This is 5% off topic, but just to say that Zack (the person behind this service + Infinite Digits) is (also) a super prolific (and extremely kind) developer/maker/hacker with a ton of exquisite software+hardware musical projects:
Thanks for making the internet a more positive (and springy!) space!
-Zack
>How it works # YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about
okay, but how does it work? how does it check the status of things?
There are two general options:
1. Scrape a google search for the question, feed that into OpenAI with the additional prompt of "Given the above information, is the answer to <user prompt> yes or no". Or give the AI a "google" tool and just ask it directly.
2. Same thing, except instead of OpenAI feed it into underpaid people in the global south (i.e. amazon mechanical turk). These people then probably feed it into ChatGPT anyway.
Given there's a free tier, and when you use it it produces very ai-sounding text, I think it's pretty clearly 1.
Also, if you enter a clever enough question, you can get the system prompt, but this is left as an exercise to the reader (this one's somewhat tricky, you have to make an injection that goes through two layers).
I built something very similar a few months back and I just asked an LLM. You could optionally specify a CSS selector for HTML or JMESPath for JSON to narrow things down, but it would default to feeding the entire textual content to the LLM and just asking it the question with a yes or no response.
Their “About” site is (just slightly) more insightful:
> Using AI-powered web search, we continuously monitor your questions and send you an email notification when the status flips to what you're waiting for.
Without knowing whether they actually do it that way, if you give ChatGPT the following prompt, it returns `No.`:
> Please answer the following question with just “yes” or “no”: Is the new iPhone 18 available for pre-order?
You just curl the site or use its API, if it has one? Then you store the result in a database and see if its value has flipped. I don't get the question; this is trivial.
And how exactly does it call any arbitrary API or know which site to curl for any arbitrary question a user might ask? Your answer doesn’t contemplate the how this actually works.
According to https://yesnotice.com/about/ it uses "AI-powered web search" so the heavy lifting is likely outsourced.
> Additionally, YesNotice will provide an estimated availability timeline for the question, so you can have some information about when to expect the change.
How is that trivial in the general case?
Let's see how accurate those predictions are before worrying about the how.
> YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about (e.g., product stock, website availability, domain status) and comparing it to the previous status. When it detects a change from no to yes, it sends you a notification via email.
How does it generalize arbitrary indications of status into yes/no?
How does it know how to use arbitrary APIs to obtain arbitrary indications of status?
That's if the website you're querying is a static html file but the web is much more dynamic and varied. Some of the questions I have: does yesnotice execute js, does it handle an answer appearing on a different page, does it handle ambiguous launch language. In essence: how does it work?
what site does it check? what api does it call?
one of the examples is to see if a new coffee shop is opened in town. what's the API to call for that?
I'm glad someone finally did something here. I wish you every success.
Thanks! Had pretty much the same thought process as you, so I made this little tool (yesnotice) to do pretty much that. Its not perfect, but I've been using it a lot and its working great for me (mostly to get notified when certain new packages are updated and TV shows come out...then I don't have to remember so many things!)
The "yes/no" framing is a nice constraint that makes this actually useful vs generic "page changed" monitors. Do you rate-limit the checks to avoid hammering sources?
Ok, I'll only accept this use of AI if YesNotice can figure out how much their computer cycles cost to do whatever it's doing.
Neat! Now I don't have to remember to Google for new vaccine updates every week!
Cool idea. Just a heads-up that the Demo link at the bottom of the page leads to a 403.
Nice idea.
Love this idea
Very much reminded of "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez, where the system is watching the news to find out when people were dead, etc.
hug of death?
[flagged]
>Notifications are sent via email or SMS, depending on your preference.
This would be a perfect use case for RSS.
And then a service on top that checks the feed and notifies you when there’s a new item.
I presume most mobile RSS readers do this already. With the added bonus that users can set their own settings of how often to refresh their feed rather than writing a service to do it
This is 5% off topic, but just to say that Zack (the person behind this service + Infinite Digits) is (also) a super prolific (and extremely kind) developer/maker/hacker with a ton of exquisite software+hardware musical projects:
- check out https://infinitedigits.co/docs/products/zeptocore/ if you're into sample-y, jungle/breakcore-y audio mangling/button mashing
- and his https://infinitedigits.co/docs/software/collidertracker/ terminal-based tracker
Signed, an honorary member of the Zack Fan Club :-) haha
Oh! The maker of croc too https://infinitedigits.co/docs/software/croc/ Used it a few times to send files from A to B
His contributions to the Monome Norns ecosystem are impressive as well! Barcode (https://infinitedigits.co/docs/software/norns-scripts/barcod...) is a classic and I still rock it.
