meekal bajaj

@eshear Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the synthesis of form looks at relationship between Design and Context • Form should follow context • Unselfconscious cultures adapt designs naturally through iteration. • Selfconscious cultures impose abstract ideas that misfit.

Other than Heidegger, who is the best philosopher on tools and instruments as extensions of the self? Particularly interested in someone who examines the role, philosophically, of having an instrument for inquiry. Eg the telescope or microscope enabling new sciences.

4/ What’s next These are early days. As media becomes easier to generate and transform, I believe we will see two big transformations Rise of multi-hyphenate creators. As the cost of transforming content becomes trivial, creators will publish content in multiple formats, giving rise to multi-hyphenate creators who publish across text, audio, and video. Platform convergence. As media becomes more fluid, platforms will compete for the same creators and audiences. Companies that are adjacent to each other will transform into head-on competitors, starting with Spotify and Youtube, and expanding to Netflix and XBox.

3/ The future: Game mode/Story mode The future will be a different kind of breaking the fourth wall. Audiences will break the linear narrative and go seamlessly between laid back passive experiences to being active participants guiding their own experiences. In the world where media is generated, lines between media formats get blurrier. Imagine, instead of just watching Stranger Things, the Netflix show about fighting monsters from the Upside Down, you could switch to game mode to control the characters and fight the Demogorgons yourself. Or if you want to lay back and just watch, turn on ‘story mode’ and let the story advance on its own. After all, a game is just a video where you control the narrative. If this sounds far fetched, consider that NotebookLM transforming a document into a podcast, and in doing so creating an entirely new medium and a new audience.

Game Mode / Story Mode What if your favorite show wasn’t just something you watched—but something you could play? 📺 Story Mode → sit back 🎮 Game Mode → step inside the action

Robinhood making it easier to invest for everyone and the push to lower interest rate is eerily similar to “Sunshine” Charlie Mitchell and the City National Bank in 1920s.

Text to speech generation. 3/10 The good. Passable quality, easy to integrate, and cheap tools. The bad. OpenAI’s TTS felt abandoned. No way to control speed, limited number of voices, and no great way to refine the output with pauses

Image generation. 4/10 The good. Detailed prompt engineering goes far. The bad. a) Challenging to create multiple coherent images b) Lack of negation in the prompt, you can’t say ‘don’t do this’.

Building products with AI is completely wild. In 10 days, I built a storytelling app without writing a single line of code. Everything on gostorytime.ai has been created with AI. The code, the designs, and the content is all generated.

I am obviously biased on Apple vs Patreon discussion. But @benthompson proposal of Apple collecting 30% on Patreon’s earnings, rather than the creators earnings, really feels like an elegant solution that rewards each platform for the value it creates. theverge.com/2024/8/12/2421…