jmathai

My wife is an extrovert and I'm an introvert. We are also the party throwers. If we didn't throw parties I don't think our extended family on her side would ever see each other. But even as an introvert, I feel very grateful and energized after hosting people at our home.

This prompt is a good way to test how well models fill in missing context because it's so nondescript. They're definitely improving.

Remember when people considered you a genius for prompting with "You are a skilled writer....".

> I don't really buy into this theory that they want to keep all of their users on their site due to advertising revenues.

It’s more their business model than it is theory. So I agree that of course this is what they would do.

It’s not a product I’m wanting to use. But I can vote with my feet - they aren’t obliged to do any different.

I legitimately thought you and a few other commenters were bots.

Probably was. But they were not originally a giant ad company.

A lot has changed and this technology for this Google is an unfortunate combination for consumers.

Google will stop being a traditional search engine because they believe they’ve found a more profitable version of it.

One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.

This really hits me, as someone building tools that utilize LLMs to help people deepen their faith.

My app tries to help people read the Bible more.

I’m asking myself.. What constitutes better? And is it worth pursuing?

Is better always better?

Matt? Is that you?

I’ve set two small businesses up on Claude design and GitHub pages (though they don’t need to know about git or GitHub).

I tried Wordpress. I don’t know how most people use their admin interface.

I like how James Kelly talks about Redemptive AI…different from Responsible AI.

https://youtu.be/LgW048IlyOQ

Why are we bothering asking him these questions?

You gave me an idea :). The original motivation was to explore the Bible like I explore Wikipedia. I think this UX for Wikipedia would be really amazing. Someone should build it. I hope I don't get the itch to do it this weekend!

https://trysojourn.app/writings/explore-the-bible-like-wikip...

The risk of not remembering how to do long division was limited because we could point to more complex problems that we would be solving instead. That was the trade off.

With skills and agents, that's a lot more fuzzy. Because for every higher complexity problem the obvious answer is that agents would be able to do that also.

Some folks (with significant agency) embrace that future with open arms while others (99.9% of humans) are tepid.

What's an example of an app / UX that you really love which other apps may rely on chat for? I'd love to check them out.

> Build an agent to win online programming competitions. A program that can write other programs would be, for obvious reasons, very powerful.

Interesting that Anthropic led the way here.

I think chat is a great entry point for many experiences. The approachability and flexibility are unmatched.

A question becomes, how do you evolve a chat experience to task specific actions?

I’m building an app to explore scripture. Chat is an amazing starting point. But it’s terrible once you get into reading the actual scripture.

I think we will see more of this in the future. Here is how I’ve envisioned evolving an experience out of chat. Curious if others have their own ideas.

https://trysojourn.app

It is unclear to me what a future void of human thinking looks like.

I wish we would stop and ask that question and ponder if that’s what we want.

It feels a lot like power has been concentrating such that a minuscule minority get to set that direction.

I mean 3x telecom and fiber doesn’t seem so crazy to me. Both represent massive shifts and I think AI has a lot more potential.

Scaling AI seems to be an energy problem that needs to be solved. Perhaps that is the Achilles heel that makes the bet risky.

The title of that book is marvelous and packs a lot into just 6 words.

I don't think it has to be if it forces you back into the moment instead of sitting in the anxiety.

> The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. - Psalm 23:1-2

The interpretation of this I love most is the visual of a sheep, satisfied enough that they lay down instead of grazing or drinking. This posture is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible.

I imagine most religions and philosophies have similar.

This hits me like a brick wall with my young children. Seeing them change so rapidly is a glimpse into how short life is and how often an experience unknowingly becomes the last of its kind.

There is so much to be gained by slowing down, focusing on what you can be grateful for, and not striving for more.

We have lived with lackluster B2B and enterprise tools for so long that we have become numb to how bad they are.

Being able to build something that works just how you want with minimal investment is a huge value add.

I ditched web analytics platforms and just send events in jsonl format to disk.

I have a regularly scheduled job that imports it all into a duckdb database and updates a very custom report. I can also ask random questions like “is there a cohort of users who use feature A and B?”.

It’s super lightweight and incredible.

WhatsApp is definitely part of Meta's distribution and reach strategy. So it's very relevant.

I don't think OP is trying to punish investors. I think they are saying the overall damage of letting these companies continue the current trend will be worse than the cost of unwinding it now.

I'm an advocate of reformed legislation to enable this.

Seems like a scenario where two completely avoidable wrongs....killed 120 children. AI being one of the wrongs.

> The Minab site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes.

I feel like we're optimizing the wrong metric here.

I have found a lot of value in the approach the post describes. I store my markdown as GitHub issues, regardless of how I come up with a detailed feature description (usually a chat session).

Before implementation, context is always cleared to ensure that the model is working only from known context (skills, AGENT.md, etc).

A major benefit of this is that agents can look up prior prompt instructions as needed or when mentioned in the current prompt it's working on.

I recently described my workflow here https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...

Not sure if what I said made sense. I mean inject titles, descriptions, etc from the Google Takeout into the photos EXIF. Then when you import them into Immich, it'll extract those into its own database.

Nice. The PHP script could also write metadata back into the photo so it gets extracted by Immich on import. Just an additional prompt :)

A tweet of yours a decade ago convinced me to add Google Photos into my workflow (thanks).

https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...

I removed it from my workflow when its integration with Drive was sunset.

I was without a great UI for a couple years, paying attention to Immich in my periphery. I decided to add Immich this year on a Mac Mini as well.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...