277 entries from "Germany"

I guess I was wrong about AI persuasion

“The best diplomat in history” wouldn’t just be capable of spinning particularly compelling prose; it would be everywhere all the time, spending years in patient, sensitive, non-transactional relationship-building with everyone at once. It would bump into you in whatever online subcommunity you hang out in. It would get to know people in your circle. It would be the YouTube creator who happens to cater to your exact tastes. And then it would leverage all of that.

[We can be convinced of a lot. But it doesn’t happen because of snarky comments on social media or because some stranger whispers the right words in our ears. The formula seems to be:

1. repeated interactions over time
2. with a community of people
3. that we trust

You can try to like stuff

When I encountered spinach as an adult, instead of tasting a vegetable, I tasted a grueling battle of will. Spinach was dangerous—if I liked it, that would teach my parents that they were right to control my diet.

On planes, the captain will often invite you to, “sit back and enjoy the ride”. This is confusing. Enjoy the ride? Enjoy being trapped in a pressurized tube and jostled by all the passengers lining up to relieve themselves because your company decided to cram in a few more seats instead of having an adequate number of toilets? Aren’t flights supposed to be endured?

Unit

Unit is a general purpose visual programming system built for the future of interactivity

Polarized Words

Enter 2 or more words to see their relative distances to the concepts of "good" and "evil".

based on language model embeddings which capture the semantics associated with the words in humanity's collective consciousness.

Confessions to a data lake

visual interfaces of our tools should faithfully represent the way the underlying technology works: if a chat interface shows a private conversation between two people, it should actually be a private conversation between two people, rather than a “group chat” with unknown parties underneath the interface.

We are using LLMs for the kind of unfiltered thinking that we might do in a private journal – except this journal is an API endpoint. An API endpoint to a data lake specifically designed for extracting meaning and context. We are shown a conversational interface with an assistant, but if it were an honest representation, it would be a group chat with all the OpenAI executives and employees, their business partners / service providers, the hackers who will compromise that plaintext data, the future advertisers who will almost certainly emerge, and the lawyers and governments who will subpoena access.

When you work through a problem with an AI assistant, you’re not just revealing information - you’re revealing how you think. Your reasoning patterns. Your uncertainties. The things you’re curious about but don’t know. The gaps in your knowledge. The shape of your mental model.

When advertising comes to AI assistants, they will slowly become oriented around convincing us of something (to buy something, to join something, to identify with something), but they will be armed with total knowledge of your context, your concerns, your hesitations. It will be as if a third party pays your therapist to convince you of something.

Puppy Wisdom, if we can hear it.

[When a baby dog bites, it can be painful but also totally normal. Why can knowing this give me so much patience towards an animal, yet I take it so personally when my partner does something which hurts? Getting hurt and processing it together can also be a normal part of relationships, and you can't have one without the other.]

projects solve your own need whereas products are the intersection of other people's needs, your capacity to build a solution, and their means to compensate you for it.

A Gentle Introduction To Learning Calculus

Math and poetry are fingers pointing at the moon. Don’t confuse the finger for the moon.

Jackson Kiddard

Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience.

Anyone who abandons you is teaching you how to stand up onyour own two feet.

Anything that angers you is teaching you forgiveness and compassion.

Anything that has power over you is teaching you how to take your power back.

Anything you hate is teaching you unconditional love.

Anything you fear is teaching you the courage to overcome your fear.

Anything you can’t control is teaching you how to let go.

How do we build the future with AI?

[The bigness and slowness of government] is supposed to create space and resources to account for the communities that a “lean” approach deliberately ignores.

building for yourself on a saturated platform doesn’t shift paradigms if you are already the main character

it’s not like masses of sheeple relish in the experience of catching a cab and couldn’t describe a theoretical better option if they tried. It’s that realizing such a thing requires availability of copious investment capital in the face of non-negligible risk. People who can pursue this kind of thing are either previous-tech-exit-rich or poised-to-convince-venture-capitalists-rich. Their stories are fun to tell and hear, but not practical mogul origin stories for the vast majority of tech workers.

In the nineties, the Dorm Room Garage Dudes had an appreciable head start on relationships and resources to build the commercial web. But by the time the mobile platform came along, those same people had become billionaire tech moguls with cliques that garnered names like ‘The Paypal Mafia.’ This gave them an order of magnitude more opportunity to move first on mobile. Over time, that lead has continued to grow, and with it the time from market creation to market saturation has shortened.

Immutable Infrastructure, Immutable Code

A system becomes legacy when understanding it requires historical knowledge that isn't encoded anywhere except the code itself.

The tragedy is that teams recreate this failure mode faster with AI, because mutation feels cheap while understanding quietly becomes expensive. You can generate a thousand lines in seconds. But the moment you start editing those lines, you've created an artifact that can only be understood historically. You've created brittle legacy code in an afternoon.

If knowledge only exists in the implementation, it's not knowledge. It's risk. Regeneration forces you to make the implicit explicit, or accept that it wasn't essential.

Burn it. Regenerate it. Trust what survives the fire.

Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market

Boomers could trade 4 years of college for 40 years of middle-class security (more or less). Today's 25-year-old faces a negative net-present-value on that same deal. When the fundamental economic bargain breaks down, it flips everything - your discount rate, your risk tolerance, your entire worldview, again, leading to zero-sum beliefs.

