christiangenco

I did a similar experiment with my sister a few years ago and got nearly identical results.

We'd gotten into a discussion about how neither of us believe the explanation that astrology gives for how it works (that the position of the planets at the time of your birth influence your personality) but my sister thought a person's star sign might be a proxy for being born in a particular season which could reasonably affect someone's personality (ex: perhaps babies born in the winter share personality traits distinct from babies born in the summer).

She also thought that given a list of people and descriptions of personality traits of star signs she could match them with better-than-chance accuracy.

We made a list of ~10 people that she knew personally. I looked up their star signs and found a description of all 12 signs from an authoritative-looking astrology site. For each of the 10 people I gave her a choice of their actual star sign and two randomly picked star signs (determined and shuffled by an RNG). Random guessing would predict she'd have a 1/3rd chance of getting any individual person correct. She predicted she'd get ~7/10 correct.

She got exactly 3/10.

LV is financially interested in preventing anything that might cheapen the luxury LV brand.

The existence of non-luxury wallets made of leather stamped with the LV logos seems to be perceived by LV as cheapening the LV brand.

The repurposed leather from the old LV bags has the LV logo on it.

Congrats on launching! Most people who have an idea for a project like this never build it. Most people who build their projects never launch them. You're doing great!

Something that rattled me several times when releasing my own projects like this is that once I released my thing I'd expect people to start using it. Most of the time, after I built things nobody cared. I felt really discouraged and would try working on something else to see if people might start using the new thing, but the same thing would happen.

What I've come to realize is that building things is its own skillset distinct from the skill of figuring out what needs to be built which is distinct from the skill of telling people about it. I wasn't (and still am not great) at the last two, but I've been working towards getting better at it by practicing things like:

- talking to customers like a researcher (ie: without asking leading questions like "do you like it?"). Deploy Empathy and The Mom Test were great resources for this.

- figuring out where potential customers hang out online, what their problems are, and how they talk about them. 30x500 was a great resource for me here.

- learning an explore/exploit system for marketing to figure out how to build machines that take in a dollar and spit out more than a dollar. Traction by Gabriel Weinberg is the best resource I've found here so far.

For a good overview of the whole system of building profitable SaaS businesses I've recently really enjoyed The SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling.

> We’ve also added a camera, but… in our own way. Taking inspiration from our favorite point-and-shoot film cameras, it has a dedicated two-step shutter button, with center focus and a fixed focal length.

I'm most curious about this feature. It sounds like there's no preview of your photo? How do you get the pictures off the phone? Is the quality any good?

I love the ideals of this this company ("stop using your phone as a way to scratch every tiny itch of boredom and frustration") but I feel like I can get there with any ol' phone and an hour of deleting all the apps I don't actually want to be using. So much work has been put into modern smart phone cameras that it'd be undesirable for me to give that up.

Also, regular smartphones have a long tail of really useful edge cases: AirBnB checkin instructions, boarding pass QR codes, unlocking scooters, paying for parking, etc.

Yup. I was just playing around with this in Javascript yesterday and with ChatGPT's help it was surprisingly simple to go from text => embedding (via. `openai.embeddings.create`) and then to compare the embedding similarity with the cosine distance (which ChatGPT wrote for me): https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/3e23925885e3127f2c177...

Seems like the next standard feature in every app is going to be natural language search powered by embeddings.

...how did you highlight a specific sentence like that?

geocod.io is a hosted way of geocoding run by good friends of mine. It looks like they charge $0.50 per thousand lookups.

I'm pretty sure none of my terrestrial drones have lasted more than a few dozen flights—72 across the solar system is impressive engineering!

I've had good experiences on X and unpleasant ones on Bluesky ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's me! I became more interested in the topic after the Bluesky question.

For two excellent books on the topic of how the woke ideology corrodes societies (academia in particular) check out "What's Our Problem?" by Tim Urban and "The Coddling of the American Mind" by by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

ERVs are crucial for keeping CO2 and VOCs low. You can install one in a window! https://gen.co/air

My wife and I own a single family home, a gas-powered car (Toyota Rav4), and an electric car (a standard range Tesla model 3). The electric car is much more convenient for us for city driving and the gas-powered car is much more convenient for road trips.

Refuelling the Rav4 is an errand that takes time, planning, and mental energy. For my wife it's also a low-level danger: women find gas stations spooky, apparently.

Refuelling the Tesla is automatic and effortless. After you park at home, if the charge is <40% then plug it in. The next time you need to drive somewhere it will be full. It took me an afternoon hanging out with my electrician cousin and about $400 in parts from Amazon to build our own at-home electric refuelling station.

Road trips with the Tesla, however, are currently impractical: we end up adding another ~30% to the drive time. With only a ~220 mile range the Tesla needs to stop about every 150 miles for 40 minutes which is brutal. Range anxiety also becomes a much bigger factor driving through more rural areas and your route choices weigh supercharger locations above everything else.

