sickcodebruh

Media, arts, film, and America: things that are not monolithic and cannot be evaluated with blanket statements.

A side-effect of the democratization of content creation and the explosion of ways to consume content is that there’s more low-quality things to consume. Low-quality content will always be produced in greater abundance than high-quality so there’s more garbage to dig through, but there are still gems out there.

Personally, after years of infrequent movie attendance, this is the first month that I can remember in my adult life that my wife and I saw two movies in the theater and given the opportunity there’s a third we’d still like to see!

This misses the point about complaints of AI slop. It’s not about “worse”, it’s about “distracting”. It’s about AI fingerprints overwhelming the consumer. It’s not too different from hiring a freelancer who does a blatant stylistic ripoff of a popular artist in an unflattering way: the consumer of the work sees the ripoff first, focuses on the ripoff, is unable to appreciate the message being delivered. AI slop is overwhelming and distracting to the consumer in that it communicates messages of laziness, disinterest, disregard for the underlying message. Whether this is true or not in every case, we’ve seen enough cases where we have to start by considering it. It’s the vehicle for scams and spam. It’s like sending an email that starts with “FIVE TRICKS TO HAVE BETTER SKIN” or any other meme spam line.

A human freelancer might do work that is technically worse. Worse can be distracting in ways that are, well… worse. But it’s different, it doesn’t tap into a collective cultural understanding of “AI slop.” It may communicate even more poorly, but it’s not the same problem.

My wife and I met on original okcupid. Not much to say other than the system worked! It’s sad to hear they become tinder-y but I guess it’s hard to compete with the immediacy and dopamine prospects of swiping.

When we consider:

* LLM usage is new for the world

* Models are evolving quickly with high worldwide competition

* Hardware is evolving despite RAM shortages

Is investing a huge sum of money in equipment for local inference a wise use of money? Or are M5 Ultra and equivalently priced local inference hardware future-proof enough to be worth it relative to how the market is evolving? Maybe it’s all a question of what you’d spend otherwise on serverless or dedicated GPU spend…

Composer 2.5 is phenomenal for so many tasks!

Clerky is great. I used it a few years ago and not only was the web product as advertised, they were quick to answer questions and give advice where they could for years after. I hope they keep doing well within Stripe.

> Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

> The founding moment was not a new nation, but a Liberty-conceived proposition: all men are equal.

Wasn’t that a different level of challenge? It was easy to call out the problems with it and recognize gaps to close. With Seedance 2.5, I’m not sure how I’d describe it other than “looking like AI video and all AI video is inherently off-putting”. People smarter than me are working on this but I’d be surprised if it ever actually became tolerable to look at it.

The sample video looks incredible and the ability to keep details consistent for so long is impressive but it _still_ looks screams of AI in every single shot. I can’t put my finger on why, something about the way the rooms are put together, the expressions of the faces, the movements… It’s very unsettling.

It is clearly not effectively communicated if the tool used to write it stamps its signature in such a way that it distracts from the great work they’re doing.

Crazy fast but the the way all header text sizes change briefly flash between values every time you switch tabs would drive me nuts if I was responsible for this.

Varied. Most were exactly the same processes I remembered from interviewing years ago: some startups with no processes and unable to get signals, big public tech companies abusing leetcode, awkward screeners hoping for keywords, and everything in between for the most part. Biggest change is they all asked about AI and wanted to hear that I embrace modern tools and am hungry to find the best ways to work. I am positive that skepticism about AI in November prevented me from getting some interviews; demonstrating fluency (insofar as one can be fluent in these racing waters) and excitement for it in January was key to getting some (but not all) offers.

Around 12 calls if I remember correctly. With the exception of those who ghosted me, every company was very prompt, respectful of my time, and had a reasonable process that went from first to final interview pretty fast. I got a ton of outright rejections to my resume, which I sent around a lot. Getting the first call was the hardest part. YC job board ultimately led to finding my new role.

The company I went with had the best, warmest process that reflected how they like to work and was built to find people who had overlapping priorities. Thinking back, I think that most companies either deliberately or inadvertently wind up with processes that sync up with how they are organized internally and what kind of people they hope to hire.

Obsidian is my favorite new tool. I started a new job last week and decided to spin it up on day one to help me onboard and learn their system. It’s been wildly successful, the missing piece I needed to really turn Claude Code into the learning and documentation tool I dreamed about.