jessep

Hahahahahha. I love this. Brilliant work.

Yeah, I’ve notice that people have started to sound like LLMs even when the LLMs aren’t writing for them. Not stupid people. Not lazy people. Some of the smartest people I know —- I can’t figure out how to use an em dash here, but you get the point.

Sort of related, but we had to shard as usage grew and didn’t have uuids and it was annoying. Wasn’t the most annoying bit though. Whole thing is pretty complex regardless of uuid, if you have a highly interconnected data model that needs to stay online while migrating.

Really beautiful. I bet Ramanujan just “saw” and felt these.

That doesn't make sense. The free part is the marketing, the more people like it, the faster it spreads. I run a freemium business and all the motivation internally is to increase growth by improving the free product. Once you achieve a good conversion to pro, any more will slow down growth. At that point, all you care about is improving the product for free users to generate word of mouth, and building features that will do so.

I absolutely love this.

I have had a few epic refactoring failures with Gemini relative to Claude.

For example: I asked both to change a bunch of code into functions to pass into a `pipe` type function, and Gemini truly seemed to have no idea what it was supposed to do, and Claude just did it.

Maybe there was some user error or something, but after that I haven’t really used Gemini.

I’m curious if people are using Gemini and loving it are using it mostly for one-shotting, or if they’re working with it more closely like a pair programmer? I could buy that it could maybe be good at one but bad at the other?

Yeah, it's a good point, but I think that our intuitions are different on this one. I don't have a horse in this race, but my assumption is that the next OpenAI release will be a massive leap, that makes GPT 4/Claude 3 Opus look like toys. Perhaps you're right though, and Anthropic's curves with bend upward even more quickly, so that they get to that they'll start catching up more quickly, until eventually be they're ahead.

Two things interest me about Claude being better than GPT-4:

1) We are all breathless that it is better. But a year has passed since GPT4. It’s like we’re excited that someone beat Usain Bolt’s 100 meter time from when he was 7. Impressive, but … he’s twenty now, has been training like a maniac, and we’ll see what happens when he runs his next race.

2) It’s shown AI chat products have no switching costs right now. I now use mostly Claude and pay them money. Each chat is a universe that starts from scratch, so … very easy to switch. Curious if deeper integrations with my data, or real chat memory, will change that.

Thanks!

Ummmm ... what is grub? Didn't see any links to it from the three random grub2 repos I looked at.

"The Art of Action" It has changed how I approach everything, not just how I run my business. Is applying approaches used in militaries to organize action around the leader's intent, taking action in the right general direction, and delegating the "what" (the intent) but not the "how" of the way it is actually achieved.

True! I meant "artificial scarcity" in the economic sense of monopolies reduce supply of an abundant material to drive up prices.

My best friend's dad was high up in Woodstock 99 corporate, which means he was responsible for making much of it run (yeah, I guess there were some issues ). We had backstage passes, a house, and a ... weird experience. Did some stupid things. Some highlights:

- We were on stage in the famous closing Red Hot Chili Peppers show (like in the wings, looking out on the audience from behind the band). That was surreal. We could see the fires start in the distance, stuff getting ripped down, things starting to sort of go to hell. All while, the most amazing band of the moment is playing the most amazing songs 30 feet away from us. Quite a contrast between awesomeness and ... whatever the strange mix of emotions riots give.

- We learned that there was no Mountain Dew in the whole event because Coke got the contract, so we went out and bought many cases, drove it in through our special entrance, and basically auctioned it off. People were willing to pay $5 a can. We made a lot of money. Pretty sketchy.

- Worse/weirder, we had a backpacks full of ice to hold the Mountain Dew in while we walked around the crowd selling it, and people started to offer to buy ice from us to cool off. So once we ran out of Mountain Dew, we started yelling "Ice is nice! We got ice!" and selling it. That ... well, I feel like that was me experiencing a real microcosm of capitalism and the allure of artificial scarcity ... and not acting the way I would hope . Give away the damn ice man.

- We kind of just walked around backstage and there were so many super famous people that none of them felt very special, and they'd just kind of talk to you while you were in line for food. Ice Cube had some cool sneakers that my friend chatted with him about. George Clinton was chill. I think we talked with Erykah Badu for a while at some point. (Stars are not at all like this backstage at a normal concert, btw, which we also did a lot because of his father. A their normal concerts, these same performers are the center of the universe, and don't have time to chat with a bunch of high schoolers running around.)

