An extremely eye-opening comment, thank you. I haven't played with the image generators for ages, and hadn't realized where the workflows had gotten to.
Very interesting to see differences between the "mature" AI coding workflow vs. the "mature" image workflow. Context and design docs vs. pipelines and modules...
I've also got a toe inside the publishing industry (which is ridicilously, hilariously tech-impaired), and this has certainly gotten me noodling over what the workflow there ought to be...
There are plenty of river ports/quays with power and water hookups. If you want to houseboat it, you really only need to move when you want to dump the septic tank (and in some areas, not even that).
The "good" spots are highly desirable and usually privately owned (or on a very long-term lease), and you often need to buy a boat to get the mooring spot beneath it. (A buddy of mine in London ended up with 3 boats while upgrading his mooring spot.)
Another options is to vagabond it, where you move your boat to a new area every week or two -- this is usually unserviced, so it's more like camping, but lets you use unofficial spots and is free.
(The last option is to find goofy loopholes. E.g., in some areas of the Thames, you can create a nesting habitat for an endangered bird on your boat, and then once the bird settles in, they can't force you to move, since doing so would destroy an important habitat. Sounds stupid but a surprising number of permanent city boats are there on some sort of loophole.)
I do ~$15k/m in royalties from 3 nonfiction titles[1] which mostly sell via word of mouth (as opposed to hands-on marketing and/or author platform stuff). So it's definitely possible, if you approach it properly.
It's true, as another commenter mentioned, that the expected result of most nonfiction is zero. But in my opinion, that's largely because most nonfiction today is built like software in built like software in the 90s, without proper user-facing iteration and refinement. I wrote a whole thing about it[2].
Books created as a cynical cash-grab are already negative value in terms of time investment and opportunity cost. I think they're only worth getting into if you care enough about it (either the end result or the activity) to do it regardless of the money. And then, only once that's true, perhaps start looking for ways to optimize it as a process and product.
Any chance you've written more about the system design and incentives side of it somewhere (whether about medium in particular, a previous biz, or just the mechanisms in general)? If so, I'd absolutely love to dig in... It's got big overlap w/ some stuff I'm trying to figure out for building useful communities, and it's not so common to find folks with a deep view on it ;)
I got into the fifth batch (s07) and remember my other startup friends staging an intervention to dissuade me from accepting because "the valuation is really bad."
Interesting to see how long even the industry insiders failed to take YC seriously. And then once it was working, they flipped immediately to complaining that YC was too powerful and too influential (unbeatable network effect, seed/A valuation inflation, and so on).
I also remember the constant naysaying about scalability and batch size. Our batch was ~19 companies. People kept naysaying, "Well this model is fine for now, but it will never work past 20 teams."
PG would always reply with something like, "Yeah, they said that when we had fewer than 10 teams also. We aren't thinking too far ahead; each batch, we just find the next bottleneck and solve it, and we'll see how far that gets us." Which evidently got them pretty far. A lovely example of doing things that don't scale.
Aw, you're a star, Andrew. I really appreciate (and admire) the sentiment and thoughtfulness. (Although I still think that I dropped a bit of an unsalvageable mess on your lap!)
As a side note since you're here, I'm super psyched that you've taken the time to share what you've learned in your new book -- it's the next one up on my list for serious study, and I couldn't be more excited about it. Based on the reviews so far, it looks like you've written something really special and that I'm in for a real treat. Can't wait :)
The mundane answer is that there's some stuff that I worry about optimizing and other stuff that I don't, and this little personal site is the latter ;).
To a lesser extent, I also didn't exactly expect this to hit frontpage, so I'd sort of assumed that the only people who would see it were people who already knew me.
I'm still not sure about the answer to that, but this has at least prompted me to give it a proper think and decide whether I want to try to appeal to "the world" or just stay focused on my own little orbit. No idea where I'll end up, but it's an interesting question, and I appreciate you giving me the nudge to take it seriously.
Yeah, I looked at trailer sailers (although I wanted a cabin), but it wasn't really viable for the types of travel I wanted to do. Now that my life and location are slightly more predictable, a 7m with a small cabin that could go on a trailer would be ideal. (Although I'm sure I won't end up making that sensible choice.)
I don't have a proper answer (because it's a good and difficult question), but I sort of think of it as a context-dependant thing.
E.g., During a customer interview where I'm trying to understand what they've done (and predict what they'll do), I have vanishingly low confidence in their self-predicted behavior. So I prefer to try to look at what they've actually done in the past, talk to them to understand why they did it that way instead of some other way, tease out the invisible data (like what they tried or researched but didn't continue with), and then come to my own conclusion about how that's all likely to extrapolate.
