eigenvalue

Takes a few minutes and tokens for Fable:

https://x.com/doodlestein/status/2076068741255733715?s=46

I posted this on X but it’s relevant here, so reposting it:

I had a lot of fun using Sora and got a lot of laughs with absurd videos of me in various situations.

But like everyone else, I kind of got it out of my system after a couple weeks. Not to mention that my family got sick of seeing them. And so my usage collapsed to zero. And that seems to have also been the pattern writ large.

But this kind of flash-in-the-pan dynamic is devastating for a product with this kind of profile, which requires insane amounts of compute hardware to serve while also having no short-term monetization path.

Meta could afford to invest in IG Reels even when it was burning money and costing them a fortune for hardware because it was building up what turned out to be sustainable usage patterns which persisted long after the initial spending ramp.

It’s basically impossible to effectively monetize anything that’s not sustainable on the order of multiple years.

A subscription-based model would see excessively high churn that would be ruinous to the economics, and also advertisers wouldn’t be interested either, for the obvious reasons.

So why couldn’t this work? I don’t think that it was because the models weren’t good enough or that the depictions weren’t realistic or lifelike enough. I still marvel at some of the better outputs I was able to get from Sora.

I think the fundamental problem that Sora faced is actually much broader and more general, and it comes down to the basic Pareto math of any content generation or creative app, which is that 95%+ of the users just want to passively consume content from the 5% or less that actually wants to generate it (and is capable of making anything that other people want to watch).

It was really dismal to see the repetitive, trite ideas that 99% of users generated in the public feed. Just the same few dumb jokes and things they copied from other users.

Or putting themselves in a scene with their favorite fictional or cartoon characters or whatever, which of course got banned pretty quickly for copyright issues.

Most people are not creative and don’t have a lot of original, interesting ideas. So that means that the vast majority of the content is always going to come from a vanishingly small number of creators in a power law distribution.

And those super-creators aren’t going to want to be limited to a simple text-based interface that can only generate for 10 seconds at a time with no continuity and where large portions of things you might want to try are strictly forbidden.

They’ll instead gravitate to more customized solutions for power users that regular users would find as overwhelming to use as AutoCAD.

And that’s what you’re seeing now with all the new viral AI slop videos that are made by a handful of creators who have figured out the workflows and are pumping out the worst junk you can imagine that gets people to click and watch.

Anyway, RIP Sora; it was fun while it lasted. Thanks, Sam, for blowing a few hundred million bucks so we could get some laughs.

Thanks. I don’t get it either tbh. I’ve basically stopped posting here because of it.

Thanks! The site explains it:

https://frankentui.com/

What’s the purpose of this nasty comment?

I find this to be a bizarre sentiment. It’s an artifact that exists. The chances of me making this by hand are 0. This would be a full time job for 3 years to research and build this. For 10 people. And it would have to charge a ton of money to access in that case.

Look at the commit history. I’ve been working on this essentially every single day for over a month.

Thank you, I was scrolling and scrolling in utter disbelief. It sounds absolutely dreadful. Would drive me nuts to listen to for more than a minute.

lol, was wondering why I didn’t see your brain dead reply, and it’s because I’ve had you muted for years.

OK thanks for your input.

You really think that's the same as someone blatantly plagiarizing the work and passing it off as their own? Give me a break. This is dishonest and odious.

Yeah, I was being polite. This is outright plagiarism. @dang

I recorded this around a month ago, which is funny because it's already pretty obsolete since my tooling has advanced so much since then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68VVcqMEDrs

My full stack is detailed here on this site I made recently:

https://agent-flywheel.com/

I really think git worktrees are a bad approach. You’re better off in my view with one shared state and dealing with conflicts live by dividing tasks ahead of time using beads and letting agents communicate with each other using Agent Mail and file reservations.

I’ve been able to productively run 12+ agents from CC, Codex, Gemini-cli at the same time this way and it works really well.

This sure looks similar to something I posted on X 2 weeks ago:

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/misc_coding_agent_tips_...

You be the judge:

https://x.com/doodlestein/status/2002423770259345451?s=46

If the tool sucked, they would not be saying that. I’ve tried. Also they did give some negative feedback and it has already been used to improve the system.

I did something similar except mine is fully open source and works way better:

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/ees

I had a striking realization recently that has helped me improve my project. What matters isn’t what I think, it’s what the users which actually use the system think. Which is sort of obvious but somehow less so when the users are AI agents…

It actually does work well. And perhaps it’s not even that surprising that it would work, because we know that’s what works already for human developers and companies, so we have an existence proof already.

I was recently explaining to someone how Barra risk factor models work and how they’re used by hedge funds to measure whether someone actually has investing skill or just “got lucky” (among many other use cases). And I realized that it would make an interesting article. So enjoy!

This sounds like it would be a good underpinning for a decentralized blockchain file storage system with its focus on immutability and redundancy.

They’ve definitely saved me many hours of wasted time between uv and ruff.

They need to come up with a better way of detecting people who are actively breaking the ToS by using the Max plans as a kind of backdoor API key, because those users are obviously not using it in the way it was intended and abusing the system. Not sure how they would do that, but I'm guessing you could fingerprint the pattern of requests and see that some of the requests don't fit the expected pattern of genuine requests made by the Claude Code client.

Anyway, I've been resigned to this for a while now (see https://x.com/doodlestein/status/1949519979629469930 ) and ready to pay more to support my usage. It was really nice while it lasted. Hopefully, it's not 5x or 10x more.

I made a tool like this a while ago which was useful for transcribing a whole playlist automatically using whisper:

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/bulk_transcribe_youtube...

I ended up turning a beefed up version of it which makes polished written documents from the raw transcript, you can try it at

https://youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com/

My favorite of these programmer fonts is PragmataPro, which I bought around 5 years ago. I like how it’s denser while still being easy to read.

Only problem is that it doesn’t have all the nerd font glyphs so it can’t handle the nice oh-my-zsh themes well, like the powerline-10k theme. I still use it despite that though.

The tool now supports dozens of tech stacks out of the box with the included best practices guides. I’ve been using it extensively for both Python FastAPI projects and NextJS projects and it’s a huge time saver for me.

You’re doing god’s work here, thanks for your service! I use photopea all the time. Probably the most impressive web app I’ve seen in terms of performance.

LLMs really know how to use it incredibly well. You can ask them to do just about any video related task and they can give you an ffmpeg one liner to do it.

When I see a page filled with junky ads like that, I instantly close it. On mobile especially, it’s unusable.

I’m amazed something like this gets traction here.

I’ve made tons of improvements to this just in the past day. I thinks it’s already the most feature packed and nice looking MCP client out there now.