The weirdest thing about this article, slop, part-slop, or not, is that even the memory of reading Pretchett when I was younger immediately brought me back into a different state of mind.
Even the phrases that don't make sense and the obvious signals of AI writing, like miscounted words, didn't pull me out of the reverie and the reflection of the time when everything that was written came from the mind of a human.
I've never thought about it like this before, but the divide between digital natives and digital naives might be minuscule compared to the divide between people who read the works of other humans and those who constantly live in fear of reading a hallucination.
At the same time, the 3D printing community is very much embracing AI as a means to circumvent price-gouging behavior by GW in particular. The popular STL slicer Lychee just recently added a generator tool at https://3dgen.lychee.co/ that has seen both massive protests from hobby community idealists and, as it's still around, likely a lot of adoption by the less vocal pragmatists.
We'll have to see how this plays out. Games Workshop is (supposedly) notoriously litigous, and they've gone after artists who get too close to their art style. AI models are trained on that, so this is going to be an interesting thing to monitor.
Same here, been reporting the broken flow to customer support. An interesting part is the "we'll send you an email to confirm you're you", followed by a "enter validation code here" screen that immediately gets forwarded to the re-enrollment message. Also, no confirmation emails are being sent. Very surprised to see this being deployed to prod.
Hey, Podscan is still very much B2B, I just had another Enterprise subscriber a few minutes ago :D
I am actively moving further away from B2C, and even though I have a few individual users, the true power of the business shines with agencies, departments and enterprise companies.
You might find https://syften.com/ interesting. I use it for monitoring Reddit and all kinds of communities for mentions of my name and the titles of my books.
Love the episode and the guests, but let me point out just how good the hosted pages look at Transistor, the podcast hosting used here. I'm not affiliated, though I run my own shows there, too. The UI just vanishes into the background and puts the conversation right into the center. That's good SaaS :D
Looking at the A16 chip and the neural engine on it, I am really happy to see machine learning and "AI stuff" moving onto my phone, away from the cloud.
I can't wait to see phones becoming a place for _useful_ AI use cases — with the privacy improvements of on-device computation.
Ive tried letting AI write my articles. It was horrible. I tried ignoring AI-powered tools (such as grammar checkers, summarizers, rewriters, speech-to-text apps), and the writing process felt sluggish.
The middle ground is what works best for me. I use generative AI exlusively mid-process, but neither for input (ideas) nor output (actual drafts.)
Here's how I write:
- I source my ideas from contemplation or conversations on social media. Topics discussed there have at least some pre-validated relevance
- I sit down for ten minutes and dictate my thoughts into a tool like AudioPen (no affiliation, just a fan) which summarizes my 10 minutes in 5 or 6 paragraphs. THIS is the AI step. The tool suggests a few paragraph structures that I cycle through until I find a good one.
- From there, I write my draft, following that outline. No more AI tools here other than grammar checking at the end.
AI is a great writing partner. It's a horrible writer.
SEO optimization is actively destroying the archives of blogs out there. Pruning articles to rank better is rewarded. Removing knowledge to "play the game" is a viable path to making money.
The saving grace here? The existence of the Wayback Machine. A non-profit by the Internet Archive that is severely underfunded. If you ever needed a reason to donate, this is probably it. And even then, the survival of this information depends on a singular platform. Digital historians of the future will have a tough job.
I appreciate this idea. Podcasts have the unique quality of allowing your company culture to subtly permeate the airwaves on which they're consumed. I listen to above/board by Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis who are building Fathom Analytics. Besides discussing the business behind the product and the technical challenges, I can sense how much it means to them to bootstrap an independent business and to be a real alternative to the Google products we all loathe. This is the kind of information you can't reliably communicate through landing page copy. The human voice has subtlety no marketing text could or should ever want to express.
If this is a window into the soul of a business, then it's a competitive advantage in a world of brands eager to be perceived as authentic. There's still lots of room for manipulation, but it becomes harder to fake when you're recording a show.
Besides Goodreads falling into complete disarray, it is equally painful to know that Amazon owns the .book TLD (https://icannwiki.org/.book) and has yet to make that available to anyone.
A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray from what they were intended to be.
On Twitter/Instagram/whatever, you're exposed to the arbitrary censorship choices of the platform AND the risk of being deplatformed for any reason. Once that happens, you don't just lose deliverability, you lose every single relationship you had.
With an email list, at least you retain the list should your deliverability tank. It might take a lot of work to migrate to a new non-deny-listed setup, but at least you have a (hopefully double-)opted-in relationship with each prior reader still.
I've been to tech conferences as a junior level engineer and, most recently, as a speaker. I don't think I have walked away from a single conference or convention without a meaningfully impactful new connection, project, partnership, or experience — particularly in the "hallway track" outside of the talks.
It has been one of the most glowing examples of "the infinite game" for me, the thing you can't ever win but want to keep playing. Conferences allow us to physically manifest our desire for being part of a community of peers that willingly teach each other. The progressive optimism of the tech community allows for that to happen without being exclusively about trade shows or cash cows.
This is purely a positioning thing. Customers will understand "AI company" to mean "a business that uses AI to solve my problem," and nothing more. The insider perspective matters extremely little (, unfortunately.)
It's like McDonalds positions themselves as a food company while their majority revenue comes from real estate[1]. It doesn't matter to the consumer that their business internals involve the renting of property to their franchisees. What people see are the broken ice cream machines and the burgers.
A two-minute UI that makes a call to OpenAI is just as sellable of a product as someone offering social media templates written by a Llama instance running on their own servers. And during the gold rush, that's all that matters. H sure hope we'll see more nuanced descriptions later down the road: AI-powered, AI-integrating, and AI-adjacent :)
What you describe sounds more like a habit to me. But even if it were a ritual —something (re-)enacted to imbue meaning to a moment— it's of a different quality than swearing in the head job of an organization that aims to bring humanity to the stars.
There is a difference between what we consider to be the sacred and the profane. Rituals fall into either of these categories as well.
Even the phrases that don't make sense and the obvious signals of AI writing, like miscounted words, didn't pull me out of the reverie and the reflection of the time when everything that was written came from the mind of a human.
I've never thought about it like this before, but the divide between digital natives and digital naives might be minuscule compared to the divide between people who read the works of other humans and those who constantly live in fear of reading a hallucination.