This is kinda the exception that proves the rule. I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience, but I will bet you anything that any searches you try to do will lead you to the same half-dozen giant mail-order clothing vendors that everyone already knows about.
> exception that proves the rule
That's not how that works; "someone is doing this" doesn't prove a rule "no one is doing this" -- quite the opposite
"The exception that proves the rule" is for things like "closed Thursdays" (rule = open on other days), "no parking after 8 PM" (rule = parking allowed before 8 PM), "no refunds on games" (rule = refunds available on other items), etc.
You're confusing "The Exception That Proves the Rule" (in English, as used colloquially) with "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis" (in Latin, which has a use similar to what you're describing.) While the law attempts to be precise, common usage embraces ambiguity.
> exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis
Or more succinctly, as first-year law students learn: Expressio unius est exclusio alterius — to state one thing is to implicitly exclude others.
https://definitions.lsd.law/expressio-unius-est-exclusio-alt...
RIP modus ponens!
They really mean the same. What changed was the meaning of the word "proves" in English. When the saying was coined it meant "tests", not "confirms". People kept saying the...saying even though they were using it backwards.
Which is amusing because “proving grounds” is still using the old definition of “proves” :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule:
> "The exception that proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning is contested. Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used…
Personally, I use it in cases like:
- Rule: Don't do X, it's a bad idea.
- Exception: One time, someone with very special circumstances did X, and with a lot of finagling and effort they managed to make it work sort of OK.
Or:
- Rule: This fortress was an impregnable defensive position.
- Exception: In A.D. 1305, the fortress was taken, with great difficulty and many casualties, by an attacking army 100 times larger than the defending force.
Or:
- Rule: This river never overflows its banks.
- Exception: Once in history, on the day of the biggest rainstorm in 1000 years, the river is recorded to have overflowed its banks very slightly for a short time.
The exception proves the rule because the circumstances necessary for the exception to occur were themselves exceptional.
But we all knew what they meant and here you are being tedious about it
I didn't really know what they meant by it. Sounds like "the fact that you do this proves that nobody does it".
I believe the phrase is used to mean something like "the fact that you found something that is obviously an exception proves that the rule normally applies."
For example, imagine if your skydiving instructor said "if your parachute doesn't open when you jump out of the airplane, you're gonna die", and you replied with "well actually that's not true, Vesna Vulović survived a fall from high altitude." Yeah, okay. The fact that you had to be smarty-pants about it and dig up a random exception really proves the point they were trying to make.
In this example the “exception” that proves the rule though was not a smarty-pants special circumstance. Using AI for shopping is just one of its many normal usages and if anything proves it is used by normal people doing normal things. It’s not like the rare example that happens once in a hundred years.
Ok but I’m not sure the relevance here? Everyone has unique needs, if they want to get specific enough. The promise of AI here is that anyone can get as absurdly specific as they want, instead of accepting whatever advertising bucket they’d be traditionally sorted into.
Fair enough, I can buy that. I feel like in most cases where I've heard it it wasn't nearly so clear cut, so that logic wasn't obvious and it sounded like nonsense
(Also that story is nuts! https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87)
This exactly.
People on this website are so fucking pedantic and argumentative over the most obvious or inconsequential minutiae it drives me nuts.
Comparing the tone of your message with its parent, do you not see the irony?
Yeah, better to be passive aggressive and faux-intellectual so as not to throw off the usual HN vibe.
Okay, I'll be directly aggressive. They were helpful and added thoughtful discussion, while your response added nothing but bitterness
That they were responding to someone else who couldn't see how it worked means it wasn't just pedantic nitpicking
I concur. I found this discussion on the phrase very enlightening and aided both my understanding of the idiom and how I should use it in the future.
I'm not really 100% certain this is the correct or only meaning, for what it's worth, so don't take me as authority. It's just the common thread I've been able to gather from context over time. If you're gonna use it (I rarely do) it'd be worth researching it to make sure you're using it correctly...
[flagged]
>It's not personal.
I didn't say it was personal, I said it was irritating.
It's a common rhetorical technique that never convinces me. I'm not convinced this guy's anecdote is an exception to some rule.
I knew what he meant and still thought it spawned an interesting discussion. Mainly because I've never quite intuitively understood that saying. So, I did not take it as OP being tedious about it at all.
That’s why we’re all here together friend.
It’s not an exception. People seem very short sighted when it comes to AI. Unable to think outside the box for how AI can be helpful or useful.
Yeah, I use AI for this stuff all the time. Found a visa agency, accountant, great cafes to be working, etc just in the past week.
Also sometimes when doing more complicated purchases that require multiple products, I use it to sift through Amazon.
Especially ChatGPT seems to be optimizing for this use case, like a “search engine that can actually reason” (by lack of a better description). It’s convenient, and saves me a lot of time compared to the mess that Google has become.
(Obviously it’s likely this will happen to AI as well in the future, but right now, it’s pretty good)
How many of the things you've listed here are $20/month better than a search engine? That's the actual deal here.
