jasonshen

Would you feel the same way about creating open source software that had been forked 1,000's of times and used without your knowledge? Are you interested in living in a world where everyone only does things if they feel they can directly capture the majority of the value created?

The funny thing is, this works well with people too. Not to literally not answer, but dig into the question or problem they bring up to understand their mental model and whether there was just a miscommunication or an actual disagreement.

Many breakthrough technologies appear initially like toys. And this certainly qualifies. I've never been able to code anything more complicated than a memory game in javascript but I have worked with engineering teams for my entire professional career. But prompting my agent to write python scripts to pull down data from various tools via API without having to read docs, do trial and error for hours / days / indefinitely, and actually produce something coherent in seconds? Incredible.

Is my OpenClaw agent currently changing my life? No. It sends me a morning briefing based on my calendar, the weather, my Readwise highlights, and notes on who I'm talking to today based on call transcripts. I use it as a food diary (which I could have done on platform LLMs but this feels like a more personalized UX as we can write the logs to text files on my personal computer). I can absolutely see how transformative this agent can become in the next few years. Certainly my usage of LLMs has changed my life since ChatGPT first launched.

You are seeing the loudest / most hyped users. There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. They're just using it to do the thing.

Really appreciate the deep dive here. M&A is the final boss of startups and so rarely do we get any credible, detailed information about how things go down from the founder's perspective, especially at the 9+ figure deal size. Having written a book about pivots, I know how hard it can be to then distill a grueling experience into something digestible. Thank you Derek!

You may be saving money but wood smoke is very much harmful to your lungs and heart according to the American Lung and American Heart Associations + the EPA. There's a good reason why we've adopted modern heating technologies. They may have other problems but particulate pollution is not one of them.

For people with underlying heart disease, a 2017 study in the journal Environmental Research linked increased particulate air pollution from wood smoke and other sources to inflammation and clotting, which can predict heart attacks and other heart problems.

A 2013 study in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology found exposure to wood smoke causes the arteries to become stiffer, which raises the risk of dangerous cardiac events. For pregnant women, a 2019 study in Environmental Research connected wood smoke exposure to a higher risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include preeclampsia and gestational high blood pressure.

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/12/13/lovely-but-dangerou...

At the highest level, this becomes a question of whether we live in a predetermined universe or not. Historians do debate the Great Man vs Great Forces narrative of human development, but even if many historical events were "close calls" or "almost didn't happens" it doesn't mean that the counterfactual would be better. Discrete things like the Juicero might not have happened, but ridiculous "smart internet-connected products" that raised lots of VC money during the ZIRP era feels inevitable to me.

Do we really think LLMs and the generative AI craze would have not occurred if Sam Altman chose to stay at Y Combinator or otherwise got hit by a bus? People clearly like to interact with a seemingly smart digital agent, demonstrated as early as ELIZA in 1966 and SmarterChild in 2001.

My POV is that human beings have innate biases and preferences that tend to manifest what we invent and adopt. I don't personally believe in a supernatural God but many people around the world do. Alcoholic beverages have been independently discovered in numerous cultures across the world over centuries.

I think the best we can do is usually try to act according to our own values and nudge it in a direction we believe is best (both things OP is doing so this is not a dunk on them, just my take on their thoughts here).

First off congrats on launching a novel idea and hitting HN front page.

Question / feedback — why is there no way to see what one of these looks like on the website? You have a header that says "see it in action" that literally doesn't allow you to see the video you're saying it produces.

I have an idea in my mind of what it looks like but I think you'd do well to have multiple examples illustrating different situations where this product could be useful.

With ChatGPT explicitly storing "memory" about the user and access to the history of all chats, that can also change. Not hard to imagine an AI-powered IDE like Cursor understanding that when you reran a prompt or gave it an error message it came to understand that its original result was wrong in some way and that it needs to "learn" to improve its outputs.

I am also not a therapist but I am a former tech founder turned executive coach so I do talk to people who are facing what feels like overwhelming challenges, risk, and uncertainty.

Even in the language you used "severe learned helplessness" and "extremely stupid", you are revealing a state of mind (cynicism, self-flagellation) that is not oriented to improving your condition.

You know you have a strong bias against therapists—given your seeming lack of knowledge about them, where do you think that bias came from? Fundamentally, we are a social species and evolved to live with strong connections to small groups.

Our society is no longer set up like that. So professionals like therapists and coaches provide the essential value of a caring, supportive, and helpful relationship that we lack. Like getting an essential nutrient that your diet lacks.

Do you have health insurance? Many of them cover mental health—the site Headway can help you find one that takes insurance. Try a few and gather some first-party data before writing them off fully. The downside is a few hundred dollars. The upside is a much brighter and materially better future.

Full text link here: https://archive.is/DIKKv

Musk has (for now) pulled of heist that sounds like a summer blockbuster scheme: take direct control of the payment system that all US Gov't payments run through.

I guess the world's richest person still didn't have enough. I really the court orders get enforced soon or the limited trust the public has in the federal government is about to go into freefall.

Our big brains actually evolved because of lying - research by scientists like Robin Dunbar shows that figuring out who was lying and how to lie better may have driven the explosion of human intelligence. The same brain power that helped our ancestors outsmart each other is what lets us do amazing things today.

