rwhitman

I'm fairly certain it's just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, on an individual basis.

Having doubled down on using mostly Claude (+GPT and Gemini) professionally in strategic consulting work for about 2 1/2 years I can say with certainty that the irrational exuberance of the tech leadership echo chamber towards abdicating management responsibility to Claude, while in the honeymoon period, is going to be regarded as very foolish in hindsight.

I've known Webflow for a while as a business, and even pitched it to large companies like Maersk and Nielsen as a Wordpress alternative. I was on the sales side so it always seemed like a great cloud option that was in the territory of Squarespace but far more control for enterprise development. However...

I recently put my old frontend hat on and opted for Framer to build a new website, seeing if I could sketch it out in GPT + Claude then had it give me instructions to translate to a modern cloud CMS.

While I find Framer, Webflow, etc, significantly more aligned to my brain than say Squarespace or Wix, overall, they are incredibly frustrating and full of tedious little proprietary quirks that drive me goddam insane. You need to learn the interface but still also need an understanding of how breakpoints and CSS positioning work among other things.

The preview website artifact that Claude Design spat out was pretty dang good and was written in simple vanilla semantic HTML/CSS with no dependency overhead. Its a little rough around the edges and clumsy on details but an appropriate starting point for both beginners and enterprise.

A company like webflow has to be looking at this and sweating bullets. Wish the initial reaction to AI-driven threats these days wasn't to gut the company in favor of agents. Yes Claude Code + Claude Design are awesome but none of these products are perfect and they all still have a place to coexist within the market

The uptick in Indeed job listings is not a reliable indicator of job growth. AI has simply made it easier to render JDs and screen candidates at scale. Wouldn't it be expected that software companies would be better at leveraging the tech to create more job listings?

I've found this several times as well. I googled something to dispute a comment in reddit, and google "confirmed" it as accurate, citing what the person said in that exact reddit comment.

Google has become the ouroboros

I feel like there is such a huge opportunity for small niche community social networks right now. The major social networks are such a cesspool of nonsense and brainrot.

Exactly, and main reason I've stopped using GPT for serious work. LLMs start to break down and inject garbage at the end, and usually my prompt is abandoned before the work is complete, and I fix it up manually after.

GPT stores the incomplete chat and treats it as truth in memory. And it's very difficult to get it to un-learn something that's wrong. You have to layer new context on top of the bad information and it can sometimes run with the wrong knowledge even when corrected.

My thinking was that there was an exception handling and the error message was getting muddled into the conversation. But another commenter debunked me.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I loved the beetle article, thanks for that.

They're so well tuned at predicting what you want to hear that even when you know intellectually that they're not sentient, the illusion still tricks your brain.

I've been setting custom instructions on GPT and Claude to instruct them to talk more software-like, because when they relate to you on a personal level, it's hard to remember that it's software.

Wow this is incredible. I saw the emergence of that spiral cult as it formed and was very disturbed by how quickly it proliferated.

I'm glad someone else with more domain knowledge is on top of this, thank you for that brain dump.

I had this theory maybe there was a software exception buried deep down somewhere and it was interpreting the error message as part of the conversation, after it had been stretched too far.

And there was a weird pre-cult post I saw a long time ago where someone had 2 LLMs talk for hours and the conversation just devolved into communicating via unicode symbols eventually repeating long lines of the spiral emoji back and forth to each other (I wish I could find it).

So the assumption I was making is that some sort of error occurred, and it was trying to relay it to the user, but couldn't.

Anyhow your research is well appreciated.

If you want to go down a rabbit hole examining people in this disturbed place in realtime search reddit for the Cyclone Emoji (U+1F300) or the r/ArtificialSentience subreddit and see what gets recommended after that, especially a few months ago when GPT was going wild flattering users and affirming every idea (such as going off your meds).

I fully believe these are simply people who have used the same chat past the point where the LLM can retain context. It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high" in this case?).

If the human at the other end has mental health problems, it becomes a never-ending dive into psychosis and you can read their output in the bizarre GPT-worship subreddits.

