arvidkahl

The weirdest thing about this article, slop, part-slop, or not, is that even the memory of reading Pretchett when I was younger immediately brought me back into a different state of mind.

Even the phrases that don't make sense and the obvious signals of AI writing, like miscounted words, didn't pull me out of the reverie and the reflection of the time when everything that was written came from the mind of a human.

I've never thought about it like this before, but the divide between digital natives and digital naives might be minuscule compared to the divide between people who read the works of other humans and those who constantly live in fear of reading a hallucination.

At the same time, the 3D printing community is very much embracing AI as a means to circumvent price-gouging behavior by GW in particular. The popular STL slicer Lychee just recently added a generator tool at https://3dgen.lychee.co/ that has seen both massive protests from hobby community idealists and, as it's still around, likely a lot of adoption by the less vocal pragmatists.

We'll have to see how this plays out. Games Workshop is (supposedly) notoriously litigous, and they've gone after artists who get too close to their art style. AI models are trained on that, so this is going to be an interesting thing to monitor.

If "we need to have this done by Nov 12th" is the milestone they were going for, and not a functional flow, then it was a great success.

Same here, been reporting the broken flow to customer support. An interesting part is the "we'll send you an email to confirm you're you", followed by a "enter validation code here" screen that immediately gets forwarded to the re-enrollment message. Also, no confirmation emails are being sent. Very surprised to see this being deployed to prod.

Hey, Podscan is still very much B2B, I just had another Enterprise subscriber a few minutes ago :D

I am actively moving further away from B2C, and even though I have a few individual users, the true power of the business shines with agencies, departments and enterprise companies.

You might find https://syften.com/ interesting. I use it for monitoring Reddit and all kinds of communities for mentions of my name and the titles of my books.

Linked above is a subpage. The actual homepage at https://fennel-lang.org/ has code and even an integrated place to run it.

Love the episode and the guests, but let me point out just how good the hosted pages look at Transistor, the podcast hosting used here. I'm not affiliated, though I run my own shows there, too. The UI just vanishes into the background and puts the conversation right into the center. That's good SaaS :D

Looking at the A16 chip and the neural engine on it, I am really happy to see machine learning and "AI stuff" moving onto my phone, away from the cloud.

I can't wait to see phones becoming a place for _useful_ AI use cases — with the privacy improvements of on-device computation.

Ive tried letting AI write my articles. It was horrible. I tried ignoring AI-powered tools (such as grammar checkers, summarizers, rewriters, speech-to-text apps), and the writing process felt sluggish.

The middle ground is what works best for me. I use generative AI exlusively mid-process, but neither for input (ideas) nor output (actual drafts.)

Here's how I write:

- I source my ideas from contemplation or conversations on social media. Topics discussed there have at least some pre-validated relevance - I sit down for ten minutes and dictate my thoughts into a tool like AudioPen (no affiliation, just a fan) which summarizes my 10 minutes in 5 or 6 paragraphs. THIS is the AI step. The tool suggests a few paragraph structures that I cycle through until I find a good one. - From there, I write my draft, following that outline. No more AI tools here other than grammar checking at the end.

AI is a great writing partner. It's a horrible writer.

SEO optimization is actively destroying the archives of blogs out there. Pruning articles to rank better is rewarded. Removing knowledge to "play the game" is a viable path to making money.

The saving grace here? The existence of the Wayback Machine. A non-profit by the Internet Archive that is severely underfunded. If you ever needed a reason to donate, this is probably it. And even then, the survival of this information depends on a singular platform. Digital historians of the future will have a tough job.

I appreciate this idea. Podcasts have the unique quality of allowing your company culture to subtly permeate the airwaves on which they're consumed. I listen to above/board by Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis who are building Fathom Analytics. Besides discussing the business behind the product and the technical challenges, I can sense how much it means to them to bootstrap an independent business and to be a real alternative to the Google products we all loathe. This is the kind of information you can't reliably communicate through landing page copy. The human voice has subtlety no marketing text could or should ever want to express.

If this is a window into the soul of a business, then it's a competitive advantage in a world of brands eager to be perceived as authentic. There's still lots of room for manipulation, but it becomes harder to fake when you're recording a show.

Making the best of it :D

Besides Goodreads falling into complete disarray, it is equally painful to know that Amazon owns the .book TLD (https://icannwiki.org/.book) and has yet to make that available to anyone.

A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray from what they were intended to be.

Was Captain Hindsight an option? :D

This becomes a question of orders of magnitude.

On Twitter/Instagram/whatever, you're exposed to the arbitrary censorship choices of the platform AND the risk of being deplatformed for any reason. Once that happens, you don't just lose deliverability, you lose every single relationship you had.

With an email list, at least you retain the list should your deliverability tank. It might take a lot of work to migrate to a new non-deny-listed setup, but at least you have a (hopefully double-)opted-in relationship with each prior reader still.

I've been to tech conferences as a junior level engineer and, most recently, as a speaker. I don't think I have walked away from a single conference or convention without a meaningfully impactful new connection, project, partnership, or experience — particularly in the "hallway track" outside of the talks.

