auntad

There's a number of people building various flavors of this. I'm one of them -- pulsemcp.com - we expose our data via API (pulsemcp.com/api) that is theoretically the starting point for what you're asking.

The issue with the current state of the ecosystem to do what you're saying is that server implementations all have extreme variances of quality. Some are very robust and reliable. Others have very poor and limited UX, if you can even get them to start up on your local machine.

So we're not really in a place where we can trust that a server "does what it says it can do [well]", and so any autonomous solution to "choose tools (servers)" probably won't work well today (yet) while the signal to noise ratio is poor.

Personally: I think autonomously choosing between tools is not the most compelling approach in the short to medium time horizon. I expect client application creators to get a lot of mileage by thoughtfully curating the possible servers exposed to their users, and building nice UX to integrate usage of relevant servers as-needed.

As a software engineer that spends a lot of time in marketing, I didn't find GPT 3.5 useful for anything besides writing marketing copy faster.

I have found GPT-4, on the other hand, to be excellent at writing complicated SQL queries, one-off scripts in just about any language, expanding and fleshing out content ideas from just a seed of insight, and debugging cryptic error messages. Among some other one-off use cases, but these I use on a recurring basis.

I'll throw in another wrinkle: it's not just the candidate pool to consider, but how companies are choosing to leverage - or avoid leveraging - the platform.

I wouldn't say Triplebyte imposes a significant cost on the candidate. They only have two rounds: one is a quiz that's quite straightforward to complete (about a half hour of multiple choice, if I recall correctly), and a single 1-2 hour video interview. If nothing else, it's good practice for the candidate.

Plus, they dangle some brand names as partners that would attract any candidate, including the cream of the crop. Stripe, Palantir, etc. So top tier candidates are certainly likely to be convinced to give Triplebyte's process a shot.

I'm not sure how often candidates get matched with those top tier companies on Triplebyte -- I didn't get matched in my recent job search, and ended up applying and receiving offers from several of them independently of Triplebyte -- but it's certainly plausible that Triplebyte has many top candidates at least giving the platform a try.

Regardless of which candidates are using Triplebyte, the only relevant data is which candidates are _getting offers via Triplebyte_. In my experience, I received several offers, only one of them via Triplebyte (I only accepted one onsite there) - Triplebyte has no insight into my other offers.

That one offer via Triplebyte was significantly lower - at least on base - than all of the other offers I received. It would've put me in the 50ish percentile on this post's plots. The other offers put me in ~60-97 percentile. Very anecdotal, but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of companies giving offers via Triplebyte are generally paying less than top companies who are less likely to use Triplebyte despite having a presence on the platform.

Judging from Rob Walling's thoughts on this topic from his book -- the equation looks different for the kind of company they're looking for. There's no "huge risk of failure"; the focus is on businesses highly likely to succeed that will have (relatively) slower, but consistent, growth. And obviously (relatively) lower final valuations.

This sounds like a big deal, but doesn't seem to be getting attention. Am I missing something?

Giants like Facebook, Twitter, etc. have a huge competitive advantage because of their user moats. There are a countless number of people who hate Facebook, but stay on it "because everyone is there" and use the one or two convenient features they appreciate, like Events or Groups.

If this initiative is for real, goodbye inferior products like all the stuff Facebook has stuck into its ecosystem (Groups, Events, Messenger, etc etc) and hello super-speciailized companies that can piggy-back on existing user moats (moats no longer).

This is obviously fantastic for the consumer, but seems to destroy something that I thought to be key to each of their bottom lines. Why are they doing this?

I'd suspect a valid correlation that's not a causation. If a company is generally doing well, presumably the CEO isn't under as much stress and doesn't have as many firefighting responsibilities as those whose companies are doing poorly. Hence having the time to write a letter to a stranger.

Maybe those underperforming companies will bounce back and you'll find a (much delayed) response in the author's mailbox a few months down the line!

I really like his example at the end - step-by-step deep dive into a specific topic. 30 hours of learning, direct links to resources, come out the other end as informed and aware of the topic at hand.

I usually find it difficult to wade through the mountains of possible (often outdated) resources on a topic I'm unfamiliar with - At one point I was thinking it'd be useful to crowdsource those kind of step-by-step guides across a variety of verticals. Kind of like an online class, except pulling from the best up to date blog posts and specific resources from around the internet, instead of relying on a singular POV of the guy who made some videos and called it a course.

Anyone know of anything like that? How do you approach deep diving into unfamiliar spaces?

This. There are some great bits about checklists and their (underutilized) role in preventing human error in Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things (chapter 5).

Fair response, appreciate your thoughtfulness. Your point about lack of advancement is compelling.

Doctors, financiers, etc prove that people are willing to go through life phases that tear them down mentally and physically (could easily argue that for them it can be worse than "peeing in a bottle"), but you're right, they'll all justify it saying "it won't be like this 5 years from now".

I'm curious as to how Amazon would respond to a question like, "what opportunities for advancement do your lower level workers have?"

"The reporter, Alan Selby, reportedly saw some staff members “asleep on their feet, exhausted from toiling for up to 55 hours a week.” Toilet breaks were timed, and workers were admonished by supervisors for stopping to catch their breath.

Conditions are so dire, a recent poll of 100 Amazon warehouse workers from labor advocacy group Organise showed that more than half suffer from depression, and eight percent had contemplated suicide."

While I acknowledge it's not a totally fair comparison, I find it interesting that you could replace "55" with "90+" and "Amazon blue collar workers" with "Lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street" and get probably the same statistics. Maybe even true for some spaces in tech/entrepreneurship.

Is this an Amazon problem, or a modern world problem?

That's fair from their perspective. Frustrating from a competitive standpoint: the most common reason for a user's "Why wouldn't I just use Facebook for that [instead of some new product]?" seems to be that all their data / friend graph is already on FB.

Does anyone know of any kind of community effort to democratize social data? e.g. ideal product: API-ified dashboard where I can view all my FB friends, IG followers, Twitter followers as well as every single piece of content (tweets, photos, etc) that I have permission to view on each respective platform. Standardized in a public format, live updated, and consumable by other apps (if permitted by those apps' users).

Super technically challenging (given that much of this data would be inaccessible without well-maintained brittle web scraping bots), but seems technically possible.

But I guess such an effort could run into the same scrutiny as the reasons IG shut down these endpoints... :\