mattmaroon

I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do.

And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years.

ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month

You gotta think long term. This is going to cause all those lumber companies to plant more forests and 40 years from now when they’re big enough boom, 3 new jobs servicing the autonomous tree harvesters.

Me too.

Right now you have a window. AI can do a huge chunk of the work you were doing last year, and outside of programming, nobody seems to know about it yet. I've cut 10 hours a week out of my schedule in the last several months just in time to have my first kid, at the ripe old age of 46.

They'll figure it out and we will be right back to the same pressure we had before, but for a short time at least, if your field is competitive, you have a huge edge.

Ah. Yeah. I can’t wait until the tooling for non-programming tasks catches up to the tooling for programming. I’m sure it will happen. Most of the software world started off aimed at developers (because they made it) and then found its way to us muggles.

Do you work in the space?

Oh I’m just using ChatGPT, I haven’t dives into getting anything to run locally yet. That’s on the off season project list.

I do where possible. I build MCP servers into custom tools. But a lot of it is stuff like filling out permit applications on government websites, or reading festival websites and applying, etc.

I will say one thing that frustrates me is the opaqueness of the billing model. I basically just have to pay a random amount. I guessed that it navigating the web is relatively pricey from watching my usage as it does stuff. And the whole thing is worth 10x what I pay for it anyway, it just would be nice if the pricing were somehow more transparent, even in hindsight. It can explain to me what is thinking as it does stuff, it could also explain the tokens.

Also, I have certainly gone down some unproductive rabbit holes figuring out what to do with it. Time spent on it is an investment, just like automating anything. You spend hours upfront to save them on an ongoing basis.

But, I think I’m on the black on it already after just a few months of heavy use. For instance I just tell it to book my dumpsters, bathrooms, sanitation crew, and security for X event. It goes and pulls event details, looks through my email to see who I get those from, and emails them relevant details, with no prompting.

Another good example: we launched a really fancy hot cocoa concept last fall that was a hit and I wanted to try to go to all of the local pumpkin patches in October and Christmas tree farms after Thanksgiving to serve when they have big crowds.

I asked it to contact all of the ones in my area and it sent out 70 emails and I booked several spots. It made me a nice database so I can see who followed up and who I need to reach out to again, etc. and it just gets those from my inbox.

Hours of my time saved with simple prompts. So while some things take awhile to pay off, some are instant.

Huge gaps. I expect the tooling to get better for non-programmers. Codex and Cowork are great, but you still feel like you’re trying to hammer the square peg through the circle hole often when using it for non-programming tasks.

The AI is good enough to do a lot of tasks but the tooling just isn’t caught up to it yet.

I’d say it’s freed up ten hours a week of my time. And that’ll only improve.

Yes. Bureaucracy for sure when I throw festivals. ChatGPT pulls permits for me. (I think that uses a lot of tokens because of the browser control?) Manages the admin side along with some tools I built in Lovable via mcp servers.

Marketing definitely. My food truck side is relatively high volume and it manages my kitchen and warehouse side, basically generating all of the instructions my employees follow, managing and updating my PoSes, creating signage assets for specials, etc.

Reels/posts production and managing ad spend.

Here’s a fun one. I switched payroll providers after several years and suddenly my unemployment insurance rate went from 0.8% to 12.75% which is borderline debilitating to me. I knew something was wrong but not what and I work a lot of hours and calling the state takes forever and is usually unhelpful.

ChatGPT figured out that it was a penalty rate and dug in for me. Turns out because I’m seasonal and have no payroll for one quarter of every year, Gusto did not file a quarterly wage report, so even though I owed nothing I was delinquent. Gotta love government, it’s the only place where you can be delinquent for $0.

ChatGPT filed the report and requested a retroactive re-rate, which they granted. I’m sure I would have figured this out eventually but it would have taken hours, or $5 in tokens.

There. I have the business plan with two seats and I use them both and blow through it pretty fast. I think it’s because much of what I have it do involves using a browser. For instance I have it pull various permits from cities and there’s no API for that.

All white collar work will be done by AI soon, there won’t be scaling down, just scaling up. I do food trucks and festivals and I’ve got AI doing so much of my non-meatspace work now that I’m buying $10-$20 a day in tokens. At that rate, hardware starts to look cheap, and I have less of a use case for it than most white collar workers.

I make my own all natural energy drink. I too don’t like coffee much, no matter how hard I’ve tried, but also those things have a lot of chemicals other than caffeine in them.

You can buy powdered caffeine derived from green tea. I do bottling including my own sodas so I have ready access and you might have to buy at least 1 lb, which is a lot of caffeine, but it’s worth it for your health.

I don’t drink more than 200mg in a day and usually not even that much so maybe I’m at a gram a week-ish. So a lb would last me for over 8 years.