Such kind words! I really appreciate it.
Thanks for making the internet a more positive (and springy!) space!
-Zack
>How it works # YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about
okay, but how does it work? how does it check the status of things?
There are two general options:
1. Scrape a google search for the question, feed that into OpenAI with the additional prompt of "Given the above information, is the answer to <user prompt> yes or no". Or give the AI a "google" tool and just ask it directly.
2. Same thing, except instead of OpenAI feed it into underpaid people in the global south (i.e. amazon mechanical turk). These people then probably feed it into ChatGPT anyway.
Given there's a free tier, and when you use it it produces very ai-sounding text, I think it's pretty clearly 1.
Also, if you enter a clever enough question, you can get the system prompt, but this is left as an exercise to the reader (this one's somewhat tricky, you have to make an injection that goes through two layers).
I built something very similar a few months back and I just asked an LLM. You could optionally specify a CSS selector for HTML or JMESPath for JSON to narrow things down, but it would default to feeding the entire textual content to the LLM and just asking it the question with a yes or no response.
Their “About” site is (just slightly) more insightful:
> Using AI-powered web search, we continuously monitor your questions and send you an email notification when the status flips to what you're waiting for.
via https://yesnotice.com/about/
Without knowing whether they actually do it that way, if you give ChatGPT the following prompt, it returns `No.`:
> Please answer the following question with just “yes” or “no”: Is the new iPhone 18 available for pre-order?
You just curl the site or use its API, if it has one? Then you store the result in a database and see if its value has flipped. I don't get the question; this is trivial.
And how exactly does it call any arbitrary API or know which site to curl for any arbitrary question a user might ask? Your answer doesn’t contemplate the how this actually works.
According to https://yesnotice.com/about/ it uses "AI-powered web search" so the heavy lifting is likely outsourced.
> Additionally, YesNotice will provide an estimated availability timeline for the question, so you can have some information about when to expect the change.
How is that trivial in the general case?
Let's see how accurate those predictions are before worrying about the how.
> YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about (e.g., product stock, website availability, domain status) and comparing it to the previous status. When it detects a change from no to yes, it sends you a notification via email.
How does it generalize arbitrary indications of status into yes/no?
How does it know how to use arbitrary APIs to obtain arbitrary indications of status?
That's if the website you're querying is a static html file but the web is much more dynamic and varied. Some of the questions I have: does yesnotice execute js, does it handle an answer appearing on a different page, does it handle ambiguous launch language. In essence: how does it work?
what site does it check? what api does it call?
one of the examples is to see if a new coffee shop is opened in town. what's the API to call for that?
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/web-...
You could use an LLM to pick the right API.
which is, of course, what i mean by "how does it work"
From a database!
Good enhancement to existing services like Website Watcher, changedetection, etc.
Take a look at these posts --
https://deanebarker.net/tech/blog/let-me-know/
https://deanebarker.net/tech/blog/notify-one-time/
I'm glad someone finally did something here. I wish you every success.
Thanks! Had pretty much the same thought process as you, so I made this little tool (yesnotice) to do pretty much that. Its not perfect, but I've been using it a lot and its working great for me (mostly to get notified when certain new packages are updated and TV shows come out...then I don't have to remember so many things!)
Pretty cool. I suspect it's an AI implementation.
Reminds me of this classic: http://isabevigodadead.com
The "yes/no" framing is a nice constraint that makes this actually useful vs generic "page changed" monitors. Do you rate-limit the checks to avoid hammering sources?
It's IFTTT all over again!
Can't wait for the collab with https://www.istheinternetonfire.com/
Ok, I'll only accept this use of AI if YesNotice can figure out how much their computer cycles cost to do whatever it's doing.
Neat! Now I don't have to remember to Google for new vaccine updates every week!
Cool idea. Just a heads-up that the Demo link at the bottom of the page leads to a 403.
Nice idea.
Love this idea
Very much reminded of "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez, where the system is watching the news to find out when people were dead, etc.
hug of death?
[flagged]
>Notifications are sent via email or SMS, depending on your preference.
This would be a perfect use case for RSS.
And then a service on top that checks the feed and notifies you when there’s a new item.
I presume most mobile RSS readers do this already. With the added bonus that users can set their own settings of how often to refresh their feed rather than writing a service to do it
This would also be one excellent use case for web notifications! One I'd gladly use!!! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...