impostervt

The other way AI is killing self-help nonfiction: people are generating entire self-help books using AI. The human written are always better, but it's impossible to tell from a book cover and short description.

Honest question, not really related to the story: What makes someone "exploited"?

Most of us trade our time for money, so at what point does the money become too little and be considered exploitative? Are all gig workers exploited? Didn't they make a rational choice that this is the best opportunity for themselves?

It certainly feels wrong, the low wages. I'm just wondering where the threshold is.

Honestly think Go is worse. So hard to google anything about it.

You can buy shares on their secondary market pretty cheaply right now.

"major Western banks frequently pay large fines for AML violations, yet bank executives rarely face criminal convictions"

Seems like changing this would fix a lot of the problems.

I use AI to create customer avatars representing potential buyers of a product I may create (based on existing competitors and their customer reviews). I then use those customer avatars to help design the product.

I love the idea of going from "AI generated customer avatar" to "simulated real people". It would help add depth to the customer avatars, and lead to better product design.

I tried creating a society around products that I sell, but it looks like the "real-world data" is pulled from LinkedIn? I'm not necessarily targeting business people.

Over the weekend I stood up a small site with a blog of only a few articles. I've done this in the past with Wordpress and Jekyl, but I do it pretty rarely so I forget exactly how to do it and how to make the sites fast.

So I let Claude write it. I told it I wanted a simple static website without any js frameworks. It made the whole thing. Any time I add a blog post, it updates the blog index page.

The site is, of course, very fast. But the main gain, for me, was not having to figure out how to get the underlying tech working. Yes, I'm probably dumber for it, but the site was up in a few hours and I got to go on with my life.

As long as it's not SOAP, it's great.

About 1.5 years ago I inherited a project with ~ 250,000 lines of code - in just the web UI (not counting back end).

The developer who wrote it was a smart guy, but he had never worked on any other JS project. All state was stored in the DOM in custom attributes, .addEventListeners EVERYWHERE... I joke that it was as if you took a monk, gave him a book about javascript, and then locked him in a cell for 10 years.

I started refactoring pieces into web components, and after about 6 months had removed 50k lines of code. Now knowing enough about the app, I started a complete rewrite. The rewrite is about 80% feature parity, and is around 17k lines of code (not counting libraries like Vue/pinia/etc).

So, soon, I shall have removed over 200,000 loc from the project. I feel like then I should retire as I will never top that.

I've never quite gotten the axiom of choice. Can anyone ELI5?

I take a similar approach to investing on Masterworks (they sell shares of paintings). Most investors seem to buy the upfront offering, which is always $20/share, regardless of the painting. They don't seem to realize that MW holds onto the paintings for years, so it can be hard to cash out. Many will sell at a loss just to get their cash our before the painting is sold, so I can buy their shares very cheap.

I recently got a letter from the bank that owns my tesla loan, informing me that I can buy the car at the end of the loan. Previously that wasn't an option. Plus, it was for $28k (at the end of a 3 year loan).

Got another letter trying to get me to buy a new 3 with 0% interest for 60 months.

They're definitely under pressure.

Do GLP-1 already do this, to some extent?

I created a web site that uses AI to translate books, and in my testing, Deepl was way better than other AIs I tried at translating.

Oof just watched a video from the Pear.ai guys and was happy to hear they made it into YC. I don't know much about the project, but they seem like good people.

Pretty nice guy, too. Back in the early-mid 90s I was a teenager and got on some kind of David Brin fan site (this may have been on Prodigy it was so long ago), where the man himself would sometimes reply. He once responded to a message I posted, and it just about made my year.

A few months ago I started a job where I inherited a JS code base that is around 250,000 lines. It was one big class, with several sub classes, that did everything. Some files were 30k lines long.

No frameworks, no reactivity. If you click a button, you had to update everything on the screen with event listeners manually.

Took the guy years to write it. It's like a monk got locked in a cell for years with a basic book of javascript.

I started by refactoring into web components, because I had to do it piecemeal. It's been a big help, and I've cut 50k lines of code so far. But the real point was to just learn everything the old code was doing before I start a rewrite.

Seconded. I used Personal Capital for a while but the links to my accounts broke frequently. Moved to Monarch and paid for it and its way less of a hassle.

Flashbacks to high school CS back in the 90s. Started with basic then moved on to this. I understand now they use Java to teach kids, and I can't imagine trying to learn to code with that language.

Looks like the beginnings of something like lit elements.

Would love one that does two-way binding.

Awhile back I was on project A that got absorbed by the management of project B. Project b mandated that all engineers wore pagers. A guy on project A decided he didn't want to. The job he was hired for didn't require it when he was hired, and if the pager went off, he'd just have to call someone on project B anyway.

He said no. Got fired.

Computer Graphics back at Virginia Tech. No libraries, build the 3d yourself. I learned a lot in that class, including the fact that I did not want to make games for a living.

I'm confused about the "AI" part. Are vector databases, in themselves, AI? Are embeddings?

I tend to listen to synthwave while coding, as for me it has the right mix of energy + being able to ignore. I have felt my playlists have become a bit stale, and have been looking to add new stuff. Now it feels like this could just generate an infinite "good enough" play list.

Hopefully not powering this bot:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-ai...

I did this with my sister who was digital nomading in Argentina a few months ago. The easiest thing we found was for me to send her $3k via western union, which converted into an ungodly amount of pesos she picked up down there.

It was super sketchy. When I sent the money, the western union person said there was a chance western union would block it because it was such a large amount, but luckily it went through. When my sister picked it up, they basically stuffed it into a backpack to carry around. Seemed very dangerous to be carrying that much cash (even in the US it would be), but it worked out ok.

Is there a way to login to a website for the website scraper?

Interesting. Good visualization. I did something similar at this site many years ago.

https://www.wordsapi.com/

That's the standard payment when publishing your audiobook using ACX (how independents get their books on Audible) - and then only if you go exclusive with Audible. If you're not exclusive, you get 25%.

Audible's market share is like 60%, so you loose out on a lot if you don't publish there.

KDP, the part of amazon that lets you publish your own books, now has a beta program to create audio books using virtual voices.

https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/article/Invite-Only-KDP-Beta-...