This is how I've gone about it with my Shopify site.
I appreciate there may be more efficient ways to do things if you're an actual developer or engineer but I'm not and the tools I've been able to build so far have been both fun to make and add value to our workflow as a small 2 person ecommerce business.
I do at least have a background in web as a designer for many years and having worked with developers I can at least spec and understand how a product might work which is one thing Claude/AI isn't hugely helpful with and often it's the testing and QA phase as always where the problems and shortcomings expose themselves.
I'm now several years out of a career as a web designer and running my own retail business on Shopify and so while I've always had a background in working with devs and having a vague idea of how to plan and spec something, my previous job was design and writing HTML and CSS and I always wanted to be able to make small tools or little fun projects for me but the other parts of the project - the js, caching, api integration etc were always beyond my skillset.
While I wouldn't say execution is necessarily "cheap" for everything, ChatGPT and Gemini helped me build out a little Spotify playlist generator [1] recently that scans my top 100 artists in the last 12 months then generate a playlist based on their bottom 50% of songs in terms of popularity with an option for 1 or 2 songs per artist.
Sadly the Spotify API limits will never allow me to offer it to more than 25 people at a time but I get so bored of their algorithm playing me the same top songs from artists it's a fun way for me to explore "lesser lights" and something I'd have absolutely never have been able to build before, let alone spin up in a couple of evenings.
It's quite liberating as a non-dev suddenly having these new tools available that's for sure.
I don't really see how this isn't just content theft at this point. Pointing at "inspiration sites" and just rewording their content feels pretty scummy at best.
At what point are content creators and publishers going to be paid for or given the option to block AI scraping tools using their material so blatantly to generate income for other companies and publishers?
To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.
Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.
I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?
HN has become somewhere I visit daily just because of that interesting variety and well moderated content. I'm far from a smart hacker and as a former web designer turned seller of Japanese knives, I just enjoy reading varied and interesting content even if I often don't understand it.
It's the discussion below that I particularly enjoy even though I'm very much a lurker, the strong moderation and quality community feel adds massively to some complicated (for me) topics.
> Stop eating carbs about 2 months before. I did this and went from a 2:06 to 1:58 with minimal training. My body carried several kg less weight and felt like it could consume its own fat energy more efficiently and I didn’t get the 2/3 slump.
You would likely get the same results and time drop just by running consistent training mileage for 2 months instead of a big diet change like this.
This must be the ultimate HN reader video fodder, popped up in my feed the other day too. Interesting watching people like this who just decide they want to be away from everything.
This is the problem with so many companies these days in terms of not being able to get hold of anyone and just getting thrown into a loop of bot replies and semi-relevant faq pages.
I run a small business in UK and have had a few issues in the past where I've been unable to get any sort of resolution through regular channels and I've actually contacted my local MP and asked them to help intervene or at least reach a person in authority who could own the problem.
I may not agree with his actual political party but as a local MP he is good with small businesses and uses the clout of his office and name. Obviously YMMV on this depending on your MP but desperate times etc.
The goal with this design (same for Netflix etc) is not to show you the results you want to see in the most efficient format, it's to push what they want you to see.
It's even more apparent on Netflix where the UI has got progressively worse over the years to the point it's basically unusable to discover stuff you actually want to see - I mean, large rows of "you watched this already, here it is again".
It's been pretty apparent for me that their who focus changed a couple of years ago from "here's some stuff you might enjoy watching" to "here's the stuff we want you to watch" or much like Google ads, "here's something you've already watched, watch it again"
I'm almost at the point of cancelling my Netflix subscription simply because it's so much effort to find something of interest now.
I think it's lovely trying to optimise on what's realistically a small scale (better HTML, some image crushing) but I'd imagine the much bigger issue is the world's never ending creation of pure digital landfill on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
Encouraging people to record every inane detail of their lives and hosting it must be a massive resource drain somewhere along the line.
This is the same guy who ran that complete shambles of a vapourware project a few years back to build a smartphone right?
This sounds exactly the same in that it's some vanity project under the guise of being indie or privacy focused but all he's really looking for is some more cash.
I wonder if it'll be a obscurely named toggle hidden away in a settings sub page somewhere just so they can say they've offered the option.
Unlikely of course but it would be nice if they were turned off by default and they offered users the option to turn them on with a disclaimer about how inaccurate and shady many of them are.
All our clients are in travel so hard hit and projects just got stopped so we've had to go on furlough to try ride it out for a couple of months and see what comes out of the other side.
It's either going to be massive post-lockdown boom time for the travel industry or it'll be an absolute graveyard of broken companies for at least the next 12 months and we'll have to figure a new course for ourselves.
Really enjoyed that, [The Tunnel](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2711738/0) is also the same theme set in the Channel Tunnel which is also worth a watch although not quite as Nordic Noir
I appreciate there may be more efficient ways to do things if you're an actual developer or engineer but I'm not and the tools I've been able to build so far have been both fun to make and add value to our workflow as a small 2 person ecommerce business.
I do at least have a background in web as a designer for many years and having worked with developers I can at least spec and understand how a product might work which is one thing Claude/AI isn't hugely helpful with and often it's the testing and QA phase as always where the problems and shortcomings expose themselves.