Get a jewelers scale and you’re good to go

Things aren’t poorly thought out just because they’re a short internet comment. I could easily have delved into the background belief that’s deeply-rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Thinking humans aren’t special isn’t necessarily nihilism, it can be because you believe you’re only a tiny part of the vast universe, and that what we experience as “self” is just an illusion caused by limited processing power, and that since we are all part of the universe, not a separate thing from it, the universe itself has a level of consciousness that we don’t understand and might, for instance, want to develop an intelligent species that could develop artificial life for it for some purpose we don’t understand.

It is neither nihilist nor misanthropic, it’s just an internet comment that has no reason to get that deep and therefore you assumed it had no depth.

Feel better?

It was a Hacker News comment, not a doctoral thesis. People like you are why this site so desperately needs a block feature.

And yet the cheapest car can easily outrun any human who ever lived. Everything is unique if you look into it closely enough. I would say that’s not the same as special, though I admit this is just semantics.

You could say that about any religion given only a one sentence high level summary. “A guy in the sky made us in seven days.” has no serious, philosophical grounding.

I see all of this as the cognitive dissonance created when humans are confronted with what scientists have been telling us forever: we’re not that special. We’re just piles of atoms, as are rocks, dogs, computers, and all of the other intelligent life that the universe must surely be teeming with.

Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.

Well, I don’t think I’ve gotten to mc-festival scale yet so I don’t know. I’ve got a few festivals in the 25k attendee range, which is big but I have vended at some that are and order of magnitude bigger. The biggest fest I do, Circleville Pumpkin Show, gets 400,000 people, is so old it had to skip a year for WWI, and is very much the opposite of a corporate festival.

But I’ve also done the MLB all-star game, and subcontracted through a few major f&b firms and those started off as corporate as they come.

I don’t think I’ve yet been involved in one that became corporate after starting off small but I’ll let you know if I get there.

Mine are food-focused.

It’s more than just that (though I’m sure that’s part of it).

The thing about festivals is they have real economies of scale. For instance sponsors value getting in front of 25,000 people really highly, but they don’t value a 2,500 person festival at all. (I’m speaking general audience, in some niches a high quality small crowd is still worth money.) The portapotties get cheaper when you’re ordering however many come on one truck. The dumpster and tent companies don’t charge you any more for a 3 day rental than a one day. Etc.

So to make the business model grow you grow the festival. But soon you’re running a big security budget, so you look around for who in your area does security fit really big events. There are two firms. Ok you pick one.

Now the city wants to talk about your sanitation plan. Ok who does sanitation as a service here? OK there’s one company. Who can provide me a few 40 yd dumpsters and retrieve them on Sunday night? Ok there are like two willing to do that. Who rents large tents that has a fire permit in your city and can bring out a forklift because we’re on hard surface so we need 500lb cement anchors according to my city fire department. Ok there’s one vendor.

How do I feed 25k people? Well who does f&b for large events. Oh there are a few and they’re bidding on me. Guess I’ll go with the highest bidder among the few big national f&b firms. (My festivals are food festivals and I can handle f&b for 25,000 eaters no problem because I have run many large food truck festivals and I know who is good but most promoters cannot tell the good food operators from the bad and there are so many of both.)

So what happens is you’ve got all these pieces and you get to a level where just practical reasons as well as municipality rules make you choose between a handful of basically interchangeable vendors. And those vendors all do a good job and aren’t price gouging (they’ve got plenty of labor cost too) but they kinda all look the same.

Interesting. I’ve been debating starting a social media channel teaching people how to do it.

Everyone does. That’s why publishers put care into cover art.

“I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders.”

I started planning street festivals a few years ago. It’s now a lucrative and growing business for me. The demand for events at all scales vastly outstrips supply, and I think growing social isolation is part of the reason.

The free riders might seem like a problem to someone who just wants there to be events, but it is a huge opportunity to us who throw them.

I assume that of all of them as a basic security precaution.

Fair point. But they still have more potential customers than any other individual ISP. Lack of potential customers is not their limiting factor.

Their potential customer base is literally everybody because they are the only ISP that can cover the entire globe. Everybody’s potential customer base is technically limited because there are only so many humans, but they have the least limited potential customer base of anything that exists.

It’s cute he thinks Jeff Bezos thinks about this. Whoever made this decision has probably never met anybody who has met Jeff Bezos.

Good old HN.

Me: they’re great but their tech sucks

You: their tech is good

Me: it can’t do basic stuff

You: ok you’re right but they’re great

I can tell you I’m a member of both, but I frequently let my Costco lapse but never Sam’s. Just because it isn’t killing the golden goose doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile to fix.