Claude used to have safeguards against this by warning about using up the context window, but I feel like everyone is in an arms race now, and safeguards are gone - especially for GPT. It can't be great overall for OpenAI, training itself on 2-way hallucinations.

Japan, the Nordics, S. Korea and Central Europe, all countries with a demographic crisis. They need those babies.

I haven't been particularly active on HN in a long time, but I've been tinkering with this manifesto for nearly a year and thought it belonged here.

I've grown a bit frustrated with how much "Magical Computer" thinking has permeated our business culture (amongst the less technical at least). I think the business population needs to see better their tools for what they are - a mirror reflection of human behavior and not magic.

Not looking for a job, but as a parent of a toddler just stopped by to say thank you.

Not sure why this is news worthy. When my Prius catalytic converter was stolen, the mechanic i went to in Silver Lake offered to put one of these on my car and I did. A lot of mechanics in LA will do this for the car models that get them stolen frequently

Here's some reading material for you, from reputable sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894421/ https://news.mit.edu/2014/inside-adult-adhd-brain-0610

I just yesterday went to a Korean restaurant in Orange County CA that had robot waiters.

It was very exciting since I haven't witnessed it in the real world, and my daughter was in awe. Not quite sure how efficient it really was, more a novelty if anything.

The Apple Weather app UI has far less granular detail than Dark Sky iOS app for hourly predictions. I liked the hourly view of temp, humidity, precipitation. We lose that in Apple Weather and its the main thing I check in the app.

But the rain predictions have been wildly inaccurate in Dark Sky lately, including an incident last night where it told me I was in a rain storm when I was not...

I rely on Otter pretty heavily these days. 100% agree that recording and sending the transcript to meeting attendees without their knowledge is a really bad move from several angles.

I work sales calls set up with Calendly and Otter joins them all. These are very technical so normally it's fantastic - EXCEPT if we start talking early or the prospect doesn't follow the invite and never joins the call, then they would get a transcript of my team's chatter. I learned to not allow Otter to join the call until everyone is in attendance

Whats more frustrating is that you can't disable this auto-email "feature" unless you are on a business plan of some sort. But I have a paid plan through the iPhone app and apparently can't convert it to a business plan associated with my company. So no good way to disable it

I get the network effect of referral business but sharing private conversations without consent is not the way to achieve it.

I feel like this saga is going to conclude with a Hulu/Netflix/HBO documentary where they end the series with an interview of Ryan Breslow in his jail cell.

I work for a team that specializes in middleware development - eg the cases where Zapier really falls apart and needs a more thoroughly architected solution. I've spent a lot of time inside this topic.

The thing that will disrupt Zapier is the software vendors themselves. Most Zaps will eventually be replaced by native platform-to-platform integrations where the middleware has been designed and sanctioned by the 2 parties. Having a one-size-fits all solution is impractical over the long run. Its a temporary fix for a bigger more substantial problem.

This is plumbing. You don't use one flimsy universal type of pipe joint for every pipe in your house, otherwise you get leaks. Same thing

America is in a honeymoon period with remote work. Most people do not have separate dedicated workspaces in their homes, or worse have roommates, kids etc and must make office space in the bedroom. Rolling out of bed to your desk every day will warp your psyche over time (from experience).

As companies shutter the big HQ to save money on leasing empty square footage and workers disperse to distant cities, a desk in a cowork space, or even better a small private office, will become a very important need for many people.

Maybe not in the form of WeWork rebounding but the conversion of office towers to cowork is almost certain to be a trend in my mind, well before conversion to residential.

It's 2021. There is very little opportunity left in SaaS that hasn't had mind boggling amounts of investor capital thrown at it. These are your competitors. In every single conceivable niche. Not bootstrapped companies. Venture backed. Millions in capital earmarked for marketing and sales. For things like mattress testing and sushi restaurant POS.