It has been one of the most glowing examples of "the infinite game" for me, the thing you can't ever win but want to keep playing. Conferences allow us to physically manifest our desire for being part of a community of peers that willingly teach each other. The progressive optimism of the tech community allows for that to happen without being exclusively about trade shows or cash cows.

This is purely a positioning thing. Customers will understand "AI company" to mean "a business that uses AI to solve my problem," and nothing more. The insider perspective matters extremely little (, unfortunately.)

It's like McDonalds positions themselves as a food company while their majority revenue comes from real estate[1]. It doesn't matter to the consumer that their business internals involve the renting of property to their franchisees. What people see are the broken ice cream machines and the burgers.

A two-minute UI that makes a call to OpenAI is just as sellable of a product as someone offering social media templates written by a Llama instance running on their own servers. And during the gold rush, that's all that matters. H sure hope we'll see more nuanced descriptions later down the road: AI-powered, AI-integrating, and AI-adjacent :)

[1]: https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...

What you describe sounds more like a habit to me. But even if it were a ritual —something (re-)enacted to imbue meaning to a moment— it's of a different quality than swearing in the head job of an organization that aims to bring humanity to the stars.

There is a difference between what we consider to be the sacred and the profane. Rituals fall into either of these categories as well.

The expected answers and Caplan's insistence on (highly questionable) minute details are a sight to behold.

I wonder what would happen if the prompt for this was expanded to include instructions to respond in the style of Caplan himself.

I consider ChatGPT to be a gaslighting engine at scale. Every word it "utters" is meant to sound believable and convincing. It doesn't know truth or fact, just likelihood of a string of text tokens being believable.

I've started explaining it in terms of a "conman" to my friends & family. It will say anything to make you think it's right. It will even apologize for making a mistake if you insist that 2+2 is 5. That's what a liar would do to make you look good. (That's usually when people get it.)

Besides the fact that this will hit every single company in the US that creates software in a non-trivial way (which is likely even true for many manufacturers), how crushing must this be for people just getting started.

You pay $10.000 in development costs and manage to get maybe $2k in early revenue that first year. But instead of being able to claim the full $10k, you're allowed only $2k. And now you pay taxes on $8000 of expenses? With a business that doesn't make any profits? Quite bizarre.

Congressional inaction on Section 174 means huge, unexpected tax bills for companies that can’t bear the loss of R&E deductions. Instead of claiming 100% this year, it needs to be amortized over 5 years or more.

Self-funded SaaS businesses who can't easily pay 4x their current tax bill will go bankrupt from this — a tax provision that was never meant to be used.

I snuck SETI clients onto the computers in my school. This is a sad moment — but I rejoice in knowing that it embedded the concept of distributed computing among nerds in our collective memory. Protein folding, weather prediction, and looking for pulsars as an in-game feature of EVE Online... glad these things came out of it.

There is also an option outside "one exam" and "many exams" — and that's "no exams." Obviously, this is spectacularly hard to fit into the current system, but you see this a lot in vocational schools where project-based work makes up the majority of the grade and exams are held to comply with regulatory requirements.

ChatGPT might just fit into an educational world that values outcomes over fact retention. One may dream.

"Dieser Eingriffsanlass bleibt angesichts der besonders daten- und methodenoffen formulierten Befugnisse weit hinter der wegen des konkreten Eingriffsgewichts verfassungsrechtlich gebotenen Schwelle einer konkretisierten Gefahr zurück."

This roughly translates into "there has to be a sufficiently concrete danger to warrant such a ambiguously formulated infringement."

I truly appreciate this sentiment. Any collection or analysis of data "just because there might be something in there" has to be weighed against the right of everyone that is being data-mined.

This freaked me out about Minority Report when I first watched it: those precogs are essentially hacking into the future memories of everyone involved in _and by happenstance surrounding_ the lives of future criminals and their crimes.

Mass-scale datamining is effectively the real-world equivalent of telepathy. And I want neither precogs nor the government in my mind.

I for the life of me can't understand removing people who point out such critical issues from your community. Is it greed? Ignorance? Complete unawareness of the Streisand effect?

It was already dated when I read it 5 years ago. Motivated me to give myself permission to seek something other than employment.

I regularly recommend it with the massive caveat that half of the resources in the book have link rotted away.

This is something I wondered about too, and always do when looking at recommendations, particularly by single individuals.

What I like about this list in particular is that it clearly admits that reading these books by far does not guarantee anything. After all, they're recommendations.

However, having read almost all of these books before and during my own entrepreneurial journey, I positively noticed the absence of many fluffy "self-help" types that usually get recommended for new founders (the Napoleon Hill kinds of monstrosities).

This suggests that filtering who's recommendations to follow was a good idea.

That suggests that no matter how much survivorship bias is in the books themselves, the act of recommending them indicates that the founder who read the book AND built a successful business found SOMETHING valuable in the work that they deem worth reading.

Do you have any good examples? Genuinely curious (particularly about the kind of market they're located in and what happened to the "original" business).