phone from my desktop, and vice versa.

As a bonus, those capabilities don't require uploading your data to the cloud or risking LLM hallucinations.

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7 comments · 3 top-level

oceanplexian2y ago· 2 in thread

> Exporting my Booking.com search results as a spreadsheet.

Yeah except they actively don’t want you to have access to your data. They want you locked in to their shitty platform. And these companies will actually fight your ability to get data out, like Reddit or Twitter when they shut down their public APIs.

davidd_2y ago

They can want all they want, any human-readable information is now machine readable, just parse everything that's ever come across your screen.

bronco210162y ago

In theory yes, has anyone built this tool yet? I’d love an LLM<->browser agent that can do something useful besides summarize Yelp reviews. I’m thinking something that, for example, accesses the company intranet and finds me information from my paystub without me doing anything.

vineyardmike2y ago· 2 in thread

> As a bonus, those capabilities don't require uploading your data to the cloud or risking LLM hallucinations.

Ignoring that half those services are dependent on the cloud already, this is such a bold and hard problem. A solution would be magical but LLMs are our best chance.

Without clearly defined protocols (eg SMTP, CalDav) and a ton of boring to write and use case specific glue code, you’re really dependent on LLMs to make those M*N connections from one service/format to another. An LLM can turn any current or future input format into any current or future output format. That’s really powerful and basically unsolvable at scale with the tools we have now.

F7F7F72y ago

And what’s to be said about every large orgs or serious companies TOS against screen scraping data?

vineyardmike2y ago

If they don't like screen scraping they probably also don't have an API and probably don't have 100 different ways to auto-export data.

niels_bom2y ago

This so much.

I want easily pluggable/connectable systems for everything. I want to see all my messages and all my contacts and all my stuff in interfaces I choose. The future is definitely not searching email, Whatsapp, Signal and Instagram to find the message my friend sent me the other day.

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