There is no playbook for profitable bootstrapped SaaS in 2021. The winners either have a special secret that they wouldn't share for the world or they're lying about being profitable.. or in most cases the "successes" are simply such amateurs they don't understand basic accounting and believe that "profitable" means "slightly more monthly revenue than the cost of the servers".

If you embark on this be aware, the days of having your own little saas as passive side income are long behind us. This is serious serious stuff now.

I highly recommend hitting rock bottom, because when you get there you know everything after is up.

I've run little businesses, been self-employed as a freelancer and agency, run startups, been in management at small businesses and other intrapreneurial roles maybe 22 years now - and I still don't feel like I have great "business sense".

Its a learned skill. And with any learning journey you just have to plug away at.. learning. Read business books and take notes on them. Treat it like you're doing a self-directed MBA. Pick stuff off of reading lists or use the Blinkist app to find good ones. Run a very simple easy business as a side hustle for a bit to practice. Work in a seed-stage startup. You'll pick up a lot.

The related articles at the bottom of that post are revealing.. painting a picture as something of an epidemic of drone swarms that government agencies are unequipped to make sense of. Some at sensitive sites such as a missile base on Guam and a nuclear power plant. Mysterious drone swarms surveilling Colorado and Nebraska. All in 2019 early 2020.

Another article revealing that a Turkish company has developed military "suicide" drone swarms and some opinions on how poorly equipped the US DoD is for these types of low cost drone swarms. Technology that's readily available and affordable to just about anyone with deep enough pockets, not just poor state adversaries like North Korea but also drug cartels etc.

Really concerning that with all the tax dollars spent on defense research, these types of activities can take place en masse with no real strategy for countering them

This is entirely about the same politics of safety we're seeing play out with the pandemic. If jaywalking was legal, the sacrifice is that we'd have to drive slower to watch for pedestrians.

As Americans our priority has been individual convenience, over collective safety of our neighbors. Its shifting slowly, but for the most part this is a battle we're grappling with as a society on multiple fronts right now.

My parents were antique collectors. They were very proud of a glow-in-the-dark fireman's helmet circa 1940's that my dad bought. They told me it was radium paint and to keep away from it.

I will say it does it's job. That helmet was still glowing in the dark just fine

My company has a partner relationship with Shopify so I can't go into too much detail but. My rules of thumb:

1) The value of the app to merchants in the app store is taken into account. They look at whether the app fits into the ecosystem and adds value for merchants.

2) Your monetization strategy should involve revenue share with Shopify from the get-go, in a way that scales with the success of your app.

3) The user should not leave Shopify for account registration or authentication.

4) As much functionality should be embedded in Shopify as possible.

5) Do not ever attempt to build something that side steps Shopify's checkout or order data in any way. Shopify payments and transaction fees is how they make money.

Hmm... my company builds Shopify apps for large companies. We have had several in the app store that we maintain, that we're either moving to end-of-life or planning to.

Personally I believe the days of a solo engineer being able to build a viable Shopify app business are nearly over.

Shopify has instituted new process for assessment and approval of new apps in the app store, similar to Apple. We are finding the approvals can take weeks and sometimes require big rewrites to meet as-yet-undocumented business requirements.

Also Shopify stores can explode in bursts of traffic at a moments notice. And these apps sometimes are mission critical to the merchant's business. It is very challenging and expensive to scale an app rapidly when the folks who have installed it get large bursts of success without any forewarning. If a DTC brand launches their store with some cheap / free apps and their product goes viral, that means the indie solo app developer has to scale to meet the demand. These new DTC merchants often don't understand very much of the business of maintaining SaaS and aren't very forgiving when an app fails to keep up with the demand put on it.

The challenge is if an inexperienced developer offers the app for free or a nominal fee like $50/mo that means they have to scale up infrastructure and support and often re-write the app for a small number of merchants who are still only paying $50/mo. This happens to more Shopify app developers than I want to admit, and many many bootstrapped folks are operating at a substantial loss, looking for a way out without irking customers who depend on their app.

With that in mind, be very careful if you enter any type of SaaS marketplace. It seems tempting and low barrier to entry but you may be biting off much more than you can chew.