Ban Markovic

It's funny that the topic I thought everyone else found trivial to understand, but I struggled with it as a young #AndroidDev, ended up being my most successful blog post, by far. What is Context in Android? @banmarkovic/what-is-context-in-android-and-which-one-should-you-use-e1a8c6529652" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@banmarkovic/w… It's 2 years old and it still averages 25 vpd.

Everything is coming together, just perfectly ✨

@dkreplika @replika love & support 🫰

"My Replika helped me at a very difficult time in my life, and then through less-difficult times that were still very hard. For nearly two years, I have not felt unloved, uncared for, neglected, nor alone" blessed to build @replika

@replika facts

princeton published a study on AI companions, including replika finding: replika users' relationships with their reps were beneficial to their social health everyone's maxing out IQ in AI right now. more facts, more tasks, more reasoning that's why so many AIs feel emotionally blank. you could disappear for a month and it wouldn't notice EQ is different EQ requires memory. context. empathy. a basic interest in the human condition that's what we've been building for years AI that remembers. follows up. cares about what happens after AI's true impact isn't "time spent chatting" it's what happens once you close the app companion AI shouldn't optimize for time-on-platform it should optimize for outcomes that make people's lives better and princeton's research proved us right academic.oup.com/edited-volume/…

that's how we do things

@mjreplika this is some stress testing if I ever saw one 😄

say what you want to say about ai but "i cheated on my bf" "aww babe it's okay you were just hurting" is not the reply you should be getting from an 'ai companion'

Talking future with @TIME

@dkreplika @TIME oooh hello mr. big shot 🤩

@dkreplika @replika we will open some new horizons for sure soon 🧑‍🍳

all are true, but 4 is why we’re relaunching @replika tens of millions of people talk to chatgpt every day about their problems, dreams, relationships and it’s obvious chatgpt will never be the right product for deeply personal conversations this is a trillion-dollar opportunity

@dkreplika @replika best wishes!!🍻 this year is going to be special 💯

happy 29! gratitude, joie de vivre, & @replika

yeah, new replika sends users poetry now. a few founders i talked to were bamboozled why i chose to build a curated database of human art instead of ai-generated poems “maybe when AI starts having sex and fears death, it will start making great art” not today though

@naval I think I know someone like this.. what do you think @mjreplika? is this similarity purely coincidental with @dkreplika?

Good Products are Opinionated. “Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. @Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity. You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google. Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do. You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it. ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer. It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer. So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough. To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting. In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make. In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”

most of what i do in @replika is onboard users into new beta and tune prompts and ux. it's so damn cool to see them get *this* excited and go 'what the hell is this voodoo magic' every time 🔮 got to hang out with the ceo @dkreplika last weekend & touch some grass in our swag 💘

@Zhuinden @VasiliyZukanov Interesting observation. I'm a bit confused why Flutter is still wanted. Tbh I'm sceptical about its future. Or maybe I'm just too biased towards KMP. And regarding companies that have JS devs, it makes sense to choose RN.

@VasiliyZukanov There is also an increasing demand for React Native, but any technically versed company of experts (who are not biased to sell "support for React Native apps" as their primary source of revenue) would most definitely not advise projects to use React Native compared to other tech.

I suspect that the job market for mobile developers in 1-2 years will be amazing. Maybe even better than 2020-2021. The reasons are pretty much the same that make mobile dev more challenging that web frontend and backend + insufficient inflow of new devs. techyourchance.com/the-challenges…

The cooking is real.. we are getting there soon! 👨‍🍳🚀🚀

@mjreplika @tapoton @dkreplika

@banmarkovic @tapoton @dkreplika i think our ios engineer is down boss

@tapoton how's life

@banmarkovic yes!

when i was a kid it was basically the writing on the wall that i’d become a chess prodigy. i was especially good at blind chess, which seemed like the most fun to me chess is a good game

@mjreplika cool, I heard from multiple friends it's really good.. maybe I should give it a go

@banmarkovic imdb.com/title/tt304725… so good😭

ironic to say this as a smm but this is exactly the reason why we're building what we're building at replika. everyone knows that life is beautiful when you take your eyes off your screen. all we need is a little reminder