But in terms of understanding and ascribing purpose to my experiences? Or understanding and empathizing with a friend or stranger? Or sending a message out into the world in a way that can stick and spread? In that case, it's kind of a subjective thing to start with, and it's all about the stories. (To clarify: not intentionally fanciful or fictional stories. Just "stories" in the sense of how we tie all these things that happen into something coherent and ordered.)
That was kind of a non-answer, and I'm sorry I can't be more helpful. I only understand a very, very small number of things. (Three, I think, although I'm working hard on understanding the fourth.) Apart from those few narrow domains, I'm just fumbling through it like everybody else.
Heya, thanks, it's a new site setup, so it's super helpful to hear about your experience with it -- I'll get that clarified. (I had nestled an about/bio link in the deep bottom-left sidenav, but it's admittedly very easy to overlook.) In the meantime, if you're still curious, the full bio thing is at: http://stuff.robfitz.com/about/
It was the difference between a wikipedia article vs. a biography (i.e., a collection of facts vs. those same facts, but arranged around a narrative).
A specific example came up while trying to explain my first company's pivots through three products (trying to figure out a social/UGC ad stack before Facebook did). If you looked at the business model, our value prop, customer segment, etc. all of that stayed the same. Which was the unifying thread, and which I can now articulate at least semi-coherently.
But when I was describing it to Andrew, it came out as three completely unrelated products, and that we were just wildly changing plans without any coherent vision or direction. I remember that moment due to his look of profound confusion, where he was really trying to figure out how these three things I had just described were related.
I tried a bit of everything, and I did it all at the same time, so it's hard to pin down causation. The only thing that had to happen was to shift my diet away from being primarily composed of alcohol, coffee, and tabasco. Apart from that, a high-end probiotic thing may well have helped, and a good chiro/nutritionist acted as a sort of accountability coach to keep me going.
Also, getting serious about reining in the drinking acted as an anchor habit that led to a bunch of other positive lifestyle changes. (I still probably drink far more than almost anyone would consider acceptable, but it's down to a level where my body appears able to keep up. So still a work in progress, I guess, but at least my energy is back up.)
This is semi off-topic, but I normally write books, which I work pretty hard to edit down into the shortest versions of themselves.
As a weird side-effect of that, I noticed myself starting to hold all of my writing to that same standard, which was stopping me from putting out anything more off-the-cuff.
So part of my motivation with this site (which is only about a week old) was to frame it in a way, at least for myself, where I felt comfortable sharing the stuff-in-progress without worrying too much that it wasn't a finished book.
Which I guess is a long way to say that the rambliness is an intentional decision, since otherwise it wouldn't be doing the job (for me) that it was designed for. I already spend 20+ hours a week doing fairly utilitarian writing for my books, so this little site needs to be something different if I hope to stick with it. And in an ideal world, maybe a few other people will happen to enjoy some bits and pieces along the way :)
I left it moored up at a port along the canal for winter (when the canal gets too shallow to traverse), the folks who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it didn't, uncharacteristic winter storms were blowing rain and muck all over the place, the cockpit drains got clogged, the cockpit filled with water, and things went downhill from there ;)
It was sitting quite happily on the shallow riverbed when I returned, but the inside was a swamp, and I had to tear out and trash the whole interior. At least it was fresh water, so the engine (mostly) survived.
Was the most popular British-made small boat of all time, and some of them have successfully circumnavigated.
Sturdy thing with only 0.9m draft, able to ride into shallow waters and sit happily on its keels when the tide goes out, and surprisingly spacious for its length. Good boat.
Ya, we went in cold after just a quick email exchange, so you're spot on there.
Still, I remember being quite struck by how authentically he was working to get to the heart of it and tease out some value from the mess I was making. It really felt like he was on my side, working with me, despite how difficult I was making it.
I grabbed a copy of his book a couple days back (which is maybe what reminded me of this little anecdote) but haven't gotten into it yet since the pile of interesting reading is just a bit too deep. Very much looking forward to it though, cuz nobody knows it better (except maybe Oprah, I guess?)
Very interesting to see differences between the "mature" AI coding workflow vs. the "mature" image workflow. Context and design docs vs. pipelines and modules...
I've also got a toe inside the publishing industry (which is ridicilously, hilariously tech-impaired), and this has certainly gotten me noodling over what the workflow there ought to be...