You're right that trust matters - that's why we created rules and systems to encourage honesty. But lying is as old as humanity itself.

I love the intent behind this letter. So often talented people are just below the "cut off" for whatever opportunity they are seeking, and they see themselves as unworthy. Some may give up, especially if they are young and have not had other forms of recognition.

I think this is why YC sends notes to rejected applicants who are in "the top 10%" by whatever standard they are grading folks on, and encourage them to apply again.

I’ve always been interested in the idea that creativity is primarily about random association. That association can happen inside your mind, or it can be externalised like that story of how Donald Glover’s Childish Gambino name came out of a Wu-Tang Clan name generator. Yah!

You might enjoy the interview I did with a 20 year software engineer veteran who did stint(albeit short) as an Amazon warehouse worker to get through burnout

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33072083

Did I miss how we are supposed to get recommendations from what OP built?

Yes, this is bad. Yes, it was also inevitable. Hopefully we will get lots of practice watching AI try to destroy humanity and build systems around that.

Congrats on the launch! I just tried this and while the tuning examples actually sounded more like me (a bit robotic but not bad for 20 seconds), the actual generations sounded nothing like me. It was some kind of aussie accent - like you're just modifying some existing voice to get a little closer to mine. Tried it with 2 different versions of myself - reading from text vs conversational and both times got this weird aussie accent.

Goodwill. And the fact that people can do any number of other things to get the same effect without paying. What are you really asking?

Businesses are not people who get old, can't keep working, and retire. Businesses can borrow significant sums of money, issue stock, come up with a new product that can transform their revenues overnight, etc.

I know what you're trying to say but this isn't a great comparison.

As a naturalized US citizen who was born in China but intends to raise a family as full-bore Americans, it's hard for me to assess the China threat.

I believe China very much wants to assert it's influence in the Asia Pacific + MENA region, but I just don't it trying to conquer the United States directly. It's never really had a history of imperialism like the West has (excluding the Mongol empire that collapsed almost immediately).

That said, a country doesn't need to directly conquer another to be a threat. Still, it's hard to know how serious the threat really is—the post is compelling but also assumes as a forgone conclusion that China has aggressor ambitions.

Love this! The addition of phrases (I searched "invent" and got "break ground" "bring forth" and "hit upon") is what my other favorite word explorer (onelook.com) is missing. Great for coming up with terms for headlines, marketing copy, and titles. Congrats on the launch and keep going.

Really neat story and makes sense that Philip isn’t the only one who thought to do this.

This is such a fascinating story, I was literally thinking about this a few months ago when Equinox randomly contacted me. Also identify as an (ex)founder with ADHD. Would love to hear from you and hear about this journey if you're interested in connecting. jason @ jasonshen

OP here. Decided to share this on HN because it seemed relevant given the earlier article on seeking structure. A lot of folks responded to my comment about Philip sharing that they too have experienced a yearning for physical labor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33070986

Life takes all of us in different directions, I thought HN readers would find this path instructive.

I would encourage you to listen to the podcast, because he definitely does reflect on this, but it wasn’t the focus of my interview, because this was focused on ways in which burned out tech workers try to find meaning in their life, not an analysis of low paid jobs.

I spoke to a long-time Microsoft and Facebook eng leader who left his post as a nonprofit software CEO due to burnout and then spent many months languishing and spiralling into depression.

He actually decided to get a job as an Amazon warehouse worker for 6 weeks for exactly the reason OP is struggling with: to get structure.

In November, I suddenly thought, "I should at least get some sort of job somewhere just to have some regularity to my schedule, to enforce some daily practices". My number one priority was just to have structured work that would force me to get up every day—work that was very different from white collar jobs, in that I did not want to be asked to make a lot of decisions everyday.

I didn't want the stress of managing people and teams. I didn't want the politics of subjective decisions being debated amongst team members. I wanted literally to be told what to do every day and I wanted that structure to be rigorous. I strongly felt that would help me get out of my depression.

https://www.jasonshen.com/120/

Update: posted this on HN since it seems to resonate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33072083

Oops, thanks for the catch re: the spaces. Looks like I can't edit the comment anymore though.

That said, I'd say going from a SaaS model where you charge companies or universities $40k/year to access software that they provide free to students/workers is very different from a mobile app that does real-time dispatch / pickup inside a city and you charge the consumer directly. Different customer, different business model, different offering.

Thanks Ricky! Yeah the 5 I wrote about are:

Zimride (college carpool) → Lyft Grubwithus (shared meals) → GOAT Meerkat (Twitter livestream) → Houseparty Fates Forever (iPad MOBA game) → Discord The Lobby (finance recruiting) → Nuvocargo

Got to work briefly on this project and really excited to see it reach the public! Congrats to trueadm and the whole team on this.

Surprised no one has talked yet about Ghost, which feels like what Wordpress would have been had it been founded in 2013 instead of 2003. I recently converged from Substack, Convertkit and Wordpress down to just Ghost. It's not perfect but it's damn good. https://www.jasonshen.com/switching-to-ghost/