I’m not a particularly mechanical person. Even when I put together a piece of furniture from the likes of Ikea, I’ll invariably get one step wrong and have to backtrack. One of the reasons I admire people who do things with their hands – – – carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc. – – is because I lack these skills. That probably is why I’ve been busily handing these tradesman all my cash this year during our kitchen remodel.
The most “pro” thing I own is an AirSnake, shown below, which uses air pressure to blast the holy hell out of plumbing clocks. I love this thing, and I confess I feel like The Terminator strolling around my house with it as I prepare to attack any clog that may dare exist in the Knight household.
I was facing a particularly fearsome clog on Sunday, and I kept blasting away at the thing so much that I wore the rechargeable battery down to zero. So I clicked the battery into its charging unit and, in a not-so-brilliant moment, leaned the AirSnake inside the bathtub, which itself was about one-third full of water.
After about twenty minutes, when the battery seemed to be sufficiently recharged, I walked into the bathroom and was chagrined to discover the AirSnake almost completely submerged. I instantly felt like an idiot. This was an electrically-powered device with a motor and many moving parts, and the goddamned thing was completely waterlogged. I picked it up, and dirty water dripped out of every crevice. I figured with my stupidity I had managed to ruin a nearly $500 product and also deny myself access to the only real means of addressing my plumbing problem.
Now, I hadn’t used ChatGPT since May, since I considered it pretty much garbage. However, after a few fruitless Google searches, I decided, OK, let’s give this artificial intelligence thing another shot. My goal was simple: find out if I had ruined this thing or, instead, discover that it was designed to be waterproof and that I’d be OK. After all, I didn’t want to just slam the battery back into its socket and hope it didn’t explode on me. So………..
Jesus. Christ. Holy. Lord. I posed just about the most simple, straightforward, easy-to-deal-with question in human history, and this goddamned ChatGPT (which had a recent valuation of $27 billion, by the way), basically gave me a lengthy equivalent of “Fuck if I know,.’ It suggested checking the “official documentation” (as opposed to the devil-may-care unofficial documentation that also came with the product).
Not only the answer useless, it was actually infuriating. At that point, I decided, fuck it, let’s see what happens. So I slammed in the battery back, gently pressed the button, and was delighted to hear the same familiar sound of the air chamber pressuring. Phew!
So my intuition that this whole AI rally was a complete tub of horseshit is affirmed yet again, and sincerely, I hope NVDA gets absolutely torched this week.
