It’s going to turn out that LLM “AI” is one of the inventions like nuclear weapons that can severely regress an advanced civilization. Sometimes it even feels like it is likely to corrupt sentience itself, degrading it into mere cargo cult imitation. After all, if the only one in the room “thinking” is a statistical model of the thought that came before it, how could this be anything other than a dead end.
We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.
Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….
And .ain which was even better but now seems to be half lost to time (no Wikipedia, just a few links repeating the same fragments of info like http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/AIN)
How incredibly unsurprising. This is why it is pointless to make moral stands as employees when you do not ultimately have power over the companies decisions. The only power you have is to quit.
I wonder how many will do so, and how many will simply accept Sam’s AI written rationalization as this own and keep collecting their obscene pay packages…
The conclusion that we will abandon Spotify for individual artist discords is nonsense. Clearly Spotify should be enabling all of the community building and merchandising that artists want to do because that would help their margins and moat. But regardless of whether they do or do not, the vast bulk of the demand side, the listeners, are going to want à la cart unrestricted music. It’s the same thing we want for video, we are just not given it. Perhaps they should balkanize into fifteen different streaming services each with its own catalog and exclusives but that way lies the return of piracy.
You guys are a godsend to the python tooling world. I’ve been far more excited about the impact rust is having on the software world than that of AI, and your work is a big part of that. While I have not seen any real net productivity gains from AI in mine or my juniors work, I’ve definitely seen real gains from using your tooling!
In fact as Jetbrains has been spending years chasing various rabbits including AI, instead of substantially improving or fixing PyCharm, without you steadily replacing/repairing big chunks of Pycharms functionality I would be miserable. If it came down to it, we would happily pay a reasonable license fee to use your tools as long as they stayed free for non-commercial usage.
Ruff is incredible, replacing a mountain of tools and rules with a single extremely fast linter/formatter. Given that it is updated and improved frequently, I’m curious if you have tried it recently, and if so what pylint rules are you using that it doesn’t cover?
Agreed, the db migrations are usually the slowest part. Another way to speed this up substantially if you are using postgres and need your test database to be postgres too, is to create and maintain a template database for your tests. This database should have all migrations already run on it and be loaded with whatever general use fixtures you will need. You can then use the Django TEMPLATE setting https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/settings/#template and Django will clone that database when running your tests.
I absolutely love Fastmail. I moved off of Gmail years ago with zero regrets. Better UI, better apps, better company, and need I say better service? I still maintain and fetch from a Gmail account so it all just works seamlessly for receiving and sending Gmail, so you don’t have to give anything up either.
This is a fairly silly list really, missing the bulk of what's been good reads for the last quarter century(!). It's heavily biased tothings that have sold well in the past few years. That said, the books on here are quite good. I'd definitely recommend Black Leopard, Red Wolf if you want fantasy from completely different story genetics (non-Tolkien). Priory is more traditional but good fun.
Not on this list that I thought were particularly excellent, [goodreads rating in brackets]:
[4.26] Between Two Fires by Christopher Buhuelman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543121-between-two-fir...
Horror-Fantasy. Absolutely loved this book, a travelogue through France in the grip of the Black Plague...inflicted upon humanity by Lucifer in the war on Heaven. See the sights as God abandons his children and devils in both man and mythic form ruin His creation. Takes on a hallucinatory, Book of Revelations, William Blake on bad acid feel and builds to a tremendous crescendo while retaining deep heart and complex characters.
Christopher Buhuelman is one of my favorite "new" authors, his new fantasy series The Blacktongue Thief[4.22] and The Daughters War[4.3] are both excellent as well. His horror chops enable him to to make what might be more traditional fantasy stories much more impactful. For example, The Daughters War is about an desperate existential war against goblins that is fucking horrifying, which is impressive for a critter traditionally deployed for comic effect or disposable fodder for the heroes to kick about. Even though you "know" that humans win in the end because of the chronology of the series (this was book takes place before the The Blacktongue Thief which was published first), it doesn't feel like it ever. Which is the magic of good horror writing, and is often missing from fantasy which can feel like there are no real stakes sometimes despite the epic scales presented.
[4.22] Piranesi by Susanna Clark
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50202953-piranesi
Labyrinth-Fantasy. Another book I adored, this novel has a sense of place so tangible that I am convinced that it actually exists and Susanna has been there. Piransi lives in what amounts to a pocket dimension, an infinite labyrinthine house containing amongst other things an ocean whose tides rage through the halls, flooding and revealing them in turn.
[4.3] Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...
Alien Encounter-SciFi. Omitting this from any best of list shows the list isn't particularly serious, this novel is exceptional. On a distant exoplanet being terraformed for future humans, a disaster leaves the scientist in charge alone and cut off from humanity, and rather than seeding the new world with monkeys to be uplifted, she uplifts instead a small species of jumping spider. We experience its evolution across millenia and as its society reaches the space faring age, until it's encounter with the last desperate remnants of humanity, fleeing a doomed civilization and descending into barbarism. The narrative techniques to tell a story of this scope work exceptionally well and the whole tale moves quickly and with surprising emotional heft. To bring the audience to understand a world and society entirely unlike ours, and make it relatable and poignant is truly impressive. I really don't like spiders, but by the end of this book I was rooting for them... at humanity's expense.
