jmathai

I think the idea has always been wealth extraction.

Open source let your project be rebranded and resold. That happened to me a decade ago. A company named ClickUp rebranded https://github.com/photo/frontend. It’s a risk with Apache 2.0.

Turned out not to materially impact our efforts. But it felt like a gut punch at the time.

AI enables this for closed source. Reputation and community are durable differentiators nowadays. I hope your 10 years of investment provides that.

PhotoStructure looks great, by the way. I have known about it for some time and love to see great open source photo offerings.

Sounds like a great reason to gtfo.

Same. It’s been set and forget for me.

PSA: Getting out of Google Photos is both easy and super rewarding if you can run Immich and use Google Takeout. It’s also better than Google Photos.

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

My 2nd generation iPod stopped working last week. It had a spin wheel but its predecessor's actually spun.

The monochrome screen shows a folder icon with a warning sign. I haven't looked into it but I fear that something happened to the internal hard drive. It's one with spinning disks. It was truly a work of art, that device.

The distribution and customer research of building a durable and successful product and company is incredibly complex. LLMs can probably do each of the parts but it requires a lot of coordination.

Agent swarms, you say? Perhaps. But I don't think we're there quite yet. At least, we're not seeing it manifest.

I understand what you're saying. What I was saying is difficult is introducing a new tax that would tax already taxed dollars. It's the "new" part - but I get that most new tax laws will do this.

So I probably agree with you.

Multiple taxation is not the problem. It's reforming tax law and charging on things that have already paid taxes.

Imagine tax reform which collects an extra 1% of sales tax for items you have already purchased.

I'm all for reforming tax such that the wealthy cannot dodge them and pay a higher effective tax rate. I just don't know how to get there.

Elon moved the Tesla HQ to Austin which employs around 22k people. I'm not sure how much that moves the needle but it's not 0. California is doing just fine but if I were a public servant there then I'd think twice before making sweeping reforms.

I think it's difficult to tax people on money they've earned and "paid" taxes on. The billionaire tax in CA is a good example. It makes sense that the ultra wealthy would rather move than to pay that tax - for lots of reasons ranging from greed to wanting to decide how their wealth gets used.

It reminds me of student loan forgiveness. It's too hard to retroactively forgive them. It may sound good in theory but it's not fair - i.e. for people who worked 2 jobs while going through college.

The laws for wealth accumulation moving forward need to be reformed and I think we have to accept that we let people run away with massive wealth and it turned out to be not the best thing for society.

Some lessons are learned the hard way.

If the HQs move then along with them moves the high paying jobs and retail, housing, etc taxes also go. Rank and file employees at Meta can't dodge taxes as efficiently as their CEO.

My kids and their friends all dislike AI. I haven't put my finger on why, yet.

I think a part of it is a growing negative perception of technology. I think they're smarter than we might give them credit for and can feel when they're being exploited.

Maybe, despite not liking schoolwork they dislike more being a "dumb pipe" between AI and their teacher. We've stripped away purpose in the name of efficiency (and profit).

Some of the adults in charge....really shouldn't be. And I'm not referring to teachers or school administrators here.

We have 2 Frame TVs. It's a great product if you aren't someone who obsesses over picture quality and have the budget.

I'd love a clean UI to accompany the minimalistic design of the TV itself...but this looks a bit early for me to try :).

Not yet, unfortunately. Nor Android, which people have asked for.

I think Android would be supported first but no specific timeline for it yet.

I built this for my own private use but it’s since become public.

Free to use, no accounts, no subscriptions.

https://trysojourn.app

I was using Claude to bounce ideas for parenting with a focus on biblical principals. Trying to really understand how to discipline my children without provoking them, for example.

I was pleased with the experience but Claude did not make it easy for me to dive deeper into scripture. I wanted a different LLM chatbot experience that was focused on less chatting and more scripture reading.

I TestFlighted it out and friends liked it so I ended up publishing it.

Exposing yourself to great taste educates AND inspires. I love Peters Design Company and how amazing they are at identity branding.

Here's an example of rebranding Uhaul. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cMU0G8h0pys

The problem with a "software factory" as a dev is that it leads to infinite dev work. Build project A and struggle to get users, start project B.

The author is saying, build project A and stick with it. This isn't new to the "AI era" but it's more pertinent.

I think many of us have already started automating it so that they update alongside code changes.

I used their API for several years for a project to get reverse geocoding to turn city names into lat/lon pairs and vice versa.

Like Mapbox, I assume they have a profitable business selling their mapping services to other companies.

Can this work against a cheaper cloud LLM like Deepseek? https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...

Screencast looks great btw.

I've found that many "skills" with regard to using AI become obsolete very quickly. It's really hard to stay ahead of the curve, IMO. I was using agents over 2 years ago and felt way ahead of the curve [1]. Today, Claude will spin up agents without even having been asked.

Feels a bit like a fools errand.

[1] https://www.loom.com/share/aa6e55acb18c445e9186637ac763c08d

This is an idea that a platform like Kickstarter used to be great at validating. I did this in 2012 and found around 500 users willing to pay for an open source photo management software.

Finding customers will be difficult. I suggest finding a couple and then talking with them to learn what they want first and then understand their willingness to purchase by offering them a device at a cost.

For me - I’m in the market. I flashed my Asus router with Merlin. I’d do the same for my next router. What might lead me to buy my next device from you?

- I like to support independent vendors when I can. (See caveats below) - I would like a built in way to keep the firmware up to date … mine is old. - I would want to understand the commercial equivalent router based on specs to make it easier for me to decide if it will meet my needs. - The rest is provided by DD-wrt.

Happy to be user #1. Contact in profile.

Trust over speed. That’s all that’s being said here.

I think that they will impact markets by reducing the amount of labor needed. I do not think that they will increase output or new products. Many companies believe that if they just had more manpower that they could generate new ideas in the market. But I don’t think that is true. This just leaves reduction in labor.

And just to be clear, I think LLMs will be a net negative on society.

Lobbying is teriboe and the explanation cited is good for those unfamiliar.

Also, political ads in the U.S. have become so obnoxious. I don’t know how it is elsewhere.

Ads in the U.S. are personal attacks at the opponents character or lies about them. There is currently an ad about how an opposing politician supports sex change surgery without parent consent. Nothing is believable about the ad - yet somehow it’s not slander or libel.

This is the ad. https://youtu.be/WFISHnLCmms

There are LLM optimists and LLM pessimists.

The optimists have been more correct in predicting the capabilities and usefulness of LLMs.

The pessimists seem to have a hard time rationalizing what they thought with what’s actually happening.

Art was always recognizable as effort and discipline.

We talk a lot about the consumer side of this. Consumers will get tired of the creative output of AI. That it lacks soul. I agree.

But there is also the artist’s side. A craft that you dedicate decades to that’s now indistinguishable from someone who typed a couple sentences. This is a demoralizing place to be.

The scope of what a single prompt can do continues to grow. I’m in the same boat as you but not as optimistic that it’ll be something I enjoy as a craft for much longer.