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

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 of the limited token rate.

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.

I used it to violate industrial copyrights. For whatever reason, all Australian standards for technical drawings are behind paywalls

I used to spend days rotoscoping people in videos. Generative infill for background painting and automatic rotoscoping have saved probably a year of my life at this point. Image generation relies on CLIP, which needs a language model for conditioning.

I needed the following CSS copied 51 times with a 0.05 s increment, because CSS can’t for-loop and didn’t want JavaScript:

#butterfly span:nth-child(1) {
  animation-delay: 0s;
}

I know I could’ve just for-looped it somewhere else and copy-paste the output, but I was curious if DeepSeek could do it.

I don’t use it for writing code because that’s what I love but I use it for documentation and other stuff I hate…😂

It’s good for rapid output of plausibly human text that can then be sorted or assessed for adequate validity or utility. That’s all.

Creating low-effort images for ideas that don’t warrant effort, like silly jokes.

I’ve been using it recently for generating alt text for images (my bots on Mastodon and Aunty Madge on !yoursinclair@retrolemmy.com specifically). It’s pretty good at that, although does sometimes give weirdly wrong details - especially the TED Music Bot, if it gets the usual +4 startup screen it says it’s +4 on key F1, instead of 3-plus-1, and tells me the wrong colours for the text and background (I think it may be getting it confused with the C64, bit the colours are right there on the image!). It’s infinitely preferable to having no alt text, which would be the alternative.

The other thing it’s really good at is summarising articles.

I’ve also used it when I’ve had an error in my code I can’t track down, or a bracket missing that I can’t figure out. It quite often gives nonsense but I’ve had some success. Usually a normal web search is perfectly adequate though!

Despite claims to the contrary ChatGPT is very accurate with its responses when such responses involve web searches. Where it falls apart is complex multi step things like coding questions.

I make heavy use of it to skip past all the clutter of Google search results and end up with clear summaries that answer my questions. That’s all I’d really use it for as anything more than that its output is highly variable in quality.

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’ve tried ChatGPT a few times to see if it’s useful for me, and it’s worked surprisingly well in most cases.

I made a website that needed two modal images, one on the top and one on the bottom. I wanted them to be enlarged when they were clicked on. I found a load of guides for getting one to work, but I couldn’t get both to work. A few minutes with a prompt got it working. It didn’t help me to learn JavaScript, but did give me working code that I needed quickly.

I’ve used it to fluff up some text. I’m not very good at making things sound good in text, so it helped a lot.

The latest one I’ve tried is getting camera settings for a dark gig setup. I was able to give it an old photo that was under exposed but gave an accurate impression of the room, and ask for recommended settings with the same lens, a new lens, and a flash. It gave me a selection of settings with and without the flash, including settings for rear curtain sync, so when it leaves a ghost trail behind the subject. It’s nothing I couldn’t figure out, but would have taken a bit more trial and error in the room. I probably wouldn’t have thought of the ghost trails.

Regarding the job application, most companies and sites are using shitty AI to rummage through the piles of resumes they receive.

The whole job application process is frankly one of the worst real world use of most technologies, not only AI

LLMs trained exclusively on documentation and ran locally seem like they’d be nice. Basically the next step in search algorithms. Do note that I am not talking about having an AI summary at the top of every web search page, that’s harmful.