Anyway, it was a very strange event, and we had a very strange vantage point.

This kind of attitude is how bad products get made.

It was really fun, but maybe throw a few combos closer in weight in? I played for maybe 5 minutes and didn't get any wrong. I would have played longer if I got some wrong.

Oy. Yes there, are legit uses. A few straightforward examples:

1) You implementing something boards (like trello) on mobile. The well-established-in-all-the-apps-that-specialize-in-this behavior is snap scrolling.

2) Tiktok/stories/etc. When you scroll up or right, does it ever land you in between two stories? No. This is the exact behavior.

3) Presentations. Say you are building a presentation tool. The whole point is to define separate slides that are on screen one at a time. This is a very natural and appropriate use of this behavior.

So, yeah, carousels suck. But, this behavior is commonly used and useful in a lot of modern software.

I know this is pedantic, but I think your point applies to 10,000 years ago :) 1000 years ago many empires had already risen and fallen in China and it was a centralized agricultural civilization. Not an expert.

Also fall of civilizations podcast is awesome!

Here’s a timeline of dynasties.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chem/hd_chem.htm

Yeah, I was thinking about the old fashioned cheerleading things, without any electricity involved. I even thought about being explicit in case someone was going to be pedantic ... there’s even an emoji for it

Disagree! The article explains something extremely cool: that there’s a layer in the ocean that acts like a megaphone, where sound that passes into it gets caught and propagates way further. That’s cool and specific.

Awesome!!! Thank you so much.

My sister choreographed this dance, and I’m a little unhappy that she isn’t mentioned here by name. She’s brilliant, and I want her to get credit.

Her name is Monica Thomas. Her dance company is called Mad King Thomas. Here is her brand new Twitter account: https://mobile.twitter.com/onetruebonc

Her sense of humor is captured by her choice of the song “Do you love me”, which is a winking but still charming reference to the fact that this is a PR stunt to get us to love scary robots.

Dancers and choreographers are poor, and struggle to build careers. A public acknowledgment of something of this magnitude would be so impactful, and would require so little from Boston Dynamics. I wish they would do it.

They could even brand themselves as helping artists, could be good for their image.

My 6 year old twins like to come up with questions about whether you would rather die or have X happen. Recently, one asked, "I know the answer is obvious" and then asked me if I'd rather die or have a bunch of dogs die. And I was like, "I'd rather live and let the dogs die" and she and her sister were appalled. They were like, "obviously you die and save the dogs".

What are the API features you use most and would want/need?

Also, we were frozen for a long time but have been making meaningful improvements for a while now, I’m guessing your evaluation of us not growing comes from the olden days.

As we do work on things, though, we have standards for usability and polish that are higher than Dynalist and Roam, so things take longer.

Images is a good example, which will be coming out soon. We’re just going to do a good job with it, whereas the functionality in these other tools is a little weird and feels tacked on, at least to me.

Our mobile apps have had a major overhaul, you should try them again.

Yeah, we're going to address this. A/B tests and metrics guided us to this (it converts better), and I don't know why the minimal-information thing has worked well for us, maybe it forces people to try it out. I think some of it has to do with the fact that most of it is just word of mouth, and probably our attempts at more information weren't well done.

We're working on building a library of examples with video and interactive documents that people can play with and find from the home page.

Nice! I'm founder of workflowy and this is indeed very cool.* I've often thought about a vim-like navigation mode for jumping around.

* https://workflowy.com in case you aren't familiar

I found this one by the same person even more amazing. It shows the background image being refracted through the glass: https://domenicobrz.github.io/webgl/projects/glass-absorptio...

I think this is a really good set of advice. In your situation, I would second going with React and some sort of node backend

This seems like brad coming up with a list of things that annoy him, without any data to back it up. I also like using password managers, but all that really matters are the results that services get from different flows. Magic links, for example, have almost certainly been a/b tested by the services using them, and most likely lead to better outcomes. There are a lot of genuine issues with passwords that password managers solve, but I would guess most people still don't use a password manager. For this kind of thing, doing experiments and following the numbers seems like the only way to do it. Why trust your gut when you can so easily get real data?