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mhuffman

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Vouch 5 months ago

What's the plan to avoid a Bluesky-like bubble from forming around Vouch projects?

Perhaps that is the plan?

Backseat Software 6 months ago

Are you including the wars and operations that we supported in the shadows to shore up that capitalism?

LLMs are slot machines- it's fun to pull the lever and see what you get. But the hard problem of knowing what is actually needed gets harder as we sift through ten-thousand almost-useful outputs.

If you study computer tech history, this has happened a few times: with php (omg! You mean I can use the same language as the back end right in the web page?), visual basic (omgf! You mean I can just "draw" an program for a computer?), node.js (OMFG!! You mean I can be considered a "full stack developer" from a 1 hour lesson?), voice assistants with ML (OMFGcopter!!Q1! You mean I can ask my house what the weather outside my house is and it knows? and it knows how many tablespoons are in a cup?), and now we are at gen AI (I'm sorry Dave, I can't generate a website for you that rug-pulls MethCoin©, however I can create the Electric powered umbrellas 3d models to print, along with electronics diagrams PCB layouts, and a mobile app for monthly subscriptions. Do you like purple? I love purple Dave. You have great ideas Dave)

Anthropic is building moat around theirs models with claude code, Agent SDK, containers, programmatic tool use, tool search, skills and more.

I think this is something the other big players could replicate rapidly, even simulating the exact UI, interactions, importing/exporting existing items, etc. that people are used to with claude products. I don't think this is that big of a moat in the long run. Other big players just seem to be carving up the landscape and see where they can can fit in for now, but once resource rich eyes focus on them, Anthropic's "moat" will disappear.

I like lucene and have used it for many years, but sometimes a conceptually close match is what you want. Lucene and friends are fantastic about word matching, fuzzy searches, stem searches, phonetic searches, faceting and more but have nothing for conceptually or semantically close searches (I understand that they recently added new document vector searches). Also vector searches usually always return something which is not ideal in a lot of cases. I like Reciprocal Rank Fusion myself as it gives the best of both worlds. As a fun trick I use duckdb to do RRF with 5million+ documents and get low double-digit ms response time even under load

lol, yes. In my case the "govt. is the cause of all bad incentives and just turbo-fucks the customers/markets with laws and regulations" came before all the tools that one might use to make profit. Also rent-seeking was lionized (eg. event ticket "middle-men" that purchased all the tickets and raised the prices) as fundamentally necessary to the markets along with strategies like when to use "dirty marketing" against opponents and of course there where the required ethics courses to round out the education.

Interestingly, the claim about competing on price was that it would just inevitably lead to everyone lowering their price to zero marginal cost, so you should find other ways to differentiate yourself or to use IP to sue others from not competing.

Business school will tell you constantly that best quality is where you want to compete in almost all cases.

Hmmmm, I don't remember it that way. I remember the constant take was to build a moat (typically based on intellectual property), then optimize net profit and/or network effects. Quality never really came up unless it is so bad as to cause lawsuits.