Back in 2019, I applied to over 150 jobs when I graduated Western Kentucky University. LinkedIn had their little QuickApply feature, but I wrote so many essays, did many projects, and endless interviews. The entire process made me better, but I was rejected from most of the jobs.

I had a 4.0 GPA, was valedictorian with three majors, worked three jobs for most of my time at university, sold cars, ran D1 Track and Field for a year, and yet, I only got into my first job because the recruiter and some people at the company took a big chance on me (and I only got there because they had a blind resume process where they hid the school. Says a lot about a lot).

The only reason I got my chance - a truly lucky break - was because people bet on me. A computer would have instantly rejected me because I didn’t meet some arbitrary qualification. AI has spurred us right into the depths of what David Brooks calls the rejected generation - endless nos from platforms that are meant to serve as human interfaces (slot machine grabs across dating, investing, and now jobs), but really end up dehumanizing the whole process.

This is the casino economy in action. Again, just like dating apps and meme stock trading, the job market has created the illusion of abundance by replacing meaningful friction with meaningless volume. It has become a dopamonster, to borrow Scott Galloway’s word. More applications, more swipes, more trades - but every extra option raises the noise-to-signal ratio, making the median outcome worse for everyone.

Raise your prices. Add a three-tiered price structure (low, medium, high). Add discounts for up-front payment, annual plans, and institutional versus retail pricing.

[It's easier to sell more to existing customers than find new ones, so offer a menu of add-ons to increase your average revenue per job.]

[Use leads, conversion, jobs, and average revenue to calculate annual revenue, then annual expenses to calculate annual profits.]

Most small-business owners "live in their own wallet," meaning they won't charge any higher than what they would be willing to pay. That's dumb. Let rich people pay you lots of money if they want to. You'll be surprised how often they will.

[Lead with benefits, not features.]

[Output-based metrics measure numbers you don't directly control, such as traffic, signups, revenue, growth. Activity-based metrics track things you do to influence the other numbers, such as calls made, posts published, machines in operation.]

The rise of Whatever

The Web is a cool thing because anyone can just put stuff on it. It is the largest town square bulletin board ever devised. Back in the day, your ISP would even give you your own website! I don’t think they do that so much any more, but there are more cheap or free options than ever — hell, you can host a little website on GitHub.

And it used to mostly consist of little things made by people, and that was pretty cool! You would see more than four websites in a day. Websites would have colors! They wouldn’t all be designed for a three-inch-wide screen and then just scaled up when you’re at your desk! Twitter once let you set your own background image for when people looked at your profile.

Look at it. Look at it, you stupid baby. Look how outlandish or shocking or extreme or dramatic, Whatever it is. Just shut up and look at it, so Home Depot will give me a quarter of a tenth of a cent.

At least when I write a lot, you know it’s because I wanted to write it. Also I’m probably not lying to you because someone paid me to do it!

But we didn’t really get that. We got, I guess, sparkling autocomplete — a fancy chatbot that can string words together in the most inoffensive people-pleasing customer-service voice you’ve ever heard.

What even is this thing we’ve invented? Stack Overflow, but you only get the answers people scramble to type first so they can get the points? Oh and they just lie to you sometimes? Why would I want this?

[Ask your potential leadership hire who they would bring from their past jobs: if there's nobody, they might not have been leading much.]

[Who probably knows the business better is the previous operator or owner. If they stay involved for the first 90 days, your new operator can: shadow them to document SOPs for month 1, work alongside them for month 2, and perform everything independantly with occasional checkins for month 3, all the while refining the Operator's Playbook as a living document.]

You are one good hire from cutting your problems in half. Two good hires from a completely different company.

[When the price is too high, a wince or verbal "How am I supposed to do that?" offers your no to the problem rather than the person.]

[Most job listings start as a love-letter to "whom it may concern".]

I'll invest in you as much as you're investing in yourself.

Whenever I can pay to steal someone's ten thousand hours, I do so.

[In real estate the terms are so standardized that most people sign and date without reading them. Buying a business has no standard format.]

[Avoid fixating only on price: instead adjust the terms to give the seller more or less based on performance — control the terms, control the deal.]

[Find closing or closed businesses and propose the owners a referral percentage for each of their customers or transactions, then find an adjacent business that would pay ongoing for those warm leads. This also effectively gives them stake in your business, skin in the game.]

[If you know how to turn a failing business profitable, offer them a percentage of the upside as they let you fix it.]

[Find the best lawyers in your area by asking professionals (like accountants), wealthy friends (who often have good attorneys), and local luxury magazines (or vault.com) for their "best of" in the legal field.]

[Attorneys will give you hourly rates, but you can express the list of things you need and ask how much it would cost, then comparison shop ideally for a flat rate.]

[You may want to change lawyers if the deal is of a different type, as there's probably an appropriate specialization for each type. Mid-size firms might be easier as they probably "have a guy" for everything, but make sure to change the guy with the deal type.]

[Contracts can cost 3–25k depending on deal complexity.]

[A seller with few buyers might be willing to accept installments spread over longer terms to close faster, minimize taxes, and earn more money in the end.]

[How much opportunity there is depends on your ability to notice it.]