FinnLobsien

I agree with what you’re talking about but I don’t agree this is analogous.

I’m talking about a one-time cashing in of trust one already has built up, not saying whatever the algorithm demands to go viral.

These people already have the thing others are expecting from content creation!

I think this is different from the short-term phenomenon you describe where people want to get rich quick via crypto/prediction markets/wallstreetbets/etc.

It’s much more like you already have enough to retire on, but cash it all out because your cousin’s tattoo artist’s stepson recently got a bachelor’s in finance and they won’t charge any management fees.

I think it depends on what exactly happened.

If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.

But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.

As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.

I've seen this pattern a bunch:

1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.

2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.

3. They post the content

4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up

5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.

6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.

There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.

(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)

Something I've learned over the years is how much it matters to feel good about the people you work with, and how much intuition matters in interviews and hiring generally (for both sides!).

It doesn't matter how much you enjoy your tasks or how good your comp is (unless it's enough to retire early) if you dread your colleagues and/or work environment.

I've declined customers or offers.

I think it's important for two reasons:

-For career growth and learning new skills (which eventually translate to more money), it's important to be in an environment where you want to crack tricky problems and exchange ideas with colleagues. Not to talk about the fact that good working relationships pay dividends later on for networking and such.

-We spend so much of our limited time on Earth working that we should enjoy it as much as possible, which, at least for me, is a function of liking who I work with and how I work.

Oh, I totally agree with this, and it's awesome to see you interact here. iA Writer is one of the favorite apps I have and I think your approach to building software is incredibly beautiful and more companies should do it this way.

I was responding specifically to a commenter who pretended as though the article was super promotional, which it isn't. I agree your proposition is the right way to transitioning away from MS Office.

Was just saying you're actually NOT proposing to get administrations on iA Writer as their default writing tool, as a prev. commenter was insinuating.

I thought their nod to what they sell was extremely subtle. And I also don't think they'd seriously propose iA Writer as THE office solution for governments. That would be delusional.

I agree, especially for something as important as spreadsheets.

Lots of important business logic and data live there

I'm wondering if this will actually be happening at scale. It's great that it's possible and I think this kind of extremely specific software is great.

I myself have built an app to help me do 2 hours of deep work on a personal (non-job) project. It's extremely opinionated to help ME specifically (can't add more than 3 active projects, minimal interface etc.)

But I wonder how many people will truly do this kind of thing. I feel like this will be done by people who previously maintained spreadsheets or copious notes for their projects, which has always been a minority.

But that is a tiny fraction of people. We can also theoretically make any dish at home from scratch (and be opinionated about ingredients), but people still go to restaurants for things they could whip up in 20 minutes.

I think the same will be true for software.

Apple Vision Pro…

I feel like this is a device with massive productivity potential (having a ton of massive screens anywhere I want), but none of them happened.

The price tag was of course insane, but I also feel like the use cases, apps, integrations etc just didn’t materialize.

Yes, totally true. This is dangerous though when those circumstances change and basically invalidate the whole category.

I can think of NFT infrastructure here:

Various product categories were created with market leaders that owned them.

But the NFT hype didn’t hold and we effectively realized the use cases didn’t manifest beyond ZIRP-driven speculation and a small collector-artist scene.

So that can negate the whole category or crown a different winner when a technology changes.

Imagine if we used NFTs to verify if an AI or human made a piece of media.

Suddenly “marketplace” becomes a much less interesting category than scalable, fast APIs to create NFTs

The average series D is 50-100M. This is 2.3B.

I'm wondering if AI coding companies almost NEED to be this capital heavy to pay for the massive LLM costs.

Would you make the same argument for smoking?

I think we’re in a world so dominated by the attention economy and things optimized to hook us in that it’s hard to just say “I quit”.

> The difference from the Nordics is that Germans have had the determination to go all the way with things, which means that for almost any great invention in the world there's always a German behind it.

That difference is also one of 80m+ people vs. a few million for the Nordics.

> But when it comes to the social cohesion, I always thought that the Germans had to fake it like the Nordics do, or like people in the Soviet Union did. But more and more I start to realize it's not the case. Germans actually support their government and support the European Union (in Nordic countries you can't find 1 in 1000 people who supports the EU), and support the official ideologies in their country. Is this the case, or am I encountering Germans online in isolated spaces?

Germans are indeed an incredibly obedient people. Even Vladimir Lenin once said "You couldn't start the revolution in Germany because there's a sign on front of the palace that says you can't step on the lawn."

I think Germany has extreme risk aversion as a result of two world wars and being extremely invested in a status quo that put them on top. Now Germany believes they can "just one more law" themselves back to the top.

Re: EU—Germany is a massive driver and biggest contributor to the EU. A lot of the EU's bureaucracy is a German-driven mindset which assumes everything will be good if you just pass one more law.

My take having grown up in Germany: Germany has risen to one of the world's top economies with products known for precision manufacturing, exacting standards and a general assumption that "We do things the right way".

So Germans became convinced they know the exactly correct way to do things because that's how they became the top of the world. So now that things are getting worse (economy, housing etc.), many Germans are convinced they just need a bit more of the exactly correct way to do things.

