dopamine reward feedback loop. Video scrolling is an insidious form of it because the feedback time is so short that you end up hooked on it for hours, feeling bad afterwards; seriously potent stuff.
There's the politics of the corporations and then there's the business of the science behind LLM's, this article feels like the former.
Maybe someone active in the research can comment? I feel like all of these comments are just conjecture/anecdotal and don't really get to the meat of this question of "progress" and the future of LLM's
All my solo projects suffered from all the things you mentioned. Once I found a cofounder for my current project, these problems went away because
1. There’s social altruism activated because you two are constantly doing things not just for yourself, but for the other person.
2. View point diversity. You get way more feedback with another talking head at the same table, helps unblock you more than you think. And this can ignite new insight and therefore new notification energy!
Is there a way to hack this as a solo founder? I think so!
I had a former co founder who I would always bounce ideas off of and even tho he wasn’t directly working on my projects, he would check in with me and kind of act like a rubber duck I could talk to. This could be your friends, partner, or strangers!
Also, time is your best friend, for good or for worse. I think back on projects I started and quit after a year, I would like to think those projects would be successful if I just put more time into it.
My most productive workflow, is take a stab at what I want first and use gpt/claude to generate boiler plate code. I use the base components from tailwind components and ask Claude/GPT to tailor them to my needs.
Been working great! I proofread almost everything of course but moving really fast and not having to muck around with which tailwind class is really nice.
Why don’t you open source it and let devs know they can contribute starting today? Devs who don’t use HN can find it on GitHub by searching and you can begin posting call to arms if by posting your vision and goals.
Not sure if it was clear in my OP, but there are only 2 technical founders and I am one of them. We also already have a pathway to paying customers; that was also clear in my OP.
Also, what exactly do you mean by pain and grit? we're already doing that. we're growing and have growing pains hence the point of this post.
Genuine curiosity. What compels a company to write such an extensive handbook about remote work? The company I joined right after covid started was relatively small eng organization ~20 and we're up to 60-70 eng org but the company size is around ~300. There were lots of leadership meetings and communication but that's all we really needed to run a successful remote first company.
I've worked on very complex systems - The disney streaming platform (before it was disney), live video streaming systems, banking transaction systems, your run of the mill crud software with kafka clusters piping mind numbing amounts of data, netflix and a few other large engineering heavy companies.
No engineering company worth their weight is going to build a world class technology business purely with generative AI in its current state. The risk in doing so currently is total and utter failure. I have a very hard time believing we're any where near that capability. Maybe your mom and pop startup could hire a prompt engineer to build a website and simple tool but we have yet to see those exercises surfaced to the mainstream; it's purely speculative.
I say, rest easy programmers. Your careers will be enriched more than axed with generative AI as a support tool for many years to come.
Also, if anyone who works in this field has a strong opposing belief, then consider OpenAI engineers are programming themselves out of a job which obviously is not the case.
I'm one who lives in the east bay (oakland/emeryville area) and don't use BART anymore because I'm WFH now.
I also choose to drive into the city on weekends and off commute hours because the BART always has sketchy people, homeless, some weirdo moving up and down the carts and there's never enough people in the off hours to make it feel safe and worth it.
It's a bummer because I'm down the street from Macarthur and would love to take it more often but I always have to be on guard which is not the travel experience I need in my life right now.
This is cool but in the last 12 years I have never written a cover letter for a role or read one as a part of the hiring process. Maybe other markets outside of tech still use them or for entry roles.
Great point for a deeper discussion. When it comes to deciding when to move fast & when to think more carefully, the answer to this question feels very nuanced and problem domain specific than the aphorism suggests.
More action has led to painfully bad engineering decisions in some working startups i've joined that leads to attrition & perhaps years of refactoring. Sure, the argument could be made, "well that's the learning!" you moved fast and realized it wouldn't scale. And in some cases, you're right and in other cases you wished you hired someone better for the job.
Perhaps, then, to minimize the pain of the future, the less talk more action mentality only works with better engineers who make better decisions. I don't have any data to back up this claim but it sure feels like better engineers who are successful are better at making fewer mistakes when wanting to move fast.
I really enjoy reading about folks sharing their OCD stories. This one resonated with me because it's one of my obsessions.
I will say that after going through CBT and becoming an amature expert on OCD as a sufferer, a therapist would argue that this behavior of checking your photo is a form of compulsion. It works for dam sure but you're never really going to be able to go to sleep without some form of checking when the obsessive thoughts start.
Anyone who has gone through treatment knows the ultimate goal is to weaken the reaction of the obsessive thoughts which is what exposure therapy is all about.
Just a quick story, my laddering technique for achieving peace was to eventually get to a comfort level where I can sleep with the door wide open all night. Well, I didn't get that far but I did sleep with all my doors unlocked for a couple nights.
Lastly, I can safely say that I now check all my doors once these days with the exception when I'm stressed at work. I'll check them once before going to bed and if I brush my teeth between checking the door and actually walking to bed, I might check them once more. But this is a seldom occurrence these days.
Stock splits can also be used for companies with values too low (A reverse split) . These companies split to increase the value of stocks in order to prevent delisting from exchanges.