quicklywilliam

“The vast majority of this year's net loss, $72 billion, resulted from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other instruments the company issued to raise funding, the Journal report said.”

Interesting, would love to know the details of this.

There are three kinds of people:

- those who needlessly reduce things to binaries

- those who articulate nuanced positions that tend to confuse and bore people

- those who lose the plot entirely by making self-referential meta-points

By the way, I've built my own system with AI to manage my todos. So even though I probably won't use yours in the sense of paying for your service, you have some ideas and themes in here that are really thoughtful and I could see working into my flow.

I really appreciate you sharing this!

I love that you made this, and that you told your story about why. Clearly a lot of thought went into it, both leading up to and during its construction. Thank you!

Like others, I'm skeptical about the business model. That's not really a knock on you (and I wish you the best of luck), but rather with the whole ecosystem of these kinds of apps. There are three big problems:

- Everyone and their aunt is trying to sell me monthly subscriptions for a few bucks. These add up, both in terms of $ and cognitive overhead (yet another subscription I need to remember to cancel if I stop using it...)

- I don't own this system, I'm just renting it. This is a trade-off I'm less and less willing to make for a whole host of reasons including my ability to vibe code my own thing, open source, enshitification (or, perhaps more likely, you deciding to abandon this project in the future) etc

- All the usual concerns about data security and privacy are heightened right now in this era of super-capable hacking agents and super-creepy AI companies

As a user of things, vibecoding is the most exciting thing about AI. I can make anything I want to use, built exactly as I please. As a maker of things, vibecoding is the most damning thing about AI. Anyone can re-make anything I've made, built exactly as they please.

I found the text to be the best part

personally I think the most valuable part is OP's post about their history with task management, what has worked and how they are using AI.

maybe a thread that is just these types of narratives?

Not only are the models and compute unavailable to the public, they are unavailable to anyone besides the labs, including the government. We better hope the furthermost tip of the jagged frontier stays in purely theoretical mathematics, because if it strays into the physical world then we may find ourselves in a situation where the power of the labs rivals the governments supposedly overseeing them.

Lots of anti-AI takes seem to fall prey to the moralistic fallacy (ie because something shouldn’t be, thinking it isn’t). I’m very skeptical of the claims AI companies make, their motives, and whether their impact will be anything positive. But I am pretty tired of takes like this that are so reflexively skeptical of anything AI that they carelessly dismiss claims about the dangers and real impacts of AI that are happening.

(And to be clear: I’m not talking about being skeptical of fantastic claims about things that have not happened- ie an AI takeover, runaway super-intelligence, etc.)

Best tip in here: when tweaking details like colors and fonts, just ask Claude to make you throwaway picker tools right in the site.

This is totally obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it (probably because of 25 years of thinking about tools in terms of reusable components).

Thanks for writing!

Welp, here’s a way to make sure your content stays out of training sets

Better comparison IMHO is nuclear energy. Lots of potential for good, lots of problems. Managed by an insular, engineer-dominated industry who completely lost touch with and trust from the public. Public got the last word, industry suffered a 40 year ice age.

Ok, but do you really think this would have happened if OpenAI had a goal of never allowing an agent to do something like this? If a company making any extremely volatile explosives failed to take precautions and blew up a factory, shouldn’t we focus on their negligence?

Perhaps we might ALSO decide that this new explosive is so dangerous it needs specialized laws to protect the public, but that would seem premature if all available evidence indicated that the explosion would not have occurred if the company had taken the most basic precautions.

I see it as analogous to companies building fiber in the public ROW during the last big infrastructure bubble. Under the Telecoms Act, these companies had to allow competitors to use their fiber at a fair price.

Similarly, AI companies should be required to allow distillation at a fair price. Fair Use doesn’t make sense as a social contract if it only cuts one way!