The same perfectionist mindset that lets you manufacture some of the world's best physical products is the mindset that makes it impossible for the government to use the internet.

The question is to what degree that matters - if this power applies anywhere you can access ChatGPT (which is anything with a web browser), do you actually need to control the hardware?

That's true. Plus the question of how much security you actually need. I've interacted with many, many websites and apps that were horribly insecure (e.g. a hotel checkin tool that stored passport scans in a public firebase bucket...).

In the vast majority of cases, this doesn't actually matter (the passport thing of course is pretty bad). If someone found a vulnerability in a vibe-coded event calendar and hacked into it to change the timing of trivia at your local sports bar... who cares?

It's like home security. If you're not rich, famous or extremely unpopular, you should definitely lock your doors, but you probably don't need armed guards.

I thought this was an interesting article that gets a few things wrong. Obviously, shipping AI-coded stuff to prod will introduce security risks.

But I also think it's important to define what level of security is actually needed for some of these apps. Obviously if you're shipping a product to thousands of enterprise customers, security needs to be tight.

But I would equate it similar to food safety: Many common practices in home kitchens would get you fired immediately in a restaurant.

But home kitchens serve very few people, store less food and store it for less time. They also have fewer people working on them.

I think the same is true for websites and apps.

There's something to be said for the security your type of project needs vs. perfect security.

I think this article is well-intentioned, but misses a few things:

-Nir Eyal is also the author of "Hooked" which is about building habit-forming products, i.e. he's an architect of the exact things that make it harder to pay attention.

When challenged about this, he typically suggests tips and tricks to use less tech, but never admits the products themselves are the problem.

-I think much of this needs to start with company culture. We need to start setting cultural values that enshrine the importance of deep work.

I don't think there's a convincing one but I think it's pretty obvious, no?

-These days, people are pretty unlikely to pay just to have a blog when there are tons of free alternatives

-Blogging itself has experienced massive decline with social media & short-form video

-Even if they did want to pivot into a more contemporary model, migrating a stack that old and with that many dependencies would be extremely difficult

Of course it'd be nice to preserve, but I imagine the business was on life support and mainly supported by holdovers and with close to zero new customers.

At some point, you need to close down.

> speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder.

But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path.

There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true.

But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.

I think everyone criticizing this is comparing it to the wrong thing. Many ambitious students:

-graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates.

-join other people's startups where they work crazy hours

-work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school

Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation.

It's not like YC is saying you either do an internship with free lunches, corporate yoga classes and kombucha on tap or you dive into the trenches of being a YC founder.

I thought the S-Curve piece was interesting, but not complete. It's definitely true that Europe, Japan etc. are experiencing slowing wealth growth, but this specific visual makes it seem like once a society is wealthy, you're absorbed into a list of wealthy countries and that's it.

Meanwhile, many countries have gone from some of the world's most prosperous to countries people want to emigrate from (Argentina, Venezuela come to mind).

the S-curve doesn't end there.

It's not even that. It's management that sounds good vs. management that sounds bad.

Its funny that the motivational speakers, coaches etc are rarely the people who’ve actually done the thing they preach for a living.

The best coaches, “mentors” etc I’ve had would never issue blanket advice like that because they know it’d be wrong for most people.

It’s important to remember the source here: A motivational speaker’s online course/consulting company.

They’re extremely incentivized to have a simple, takeaway that makes you feel good for 2 minutes

I think it's precisely this that makes the products desirable in public. In a social class where everyone can afford everything, the real status signal become the things that require more access, not more money.

When I started my career as a freelance writer (In Europe), I'd get requests for university essays regularly. I always said no, it seemed super sketchy. But there's definitely plenty of demand for this.

I wonder how that market is affected by AI.

Let's hope it will be implemented in typical "Germany does anything on the computer" fashion where they endlessly debate into a theoretically comprehensive, but impossible to implement solution.

Agreed. Though for a layoff/redundancy, it's slightly different. What I'd add to the situation described here would be:

a) Practice talking about that situation until it no longer triggers anger/resentment. No employer wants to hear an impassioned rant about how horrible your last job was.

b) Be as specific as possible when talking about the challenges of the last job and what you attempted to do about it. If you just say "toxic environment", "bad culture" or "menial work" or whatever, that could make it look like you're super negative.

When I was interviewing while in a pretty bad job, a way I framed it was:

"I wanted to do [explain project and rationale] and took initiative in that direction, but [person with authority] obstructed me by [what they did] and that made me like I was in a culture that [negative characteristic of culture], while I value [positive characteristic of culture], so I don't believe I'm in the right place anymore. This was an example to illustrate this, but I could dig deeper and share more if you want me to."

-> This keeps it free of judgment/resentment while also being assertive about what you want. It also frames you in a position of agency, not victimhood (you're not escaping something horrible, but proactively finding a better fit). It also shows your values in a specific (believable) way, not the typical job interview talk.

I think that’s always the thing with any of these things. The companies private equity or Bending Spoons acquire are frequently inefficient, bloated and not the best-run businesses.

But its basically an admission that the business is in its extraction phase and will no longer innovate.

Relevant quote:

Private Equity is engaged in buying artisanal semi-businesses, turning them into businesses, propping up the numbers while destroying them —then, hopefully, destroying itself.