“Taste” is something that’s developed through repetitive exposure to differentiated items in a particular set, combined with extremely high abstract analytical abilities, and that’s something completely different from having marketing or personal branding skills.
I think you’re right that that’s the evaluation happening, but it’s totally misguided. If you’re indexing for differentiating levels of taste I would be very wary of empty vessel young influencers. Taste is built over years and years and imo requires a certain disdain for the crowd. Look at Linus Torvalds as a pinnacle of taste in code for example.
I think wrapper companies could do very well if AI does end up becoming having an impact near on the order of the internet or smartphones, which it may never.
A product that incorporates a foundation model could still require solving a hard engineering problem separately from the training and provision of said model. Someone who could, say, provide a reliable filter for copyrighted content from an LLM is providing real value and has a tangible moat.
Acting like Elon Musk is cringe for a lot of reasons but I don’t think it’s that out of pocket for a startup founder to admire him, even if all he did was SpaceX he would have an incredible legacy and story
Adderall is great at making me produce, but horrible at true “focus.” It makes everything other than pure output feel like a waste of time. In the long run, I found this to be a pretty detrimental way to operate. Good for getting something across the finish line but since I’ve stopped taking it I’ve been able to go a lot deeper into stuff and plug away at long term projects rather than just checking off as many “tasks” as possible.
Seattle/Washington has no elite or quasi-elite universities. That’s probably the #1 reason.
Compare it to Boston which is a similarly sized city.
Boston/New England has Harvard, MIT, BC, Tufts, Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Brown, etc. It’s the most educated region of the world with huge pool of founders and talent. Even though it’s not a tech focused place the way Seattle is it’s a better place to find young talented people willing to work for or start a new company.
Wow, your second paragraph hit the nail on the head about the effect that any sort of ML/AI work has on me. Tweaking hyperparameters/prompts/features and running it “one more time” is like sitting down at a slot machine for me. Can burn a day without any real work done iterating towards some unreachable perfect run.
I think this is a really underexplored use case for LLMs. LLM embeddings are really good at encoding rich semantic information that’s easy to query and hack around with in a variety of ways. Retrieving primary sources that correspond to one or many thematic dimensions is one such case for embeddings, but most applications that do this portray it as a driver of RAG chatbots, when it could be an end in and of itself.
I have an app that does your book recommending idea but with Wikipedia articles. I am trying to release it soon, once I get past my perfectionism, if anyone is interested. Expanding to non Wikipedia sources is an eventual goal.
I basically never want to read chatbot output for pleasure. I want to read primary sources.
I had a similar experience where I gained a strong sense of how ancient humans and modern humans are one and the same.
It was individualistic in that the sense came from my own embodied experience of being in the world, and I was thinking about myself, but it was an insight about contextualizing myself in a much larger thing.
It made me feel special, personally, for being a member of such an incredible group, but anti-individualistic because I extended this specialness to everyone.
Credit scores don’t discourage competition. Competition can still exist within brackets.
The reason rates don’t differ much is because most of the rate is determined by factors outside of the lenders control. There’s a pretty small margin for them to compete on price with each other with. That’s why rates on stuff like mortgages are basically commoditized.