Because of shifting demographics in the book buying market, readers looking for good yarns outside of the current trend of romantasy and/or cozy scifi/fantasy may feel a little left out, but there are tons of great authors that may be forgotten from these lists for a while. I heartily recommend:
Anything by Joel Shepherd https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/215710.Joel_Shepherd, ex Spiral Wars series (scifi space opera with fascinating AI) [4.27-4.56], Cassandra Kressnov series (cyberpunk) [3.88-4.0], A Trial of Blood & Steel series (fantasy) [3.9-4.26].
Pierce Brown's Red Rising sci-fi series is excellent and magnificent in scope and scale.
Anything by Joe Abercrombie for gritty low fantasy with buckets of blood, humor, populated with legendary characters. The Bloody-Nine, Dogman, Black Dow, Caul mfing Shivers anyone? His latest series https://www.goodreads.com/series/211497-the-age-of-madness [4.45-4.6] was fantastic.
And of course the other books mentioned by other commenters, particularly anything by Ian M Banks.
No disrespect intended, but what is the point of using terminology like “moonshot” coupled with tiny amounts of funding like $3m. If moonshot is taken to be a loose reference to the Apollo program - which I imagine it is otherwise the name is poorly chosen - then the funding amounts are off by several orders of magnitude. In 1960 the US government got its feet wet with a 900 million (in 2020 dollars) spend on the Apollo program and ramped up to a high of 40,000 million a year by 1964. The total spent on the Apollo program between 1960 and 1973 was 283,000 million or almost one hundred thousand times as much as the 3 million investment under the moonshots fund.
Sure the 3 million is a seed round but the US spent 300 times as much on its exploratory “seed” round in 1960.
It is unlikely until he extreme that any real “moonshot” will achieve significant impact without the combined talents of a large percentage of the world greatest talents driven by goals of the highest social priority funded by limitless pockets and organized by the very best managers and leaders that society can produce.
Oddly enough I just implemented my own one of these in 34 sloc using flask and weasyprint. I chose to only have it accept html in a post rather than a url so that it could render non-publically accessible urls. You can also pass it a base_url (which it passes on to weasyprint) for resolving relative urls for static assets in the html, which are usually publicly accessible. Runs on heroku for simplicity.
You've got this, these are all problems we've all had before, and there are solutions to them ;) We will all be here to give feedback, commiserate, and help you succeed. You have a great attitude in this response. An ability to take honest (often unpleasant to hear) feedback and use it to improve your product and pitch is the single most important thing you can do for yourself. Keep on crushing problems and I look forward to your next showing!
Your medium article is 50X better than your website. Your website is useless for promoting your product. I don't like the headline font for your site, the lack of screenshots, basically the lack of focus on a product that will live or die on its usability and interface. I'm not a fan of the Z in openloopz. Combined with the comic sansy looking headline font it doesn't feel polished.
The inventing of a new words ("loops") is to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. You are now not only trying to tell a (very) mildly interested reader about your product you need them to learn a new language in order to understand it. This is an unrealistic cognitive burden for a sales pitch for a todo app. I strongly suggest that you use the simplest possible terms in plain language to describe the focus of your product, how it fits into the users life, and what problems it solves for them.
Your post here is more focused on your personal suffering than on your product. We are all eating shit to try to launch our companies, but too much focus on that makes for a downer intro to your product. I'd try to separate your moments of sharing the struggle and the moments of sharing the product. Do you want people to be genuinely excited about it, or pity you? Which emotion do you want to be a stronger first response?
Scanning further over your medium article (It's longer than a casual browser will give it time, ie 5 seconds) I suggest you take whatever the salient feature of your product is, maybe the hashtagging to create inline tasks and put that front and center in a huge picture and font. I'm still not sure what problem you are solving or who you are competing with, is it todo lists, slack, what? Where does this tool fit in my life? I suggest you take a look at the way that slack conveys information https://slack.com/is/team-communication (notice even the url hammers home their function).
I think that honest feedback is very imporant and that your main problem here, which is something that affects us all, is that you are too close to the product. You already understand it, you speak its language (invented words and all), and you are now longer able to communicate it to the passing man in the street. I suggest workshoping your pitch and language with fresh ears constantly until you are able to get someone to understand the basics of what it is and how it helps them in 10 seconds or less. All that said, I'm rooting for you, best of luck!
I like Simple and I wish them success. I don't like them because of their fantastic app and website, or excellent human customer service, but because after many years of abuse at the hands of Bank of America I wanted a bank that does not aggressively pursue Non Interest Income (ie fees, usually overdraft) as a major source of revenue.
Simple states very clearly on their faq[0] page that they make money off of interest and interchange fees, not punitive and arguably immoral fees like those imposed by the large mainstreet banks. Head over to this reddit thread[1] from this morning that discusses what it's like to work for these banks: "[the customer who was mistakenly charged the fee] struggles from week to week with finances, and needs every dollar more than the rich customers who treat us like shit yet the managers kiss their asses. It wasn't the customers fault at all yet they have to suffer".
All of the large banks are ruthless predators on the weakest of our societies, gouging their customers with an ever evolving scheme of fees and debt incentives to ensnare, entrap and exsanguinate those who can least afford it.
They are involved in price fixing scandals of the highest order, are beyond the reach of the law no matter the transgression, and seem to hold the sum total of our shared societies in contempt. Apparently there is very little that can be done at this point, the horse as long since bolted, but at the bare minimum I'll be god damned if I give them a dime I don't have to. Simple enables me to bank as usual without continuing to participate in that abusive relationship, and for that, I like them.