Obviously, a better search engine that also doesn't display ads is better. But is it $20/month better? When it's also got daily usage limits? And they're almost certain to start injecting ads as soon as they possibly can without alienating people?
I’m already paying for it, this is just one of the many ways I’m using it.
Your phone and internet connections also have usage limits, and you’re also using them in various ways.
I agree that it’s extremely likely that, especially post-IPO, monetization will kill the current user experience, which I already hinted at in my previous comment.
I’m not entirely convinced that they will be able to monetize that effectively with ads. Right now I can buy more chat than I can use in a month for $10 in API credits via commodity open model providers.
Given the growing distrust of ad supported tech, I could see AI remaining as a paid product.
Kagi is a better (arguably) search engine without ads. Unmetered search is available for $10, and also includes an AI search tool.
> I use it to sift through Amazon.
...seems more like a case against Amazon (search) than for AI, then.
Maybe I'm fortunate enough to live someplace where Geizhals[0] exists, but it's been years since I gave up on Amazon altogether. The bad UX is just user hostile and there are many competitively priced retailers with web shops anyway.
[0]: https://geizhals.eu/
Don't you think that's backwards from how utility usually works? Most effective solutions come from attempting to solve a known problem, not by searching for problems to apply an available solution. Even thinking outside the box is usually in service of a particular problem - just applying creative or unorthodox solutions to that problem.
You're thinking about it the wrong way. Have you never come across some successful business idea and go, 'Huh, I never realized this problem even existed' or even 'People are paying this much for this? Wow'
These machines are general purpose technologies used by hundreds of millions of people. ChatGPT alone is used by over 900M people every week at least. You can count the technologies with that scale of users in your hand.
You'll never conceive all the sort of uses it could possibly have, much like nobody could ever conceive all the uses the internet had and will have and it would be misguided to think so. As you see, there's like 2 dozen people here telling OP the thing he thought 'No one' could possibly LLMs use for is in-fact seeing some use.
I don't think people doubt what AI _could_ do, they just have been through enough enshitification cycles to know this is not any different. Right now AI is better than Google but only because Google regressed so much. Market forces always prevail. The operating costs are just too high to offer AI for free for everyone but people will refuse to pay, so AI (at least for the masses) will become just an other marketing funnel companies can buy out. I also don't see how AI will change the fact that clothing companies target average users and don't serve the long tail.
Yeah it's a helpful and useful tool. It's the people who use it in annoying ways and marketing pushing it too much. It's natural for people to think like that. It's strange being there. Isn't exception a word that describes it well?
Twitter would make you think it’s dooms day with AI yet there are pockets of “wow that’s incredible”
It can be useful.
That's the problem. It moves an incredibly amount of power into a small handful of multinationals.
I don't want to live in a fucking world where an AI watches everywhere I go, reads everything I write, listens to everything I say, and makes decisions that affect me with zero appeal or recourse.
Because that's exactly where we are headed as people.
---
As businesses, we are headed to a world where if you don't pay tribute to the AI syndicates, your business will be undiscoverable.
ChatGPT has helped me find multiple niche products and vendors. It is really good at that. Products I fruitlessly tried to find for years, ChatGPT found right away.
> I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience,
That is kind of the idea of serving the long tail. Everyone is unique, and there are a lot of everyones.
That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.
> That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.
Indeed it is, but when you are p95 (at least for height, but not overweight), you'll soon learn that you do not have any other option: common sizes stop growing in length (at least noticeably) usually at XL or even L, so you are looking for specific fits (long, slim) and those are rarely stocked in stores. Sometimes I'll try a model from one brand and buy a different colour online.
But enter online shopping and 14-30 day return windows.
Still, for formal wear (shirts, jackets, suits), I simply stick with made-to-measure and custom tailoring.
I bought a used laptop with the help of ChatGPT last month and was amazed. It helped me narrow the model that suited my needs based on my prompts. I needed to renew my old Thinkpad T480. It also helped me find an ad and negociate with the seller.
I ended up with a T14 Gen 4 and I'm super happy with it.
> ChatGPT has helped me find multiple niche products and vendors. It is really good at that. Products I fruitlessly tried to find for years, ChatGPT found right away.
isn't that what search engines were built for? we've just forgotten how to build a search engine that's not just an ad factory, so instead we're putting an ad factory into our new search engine?
ChatGPT and similar are, in some sense, a semantic web search engine combined with an operator that's able to jot down its findings, pivot to different lookups, and filter/combine outputs.
I use Kagi to search, and claude to help me find things. These are different tasks.
If I know what I'm looking for, Kagi is much easier.
If I don't know what I'm looking for (I have hobbies that involve learning new techniques, and my method for learning a new technique seems to involve getting inspired by short-form videos, which don't come with a glossary of terms or a dictionary of tool names, so I often don't know what I'm looking for) then I can describe it to claude who can usually come up with a name for the thing, some useful advice about it, and where to start looking.
