Elena Yunusov

Awesome AI Tinkerers tonight thank you to @Shopify and @googlecloud for the support!

I’m sorry, but.. what in the world

Agreed

& these products aren’t getting easier to use, they’re actually becoming *more* difficult to use. i struggle to figure it out a ton (see recent chatgpt launch). ask anyone normal to approach an ai app today, you’ll see how much everything feels like a smartphone before the iphone. this applies to both software & hardware.

I lived in Toronto from 1999-2021, I can’t remember a single summer with a smoke issue. It’s definitely mismanagement. This is a brand new problem.

the best part about building things nobody asked you to build: you find out what you actually care about.

Great read. I push myself to operate in Stage 2. Doesn’t happen always but cmux + codex makes it very doable. @bcherny has included a table for moving towards higher stages. It’s recruiting high season for me, so not enough time for coding but I’m hoping to graduate to stage 3 by the end of Aug. By then our @8090_Factory is also on track to make it a lot easier and structured to do so!

I wrote an essay for The Humanist Review of AI, a new editorial publication exploring AI’s impact on the world. The first issue explores the intersection of people and technology through a collection of original essays from a range of thinkers -- mine: "Against The Small Future."

Social Capital™️ I have never seen the plight of my generation articulated so well. This is the core issue we must solve, we must provide abundant social capital to the next generation - using the levers of politics and private industry - or humanity as we know it will end.

Every marketing team should do this simple test. At random, ask 100 of your existing customers to describe your product in their own words. No leading the witness. Then look at how you describe your product on your site. Don’t dismiss obvious differences by telling yourself, “They basically mean the same thing we do.” Really look at the specific words. Really consider exactly what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. Compare that directly with the words you’re using, the descriptions you’re presenting, the picture you’re painting. Then stare at the Grand Canyon.

Our first model, Inkling. Trained from scratch, weights are open, fine-tunable on Tinker today.

we’re entering the end stage of the address bar, domains, tabs, & all the stupid dumb tech plumbing browsers exposed to normal users. i.e. i almost never begin at the browser layer anymore. the journey starts in claude, chatgpt, siri, or some other ai system. which means the browser has been demoted from destination to runtime. you still might land there via links, checkout, dashboards, authentication, & documents. but you rarely *start* there. websites are no longer competing primarily to be visited. they’re competing to be retrieved, cited, acted on, & represented correctly by agents. traffic becomes an implementation detail. which is why killing atlas was probably one of openai’s smarter decisions & i have written about it ton a year + ago (search my tweets). the browser itself will matter less & less. the systems that understand intent, choose where to go, & act on your behalf will matter far more.

Everyone has a theory on how AI will impact the job market. Here's what I'm seeing: 1/ Everywhere I look, teams are getting smaller. That does not mean overall headcount is reducing or unemployment is increasing, but my anecdotal experience is telling me that the smallest meaningful operating unit is shrinking by a factor of 2 or more. 2/ Some government groups I have spoken with (not just in the USA) are preparing for a surge in unemployment benefit claims. That does not mean it's happening, nor does it mean their plans are sound, but it's helpful to know that is one outcome they're considering. 3/ Everyone has incentives. The AI labs, the CEOs, the researchers, the banks, the government, heads of state, even you reading this. It's important to keep that in mind, especially as tunes change (ex: from mass job loss to mass job gains). 4/ Even if AI creates new jobs, it is likely that they will require new skills or be in new areas of expertise. That means there will still be a skills gap. That skills gap feels like it's growing wider every day. More jobs existing is not the same as high employment aka it's not just about jobs existing, it's whether they get filled (and yes, I wrote that and not AI). Outside of a few hundred content creators and a couple of enterprises, I'm not seeing enough movement to close the gap. 5/ Keep pushing enterprise leaders to provide a timeline on their job predictions. They'll refuse at first because they are PR-trained. Push back. Ask for a range, ask if it's over or under 10 years, ask what would have to be true for it to happen in 3 years versus 10 versus 50.

so… the herdr plugin marketplace just passed 169 plugins and i've been going through them: someone made one that renders your coding agents as pixel-art sheep on a farm. when a session ends, the sheep dies and is buried in the graveyard :( and this isn't even my favorite one 👇🧵

@gtredoux @pmarca How do you sync the audio to image though

Frustrated by the plethora of old Soviet movies on Youtube (and elsewhere) without subtitles? Help is at hand. 1. Download it (Help to Build Socialism). 2. Rip the Russian audio track (say using ffmpeg). 3. Use WhisperX to transcribe the Russian audio to a .srt file. (Forget the crappy job Youtube does at this and don't use theirs). 4. Give the .srt file to Claude to translate to English. 5. Good times.

👏

Interesting. Very interesting.

@surim0n Toronto

toronto has a lot of 🇨🇦 founders and no group chat. fixing that. slack/whatsapp group for people building. share progress, and most importantly UNBLOCK each other first happy hour once there's enough of us. what you also get: office hours from a claude & cognition ambassador reply "toronto"

let me get this straight: chatgpt got to 1b users by teaching ppl to live inside chat threads in the left sidebar. the mobile app still works that way. then the new desktop app demotes chat to a customer support pop up, makes “work” the real product, leaks codex everywhere for normal ppl, breaks normal window behavior, & throws everyone into the deep end with no explanation? you took the most familiar ai product on earth & redesigned it around your org chart. remarkable.