jmathai

A lot more people have taste than have previously been able to materialize it.

With AI, I created printable artifacts for a booth of a nonprofit I advise. We don't have a "creative" on the team but I'm fluent with all of Claude's tools and I feel I have good taste. I am not what you'd typically call a "creative" though - because I lacked certain skills that are less important now.

In about 30 minutes, I had a PDF I could upload to FedEx Kinkos to print. It looked very professional. Partly because it was based off the website that Claude also helped me design.

In the same way that AI enables me to bypass creatives, it lets creatives by bypass someone like me.

This is true :P.

I don't even need to read a Bloomberg report to know this. I've personally experienced noticeable mental decline as my AI usage at work has gone up.

I can only imagine what it does to children whose brains are still developing.

I'm not anti AI and I don't know how to quantify the pros and cons but we need to be honest about what they are.

YC funded Flock 10 years ago is even more accurate.

I get that Flock is now a pretty obnoxious company but it's hard to attribute that to YC.

LLMs add enough nondeterminism to a workflow. Swapping them without the user knowing adds substantially more.

I think an $18 billion dollar fine implies that they broke a law or two.

Really? There's so much information about how Meta targeted children with addictive design patterns. They paid the fine, and profited in the meantime. Do you really think they have any reason not to do the same in the future?

I trust Meta will keep those they don't want to access the data out. It's Meta that I don't trust.

> Your personal data is safe and secure

That's from the article. I can't think of anyone I'd trust less with my data than Meta. Well, thieves, I guess.

I feel, many times, the way Bill did in that email. Seems most people don’t mind or care.

I wondered how anyone successfully filed for unemployment a few years ago when I had to. But many seem to do it successfully.

I tell my wife that I pay too much attention to the details and have a low tolerance for poor work. I wish I didn’t notice though as it seems like a nice life!

I think this answer depends on age. For me, it was up until right around 2014. That’s when, I think, social media and mobile phones unlocked a number of generally unproductive behavior both personally and in business.

The early 2000s were truly great.

Fine is quite an understatement. It was everything I loved about the Internet. I think jQuery was when I feel the Internet peaked.

It was dethroned by corporate OSS(react, angular) and it has never felt the same.

I recently posted that “Big Tech Wants To Br Your Bible Translator”.

Each industry has its own challenges with AI. The YouVersion CEO is vocal about his belief that GenAI isn’t suitable for many use cases. I can see why they’d want to control that narrative.

https://jaisenmathai.com/faith-and-ai/big-tech-wants-to-be-y...

To avoid misquoting scripture it’s using a couple techniques including tool calls for grounding and a client-side parsing layer to find and replace citations.

It currently uses deepseek flash. We’ll evaluate local models in the future.

I would encourage you to explore professions that you might find more fulfilling. I had found myself in a similar situation as you.

Some ideas that I explored were working for a church or non profit, starting an interior design firm with my wife (she’s a designer), advising startups, etc.

2 years later, I’m advising a couple start ups, on the board of two non profits, and back in tech.

I’m not thrilled about being back in tech. But the other ways I’m spending my time help provide me balance.

I consider myself an AI optimist. From what I've seen, I think there's a lot of headroom for it to expand it's disruption.

I also dislike the future that would result in. Heck, I want to go back to pre-iPhone.

The chasm is wide between skeptics and optimists. It's as interesting psychologically as it is technically.

Immich is such a wonderful piece of OSS software. I've replaced Google Photos with it. And then some.

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

It's a tough predicament when the industry you're in is moving towards violating your personal preferences and ethics.

I'm neither agreeing with or disagreeing with the author's stance. But this tension crosses the line of "I have an opinion" to "I have an opinion that impacts my livelihood".

And I'm witnessing a lot of it.

I have wondered this about an open source project I wrote about a decade ago [1] and still use. It's an order of magnitude less popular than Monica at 1.5k stars.

The code base and logic is complex enough that it's hard to fix bugs and add features nowadays since they're few and far between. The test coverage is the only thing that makes it remotely possible.

I've considered doing the same, rewriting it so that AI can reason about it better. I think it would be a net positive compared to where it is today. But it's also stable, as I mentioned, so I don't have enough motivation to do it.

Just saying, I can see myself doing what this person is doing.

[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

I've been pretty disappointed with "medium quality" slightly more expensive furniture from places like west elm and pottery barn.

Now I will either get older recycled furniture for quality or pieces from IKEA for cost.

I'm a customer of Stripe. But I prefer to pay using these in order - Apple Pay, PayPal, Google Pay, Stripe, enter card into site.

The Stripe interface with Link and whatnot is slick but it feels like I'm giving my credit card over to the merchant even though I know I'm not.

Generally speaking, adoption for the sake of helping and protecting kids is quite noble. It's a fun fact about Eminem folks don't know about and the original submission is a post from Eminem.

I thought you were referencing Scott's Tots from The Office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0N2ZxQJYTw

Many people know Eminem has a biological daughter Haile whom he includes in many songs. But he also has 2 adopted children - his ex-wife’s twin’s daughter (referred to as Lainey) and his ex-wife’s biological daughter.

Rest in peace Dolly.

Is there a way, like Google used to do before they started rewarding SEO spam, that good content rises to the top based on criteria.

For one topic, I may want to read 100% human written content. Another topic, I may be okay okay with Human+AI content. And yet another, 100% AI content.

But above all, I also want that content to be high quality regardless of what wrote it.

I think, any many parents I speak to, that raising children to be respectful and obedient feels harder than it ought to.

There's a tear in our society's fabric around parenting. Too many parents silently wish their kids didn't have phones, or play Roblox, or use Instagram, or ... the list goes on.

These same parents wish they were empowered to make their wishes come true. But they don't feel empowered.

A quick anecdote. We have a 5yo son whom we've decided to be withhold screens from for as long as humanly possible. This decision comes from lived experience with our other kids who are 8 and years older and not from having read a book or listening to podcasts. We've lived the nightmare once and hope to avoid it this time around.

Anyways, my son was at a playdate with a classmate of his which was supposed to be swimming outside. It wasn't long before his classmate kept asking his mom to go inside. Turns out, that classmate has some game console with Minecraft in the basement. Our son asked my wife if he could play play but sadly obliged to just watch. Now at home he says how badly he wants to play Minecraft.

What does this have to do with corporal punishment? I think video games and social media cause kids to be more self centered than if they spent the same time with other humans. And this leads to all sorts of behavioral challenges that parents feel ill equipped to handle.

I'm not saying corporal punishment is the answer. But neither is gentle parenting. I think many parents are looking for something that works.

It's not only PRs, my personal projects which used github actions were seeing more builds in a single month than all of the previous year.

I’m listening to more and more AI music on Spotify. It’s got little depth but it’s very catch on the surface.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is a very quick race to the bottom and we will long for real music written by real people. At least some of us will.

Streaming services are SO incentivized to play AI music they create themselves. No need to pay pesky royalties. It’s akin to LLMs taking over search…Google gets to keep users on their property where the can continue to show ads.

Thank goodness my 2nd gen iPod still holds a charge and has all the MP3’s I’ve ripped from my cds.

I think a better way to ask this question is if I was entertained by a computer more than by the company of friends/family.

Of course I spend more time looking at a screen - it's my job description. It's never been different in the past. But outside of work, that's a different story.