cseleborg

Joined 6 years ago

Karma
448
Submissions
163
Member since
May 13
Based in Berlin, Germany. Long-time HN reader. Former developer, mostly in the music tech industry, nowadays I work on business model strategy and innovation still in that sector [1]. Former (part-time) business owner [2]. I have a (self-programmed) blog at [3].

[1] https://www.ableton.com

[2] http://carlseleborg.com/goodbye-das-cask

[3] http://carlseleborg.com

Reach me at my first name dot my last name at something that sounds like 'email.com' but with a 'g'.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 18 days ago
Isn't this the entrepreneur-or-freelancer divide? Is the thing you're working on making you money while you sleep (entrepreneur, "startup" is appropriate) or do you only get paid when you work (freelancer, "self-employed" is appropriate).

Not saying this distinction is useful, but at least it's a common way of talking about the various forms of "being your own boss".

Comment · 22 days ago
What a charming new career path! And you make an interesting point about signaling attention to detail giving a guarantee of sorts that the things that matter are covered as a matter of course.

Reminds me of a friend who would go straight to the restrooms for a quick visual inspection upon entering a restaurant: if those aren't clean, there's no reason to think the kitchen is.

Comment · 22 days ago
Yes, I think so too. Just like there is a demand for handmade objects like vases, cooking knives and beverages, which was the norm before the industrial revolution and has now become a thing of intrinsic value, provides they are of higher quality than their factory-made counterparts (I have a background in the spirits industry, where "small batch" and "handmade" have often been used to justify premium prices despite clearly lower quality. I've become a little more discerning since when I see those labels anywhere and don't take quality for granted).
Comment · 22 days ago
Your article matches my own intuition, and there's a case to be made for adjusting our architectural patterns to better compartmentalize those parts of the app we can let an agent go nuts on. For example, could we leave all of the UI to the agent? Or things like the MCP Server implementation of the app? I'm not quite sure where to draw the line yet. I'm quite comfortable leaving unit tests to the agent by now, but if it's user visible behavior, I still find the agent's work to be off somehow. Ymmv, I guess.
Comment · 24 days ago
I guess we'll only be able to verify this 10-15 years after coding agents arrived. Personally, I think there will always be a market for apps created with care and great attention to detail.
Comment · 1 month ago
> they are very strongly tuned to value code that has no errors which can be picked up by linters or similar, while humans work the opposite way

This is a really valuable insight! It resonates well with my own experience revewing AI-authored code: I look hard at interfaces, architecture and performance, and merely glance over code that just "gets the job done", because if it works, I'm not worried about it. Now I can express that dichotomy much more clearly -- thank you!

Comment · 2 months ago
That is my experience as well. I get a (subjective) speedup between 1 and 3 for parts of the code I'd consider critical and where I check the output tightly, and 5-20 for menial work OR for important code that's well isolated into its own module such that its quality doesn't matter because I can have it rewritten easily if it doesn't work as expected.
Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
The copy has AI written all over it. I find it very difficult to take any of it seriously.
Comment · 4 months ago
That's a genuinely grim thought, but not unrealistic either. I'll have to chew on that one, it's interesting.
Comment · 4 months ago
I agree in sentiment, I love knowing that another human made this, either because I fancy I could maybe do something as good as that, or because I just admire the talent, or simply because the lyrics or music touch me somehow.

That said, there are a lot of people who simply enjoy having something playing in the background, it doesn't matter what, and if you're into country music it's great to have 10,000+ hours of country music to play.

If Tidal provides a checkbox so you can choose whether to exclude AI content, I think that would work for both audiences.

Comment · 4 months ago
Maybe if enough AI produces self-report their work as AI, and enough non-AI producers are honest about uploading non-AI work, they'll quickly have the necessary amount of good-enough data to train good classifiers?
Comment · 4 months ago
True, we conducted science, part of which involved gathering and analysing data, to refine those "simple rules", though I'd say they've been pretty stable for a long time.

Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.

Comment · 4 months ago
> You want as much data as you can get about your health

The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided.

1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc.

2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.

Comment · 4 months ago
It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside.

Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.

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