Last time, as an example, was all about enamalling and cloisonne, which was quite a rabbit-hole. And yes, I could search for beginner guides for the thing. But that is going to land me at a YouTube video which has 5 minutes of "hi welcome to my show, hit the like and subscribe" and then 15 minutes of waffle before finally getting to "the thing you want is called a trivet". I can read way, way, faster than people on YouTube can get to the point, so I prefer talking to claude.
I wonder if LLMs will actually kill Youtube for those who are like you (and me)? I am curious to see if anything happens to earnings from Youtube over the next few years as people increasingly do not need to sit through whole videos.
It is what they are supposed to do but they are SEO’d so bad that they give you prominent brands rather or least common denominator type stuff.
If you have a list of specific criteria, search engines are impossibly bad at finding what you’re looking for, but top LLMs do it with ease.
ChatGPT and Claude have been amazing timesavers in my recent tech acquisitions at work, and I find I am able to find better solutions
I needed some extra wide toe box shoes. Search results had been SEOed to hell so I could only find a handful of brands (that I'd already tried).
Chatgpt found me a lot more choices.
I wanted custom lifts for a shoe. Chatgpt found me a local store that did it, I'd been calling around for years asking to no avail.
Chatgpt is really damn good at niche stuff.
>That is kind of the idea of serving the long tail.
I feel like I see a brand new way of saying “something that people don’t really want” on a near daily basis nowadays
It means Google will show you the top 5 brands for a product category and then give up. If you want something more specific you have to search through reddit threads. Or you can have chatgpt search through reddit threads for you.
No, you don't understand. We're...
- mining the 95th percentile, leveraging the Pareto Principle
- optimizing and ubiquitizing under-optimized paradigms
- pioneering agentic solutions to aggressively expand product frontiers
- innovating high-risk strategies to serve underserved markets
- digging deep into the inner recesses of my being and extracting what's left of my soul through my nostrils
And so much more.
You and the parent are dismissing an actual customer who really used the “AI” successfully.
I don’t want to believe LLMs are the future of shopping either, but it’s wrong to dismiss actual successful users with hot air.
Yeah, people are letting their biases get in the way of seeing the reality.
I also did a bunch of shopping with AI to identify clothing recently. I was going to DC for a bunch of meetings, and did not have a good sense of what clothes are appropriate in different DC contexts. I did a bunch of iteration with AI to identify something that communicated what I intended, and then ran the final list by a friend with more context to confirm that it was indeed a readable choice.
Just in the last three weeks I cut buying an used car analysis (1-3 months usually) and a new dryer (usually at least a week) to three days total -- this is "time to shortlist" aka "any of the three remaining options will be a great choice".
Using several AI models to cut through the multidimensional sea of options.
It's not all grim, thia technology can genuinely be helpful.
AI helped me shop for some bits and tools that I needed to do my rear differential and brake fluid, and after some nudging, I also got it to do price comparisons for the tools I needed. saved me a lot of time to walk into each store with an exact list on the bits that I needed. And time with getting exactly the tool I needed without overspending.
I previously would have spent this time opening up 4 tabs on three diff hardware store sites, and an additional tab to pull up the relevant car forums for tips and advice. Which I ended up doing anyways, as well as some YouTube videos because I don't trust the results. But it still saved me a ton of time investigating and weighing out options as a decent aggregator of info.
That's fine? Especially if the AI does the searches for me, and does them more frequently than I would.
I have a half dozen facebook marketplace searches going. I used to automate craigslist searches before craigslist became irrelevant. It's nothing complicated but "AI searches for me and notifies me" is better than me remembering to look.
Uhh I don’t think you shop for clothes if you think there’s just a half dozen giant mail order clothing vendors.
Well obviously you shop for clothes, but nowhere like the way people who like clothes shop for clothes.
Finding clothes is about matching the vision in your head. If you’re the type that just buy clothes whatever, this is not a problem that exists in your world.
> I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs
You know, everyone used to have specific needs in clothing when I was young. Somehow fast fashion advertised that out of us to solve their own supply chain problems.
Great ideas always start with a niche. Moreover, they almost always start out looking dumb.
and therefore, ideas that seem dumb and niche must be great
The example was of someone who is tall and doesn’t find clothes that fit them.
For the average consumer, clothes fit them.
There is no generalizability from a niche possible here, since the mass market is already served.
Actually, I think you're really underestimating how many people struggle to find clothes that fit them well. Most people's bodies are not perfectly average. For clothes not to fit well, you don't need to be a significant outlier in one dimension. Just the accumulation of several smaller deviations from average can be enough to create an awkward fit.
Beyond that, even if we limit it to height alone, there are hundreds of millions of people who are much shorter or much taller than average.
I can assure you having observed the process of clothes shopping for the women in my life, that as far as they are concerned, clothes do not just “fit them”.
Yeah there was no way Amazon could expand from its niche of specialist books to anything else, because that market was already served. Oh, wait...
I will do my best to remember your opinion next time I use AI to buy clothes, but given the fact that IDGAF, it's not going to be easy.