I was getting effected by the "technoference". A few friends when visiting us at our home, are being on phones, scrolling and engaging. I decided to buy a box. Any time friends visit us, they should drop their phones in that box and pick them up while leaving.
Coincidentally today, I have formed a weird theory about reCaptcha. I created a fake facebook account recently. And every time I try to login, I'm getting verify you are human screen that is Google's recaptcha. And I was solving recaptcha for 8-9 times on some occasions. I think the number of times I have to submit in one session went up after couple of days of Facebook usage. My theory is that, Facebook tags many accounts to be fake internally and instead of banning, they use these accounts for data farming including collecting data through Google's recaptcha (but incentive is not aligned as it would help it's competitor unless there is some payback model). This is anecdotal and 99% I'm wrong. But if I'm on the other side with the incentive to use data, it is definitely one I would try to capitalize on.
I think social media won purely because of the network effect. And once a huge amount of people hangout in one place, naturally, they would prefer to have all sort of discussions in the same place. I don't think world chose social media because it is better or anything. Social media was strongly business driven that adopted all sort of dark patterns to gather critical mass.
There is a huge assumption here that being an Entrepreneur, the only desire and success definition is to become well-off. Assuming your statement in good faith, it is not the only outcome. So offering Boggleheads strategy as an alternative or get the same outcome as Entrepreneurship is misinformed. I've come across a few friends when I shared I was building something or working for a startup, their immediate question was "Did you not get a job at Google?" :)
There are many people out there who enjoy building. Even if it gets very low traction and doesn't make them life changing fortune, people enjoy it. Along the way, they might make some money. Of course, there are also a lot of people who get on to this journey with the primary goal of making it big. We should not look at the "side-effects" and think that is the cause.
I switched away from Google to Duck a few years back. But I observed that I mostly do !g and end up on Google. I read similar comments from many others on other threads.
Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
I've seen this in K-12 EdTech. Most of the companies are owned by PEs. Digital curriculum companies, Assessment companies, Auth companies (like Clever), etc. And these PEs have portfolio of them and keep expanding. Not saying good or bad, just an observation.
I recently heard from couple of Technology Directors at schools that they are looking to procure Macbook Neos replacing their Chromebooks. This might be a strategy to defend their Chromebook market in schools.
I think there is a parallel to what happened to watch market with Quartz crisis. The same way Quartz has led to decline of Swiss movements, LLMs are going to have a huge effect on developer market. I hypothesize that in future there will be a micro segment which care about quality, taste, exclusivity etc the same way the luxury watch makers found a niche. My perspective is that this "taste" or "quality" will not be a moat. Instead, it will be a niche where only a small segment would care about it.
Exactly! I really loved the presentation. An interactive map with voice over, and at key moments zooming in, zooming out, coloring etc. Beautiful design. At the same time, not restricting the user. I was immediately glued.
I'm thinking that this can be a good pattern for photography portfolio sites. Voice over from photographer talking about his inspiration, walking through key memories, while letting the user browser around.
I'm a Hacker News reader and relate with the community. At the same time, it's not like I've same interest and energy in every niche. For example, I might have interest in custom building my keyboards, but may not be in restoring an old router. It's not like HN users exclusively use Linux desktops and many of us prefer simplicity.
The point I'm trying make is that there is more nuance than a simple HN user stereotype.
I wish someone does something similar in India. Night time driving is a nightmare. Everyone runs on high-beam. The new class of motor-cycles are with super bright LEDs and riders put them on high beam. Night-time driving is a guessing game - you need to guess where the edge of the road is, if there is a bicyclist in between, etc.
At least in late 90s, there used to be a law to black out half the headlamp. Either that was no longer the case or it's not as vigorously enforced.
I bought all my sim racing setup for my xbox. It was short-sighted but optimized for a quick decision. Now I feel like I'm stuck with it and can't upgrade the setup forward. Everytime I see these comments, it's one more nail in my wallet :)
We are building end-to-end accessibility compliance tool[1] that will take care of auditing, remediation, verification and generation of ACR/VPAT.
Because of the well bound nature of the problem space, we are able to unlock a lot of power from LLMs and put together a good end-to-end product that delivers the promise.
Still early days. I know there are lot of folks who care about a11y. I would love to chat and learn from your experience.
The fact that the author went out his way and styled it very uniquely displays that he does have taste :) It is just that your taste is different. Like another commenter pointed out, I liked the style (though I hated the pixelated font to begin with)
Is the author doing that over usefulness or doing that in addition to usefulness? Some people would also enjoy the journey with the tool, along with the results. Just because someone enjoys the 'taste' of the tool doesn't mean that they don't care about usefulness.
Also usefulness is very subjective too depending on the context and scope.
I completely agree with you. Though slightly tangential, what you called out also happens in startups and is a big learning for me. I wanted to fail fast. I thought I got it when read in a blog or a book. Similarly, building an MVP - feels amazing and I thought I understood it. Like you called out, many of the books, blogs or podcasts will present them in a flagrantly obvious way. As a reader, we often think that we understood it.
But in reality, these are very subtle. Understanding that what you are experiencing is a failure or what you are building is feature bloat is extremely hard. These aren't obvious moments. I call these micro signals. The skill is in fact developing the thinking muscle to pick on these micro signals and act on them.
Probably most of the "self help" fall in this category - very obvious when reading, but will fail to identify in reality. Internalizing is about understanding how these would manifest in reality (and be aware that these will be very very tiny signals)
X: @priyankc
Email: priyank [at] workback.ai