dopamine reward feedback loop. Video scrolling is an insidious form of it because the feedback time is so short that you end up hooked on it for hours, feeling bad afterwards; seriously potent stuff.
It’s insane. And once you’ve got a habit for it it’s so hard to stop. Without thinking about it you end up back on there scrolling slop. I’ve started to look at using the Screen Time feature on iOS, but it’s hard when some apps have a dual function like YouTube I use for music but also has Shorts.
Maybe consider getting a different, dedicated program for music (line Spotify)? Sometimes doing thinks just to work around your brain is the right thing to do.
There's the politics of the corporations and then there's the business of the science behind LLM's, this article feels like the former.
Maybe someone active in the research can comment? I feel like all of these comments are just conjecture/anecdotal and don't really get to the meat of this question of "progress" and the future of LLM's
All my solo projects suffered from all the things you mentioned. Once I found a cofounder for my current project, these problems went away because
1. There’s social altruism activated because you two are constantly doing things not just for yourself, but for the other person.
2. View point diversity. You get way more feedback with another talking head at the same table, helps unblock you more than you think. And this can ignite new insight and therefore new notification energy!
Is there a way to hack this as a solo founder? I think so!
I had a former co founder who I would always bounce ideas off of and even tho he wasn’t directly working on my projects, he would check in with me and kind of act like a rubber duck I could talk to. This could be your friends, partner, or strangers!
Also, time is your best friend, for good or for worse. I think back on projects I started and quit after a year, I would like to think those projects would be successful if I just put more time into it.
While a co-founder can help, it can also ruin everything. As you say, there are other relationships and ways of interacting that can easily fill the same role, ie. advisors, board members, customers, etc. Statistically, I think that co-founder infighting is one of the largest reasons why many startups fail. It's also a fantastic way to ruin friendships.
Having just one other person in the trenches is so helpful. I hadn't thought about the social altruism angle but I think there's a lot of truth to it.
I also agree about time. I think new products follow a model similar to compounding interest. It's very small at the start - sometimes negligible but over time things add up.
Lastly, I think we get desensitized to success. Getting the first user, the first ten, etc. These are not small milestones. They're meaningful.
Lastly lastly, if it's something you want to make money from then focus primarily on user acquisition and secondly on product. Commonly difficult for builders to do but not doing so cements delayed failure.
I think you've just gave an idea to somebody's next startup, and we'll probably see it is being done in half-a-year. In general all that tedious YAML/etc. is ripe for the "autocompletion AI".
"Don't look at your Kubernetes configuration, trust our AI to do it well" sounds like a psyop straight out of GCP or AWS to charge you four times what they need to before telling you "no, you absolutely need that $500 charge for your 1RPS static website, yes yes absolutely."
And for auditing your config and for reviewing your cloud provider's [autogenerated by AI] offers and suggestions will be another AI which will also be able to chat with their customer support AI.
My most productive workflow, is take a stab at what I want first and use gpt/claude to generate boiler plate code. I use the base components from tailwind components and ask Claude/GPT to tailor them to my needs.
Been working great! I proofread almost everything of course but moving really fast and not having to muck around with which tailwind class is really nice.
Try pairing Claude / GPT with Aider if you're not already. Not having to leave my terminal and having changes directly made in the repo ramps up the automation a bit. I turn the auto-commit flag off though, I don't know why that's the default.
Why don’t you open source it and let devs know they can contribute starting today? Devs who don’t use HN can find it on GitHub by searching and you can begin posting call to arms if by posting your vision and goals.
Not sure if it was clear in my OP, but there are only 2 technical founders and I am one of them. We also already have a pathway to paying customers; that was also clear in my OP.
Also, what exactly do you mean by pain and grit? we're already doing that. we're growing and have growing pains hence the point of this post.
Genuine curiosity. What compels a company to write such an extensive handbook about remote work? The company I joined right after covid started was relatively small eng organization ~20 and we're up to 60-70 eng org but the company size is around ~300. There were lots of leadership meetings and communication but that's all we really needed to run a successful remote first company.
- Hiring, they want to show how they work for new hires
- PR, they want to present themselves as experts
- lack of trust, or a culture of micromanagement
A side effect is: making the company less agile and its processes more bloated - now you have to read a 1000 page document before you can do anything.
I also didn’t list transparency, if anything I believe the impact is negative: I’m sure some people can ignore the rules and it’s unclear who and when.