We've got used to the self driving convenience of the Tesla but the Comma[1] on our Rav4 is just about as good for highway driving.

1. https://comma.ai/

If the average interest rate is 250% then 70% of them could default and I'd still make money.

This is fascinating and the interest rates are nuts. The current top post is asking for $400 with plans to repay a total of $475 by the 25th which ChatGPT says is a 526% interest rate.

What’s the deal here? Are most borrowers scams? Is there no better option for the financially vulnerable? I’ll try to convince my wife it’s worth an experiment.

I really wanna see something like this in VR. I’ve got the sense to un-flatten 3D objects shown on a 2D screen and I have an inkling that if you showed me a 4D object in simulated 3D space I just might be able to understand it.

Something like this is most certainly going to become the mainstream interface for computing. I think the most likely thing that will hit mass market adoption will look much more like the voice interface in Her than a chat app. I couldn't imagine my mom getting much utility out of an app like this but if the AI is good enough I could certainly see her chatting with her phone as if it was a person.

Oh this is such a cool idea! It looks like there are several episodes by 99pi about my area that I haven’t listened to yet.

I’m unable to successfully navigate the interface on mobile though so I’ll have to try when I’m back to my computer tomorrow. Because I only ever listen to podcasts on my phone it would be nice to have a better mobile interface.

Don’t forget:

- inability to milk a cow

- inability to chisel messages on a stone tablet

- inability to navigate the seas using only the stars

- inability to light a lantern without spilling the oil

- inability to decipher a message sent via smoke signals

- inability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning sundial

- inability to sharpen a quill

> Failed with error code 1002, see logs for more info

Checkmate, biotics.

The game of any platform is to attract and keep more attention on the platform.

More advanced platforms will be better at this than less developed platforms.

Content that causes users to leave your platform is, from the perspective of the platform, worse content than content that keeps users engaged in your platform.

Articles on X don't go viral as much as they used to on Twitter? That certainly makes conceptual sense because consuming an article involves leaving the platform. If you'd like that same content to perform better on X then "tailor your messaging to the medium" by breaking up the ideas from the article into a series of tweets.

That's the game. If you don't like it then play a different game.

`(11.18-10.96)/11.18=0.0196779964`

That checks out. A 20% discount would've been `11.18-0.2*11.18=8.944`.

> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins...[it's] the definition of too complicated for a computer.

Isn't that sentiment how people used to think about computers playing Go, writing an essay, beating humans at Jeopardy, or transcribing spoken language? Betting on the side of "computers will never be able to X" seems like a generally bad bet.

> We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents.

The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.

I stumbled on this system several years ago and found it useful as inspiration for organizing my external storage.

My top level categories are `inbox` (stuff that isn't sorted yet), `Media` (stuff that other people made), and `Vault` (stuff that I made).

`Media` contains `Audiobooks`, `Books`, `Courses`, `Films`, `TV`, `Music`, and `Broadway.

`Vault` contains `Backups`, `Projects`, `Audio`, Video`, and `Photos`.

Anything one layer deeper is either a file of the type described by the parent folder name or a folder containing related files (ex: `Video/2023-06-12 makers.dev 119` is a folder containing the raw recordings and processed end video and audio for my podcast).

I've got about 10TB and tens of millions of files organized in this system. It works better than anything else I've tried.

Sounds like you’ve built a valuable service that large companies are using in production! Why not start charging for it?

If I were trying to cause the most damage with AI I'd make something akin to the 2016 Russian election interference machine:

> The Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in Saint Petersburg, Russia and described as a troll farm, created thousands of social media accounts that purported to be Americans supporting radical political groups and planned or promoted events in support of Trump and against Clinton. They reached millions of social media users between 2013 and 2017. Fabricated articles and disinformation were spread from Russian government-controlled media, and promoted on social media.[1]

With an LLM and a few thousand dollars I imagine you could replicate what previously took the resources of a country to execute. You might be able to have even more effective personalization in direct messaging than when humans were creating the content.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

This is amazing! I just played through a text adventure game that probably would've taken a skilled human a week to make, not including the artwork. Incredible!

I'm having trouble using my own URL with it. I'm trying to generate a text adventure from a blog post I wrote about air quality (christian.gen.co/air) but `https://infinityarcade.com/https://christian.gen.co/air` redirects to `https://infinityarcade.com/generate?prompt_text=https%3A%2F%...` and then infinitely hangs.

I don't think you need a commercial organization registered to get a number on Twilio.

I hooked up an old Twilio number I bought a while ago to ChatGPT for an ADHD encouragement bot last week: https://attaboy.ai

Now I can message it via. WhatsApp or Telegram and it even remembers chat history (by storing the last ~20 messages in Firebase).