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 ended up with a T14 Gen 4 and I'm super happy with it.
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?
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.
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
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.
I feel like I see a brand new way of saying “something that people don’t really want” on a near daily basis nowadays
- 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.
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.