Against Usefulness
motivenotes.ai
motivenotes.ai
We came so damn close, and it's been ~10 years. Maybe this gets people's imaginations going again. Get us ready to take that, er, magic leap forward.
So instead of overlaying and augmenting the room the user already has mapped to functions i propose first extending the room which can be done via 2 projectors and passive 3D more easily and will offload all spatial senses to a new area (z all far aquarium like) that a user can see as something added and new and not something breaking his current status quo.
A large second virtual room on the wall to work with is around 1000€ for 2 projectors, silver screen and some lenses. Growing new neurons has an "aha" effect on the user while forcing him to rewrite them will leave them with pain and force a defensive reflex - you don't want that while proposing new concepts!
If you like overlaying stuff a passive 3DTV somewhere in the room or on your desk can do a floating object easily for under 300€ (z all near) while not messing with more than this small experimental area of the room. Black backgrounds work great.
This allows the user to smoothly transition from his used-to workflow to a more integrated one all while just wearing 10g set of glasses - while we wait for affordable AR glasses.
Skipping this part breaks the users known working toolset - you can do so maybe (if ever) AFTER he gets comfortable with the new toolset. Better analogy: Imagine being a teacher and i propose a camera that will turn what you write on the whiteboard into an animated explanation (graph visualization of your formula). Now your whiteboard still works! Nothing is broken. Maybe for stuff you already now the extension works just fine and your students see the graph immediately on ANOTHER screen area. That's great and added value. Because even if you didn't learn some syntax your whiteboard will always work as before and you can just draw the graph yourself or turn the second screen off then go on with your life and continue the lesson.
Now maybe if you got comfortable with that you will allow the second area screen on the whiteboard itself next to your drawn formulas (or typehinting them even;) ). But not during learning how it works.
> Everyone is building the same thing, funded by the same people, using the same words. Where are the independent thinkers?
> [JP] said a name: Folk Computer. In New York.
Who are ... building the same thing as Bret. So where are these independent thinkers?
Been building about 20 interconnected pieces of a new software stack designed to help humanity.
Most VCs wouldn’t fund it.
Most investors wouldn’t understand it.
They prefer small apps. YC’s startups used to be called “feature, not a startup”.
Now with AI it has become easier — the work I and my small team that I’ve been paying for 10 years has been greatly accelerated.
But still. Most people on HN will just deride it. Few would look deeply. Here, I will share a link:
As the 7 parts already hint there's a limit to what people can comprehend in any amount of time so while its what you do and know and fills your millers number this is not the same for others.
Trying to get customers, any customers, will teach you the customer has obligations to fulfill and he's looking for a way to go from his A to his imagined B. Now you maybe can offer some B' that has parts of your solution, but that can only be 1 or 2 parts of your stack at maximum and bend his imagined B at a very tiny amount or he will not accept it.
Because the rest of his millers number (5 or whatever intellect he shows, maybe more) is already filled with family, his boss, bottom line finances and time. Also there's always pain when you change some thinking - even if your solution is better. Most people will look for a quick fix then move on to their next immediate problem.
So maybe with some luck after handing over 3 or 4 B' to them that all interconnect you can propose a greenfield solution like yours that's now just 2 steps away.
But going there is transition and not greenfield - the customer has a somewhat working system already and completely replacing this will not make him happy.
Maybe he has a working Active Directory? Or just an apple time capsule whatever? Gmail business? Can you transition from that for the same price and pain your competitors offer as an "immediate" solution?
I do think the particular vision has merit. But I have yet to see it demonstrated on real-world work. Even Bret’s own demos were limited and lackluster. Show me how to use this to manage some typical administrative tasks. Or create a database. Or routing on a map.
She writes as a VC (I think?) where her job is to allocate capital for shorter-term "useful" (read: profitable) outcomes.
Now if something is profitable is a whole different thing.
Almost every endeavour has non-zero potential future utility - even as a counterexample or lesson to learn from. I think that definition of "useful" is probably too broad to make an argument against, and so not a useful definition.
And you have spotted the early stage opposrtunity most VCs fail to fund: paradigm shifting work often looks like infrastructure, very broad and general-purpose. It can eventually lead to trillions of dollars in wealth creation (the Web, Linux, smart contracts, etc) but the first movers may capture 5% of the ecosystem’s value. For a VC, that’s a bigger bet that can change the world a lot more than, say, the next short term memecoin sold to the greater fool for 50x or hype app dumped on the market for 100x.
Paradigm work has always run on patrons. A new paradigm is useless at the beginning, by definition, so markets have nothing to price. The first personal computers were toys. So was the early internet. The people who fund this stage are buying a position in the future before anyone can price it.
Well, some of us are drawn to this world-changing work (Vint Cerf who’s retiring this week, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, Vitalik Buterin, Jimmy Wales, Igor Sysoev etc etc) and it runs most of the Internet. But, will it get funded?
Here’s mine:
Against "only immediate/certain usefulness".
Probably with the idea that if it's radical enough & you give it time, something might come out @ some point.
Yeah, you just need a complicated setup of machinery that observes the room and multiple conventions on content tagging, etc.
There’s a tactile element to understanding your assets, supply lines, air/sea/land bridges, time to rendezvous, enemy dispositions, etc that could benefit from a richer visual canvas.
How to take that physical state, encode it so it can be replayed/evolved/disseminated into taskings.
At the moment it’s all spreadsheets, white boards and staff officers.
Thinking cap on - thanks for the post!
I used to have hacker news web pages that I scribbled upon with a stylus.
Web pages should feel more like paper.
But I'm currently not in a position to work on something like this because I have a pay check to earn. The pay checks that come out of university aren't good enough.
There was an era of giant books of schematics. It sucked.
With that you can just draw your idea in a 2D plane and if you hit the space available wall change to another 2D plane drag stuff around differently but this will not mess with the original 2D plane. When you want to discuss with other POVs rotate to a shared angle.
I was adjacent to a BigTech project working on a variant of this about 15 years ago - had the projector and camera both embedded in a smart lightbulb. Unfortunately never saw the light of day
It’s nice to see gatekeepers vanish to irrelevance.