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drodio

1,080 karma · joined May 31, 2009

CEO of Chief.bot Previously: Armory (YC W17 + YCG F19) https://www.DROdio.com

YC Badge: 0x6B527757C6bF1633A48F50c6424cB516D1384819

https://LinkedIn.com/in/DROdio https://festival.so/profile/DROdio https://tkmx.odio.dev/user/DROdio

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drodio··on US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash
I drive a 2024 Tesla Model Y and another person in my family drives a 2021 Model Y. Both cars are substantially similar (the 2021 actually has more sensors than the 2024, which is strictly cameras-only).

Both cars are running 12.5 -- and I agree that it's dramatically improved over 12.3.

I really enjoy driving. I've got a #vanlife Sprinter that I'll do 14 hour roadtrips in with my kids. For me, the Tesla's self-driving capability is a "nice to have" -- it sometimes drives like a 16 year old who just got their license (especially around braking. Somehow it's really hard to nail the "soft brake at a stop sign" which seems like it should be be easy. I find that passengers in the car are most uncomfortable when the car brakes like this -- and I'm the most embarrassed because they all look at me like I completely forgot how to do a smooth stop at a stop sign).

Other times, the Tesla's self-driving is magical and nearly flawless -- especially on long highway road trips, like up to Tahoe. Even someone like me who loves doing road trips really appreciates the ability to relax and not have to be driving.

But here's one observation I've had that I don't see quite sufficiently represented in the comments:

The other person in my family with the 2021 Model Y does not like to drive like I do, and they really appreciate that the Tesla is a better driver than they feel themselves to be. And as a passenger in their car, I also really appreciate that when the Tesla is driving, I generally feel much more comfortable in the car. Not always, but often.

There's so much variance in us as humans around driving skills and enjoyment. It's easy to lump us together and say "the car isn't as good as the human." And I know there's conflicting data from Tesla and NHTSA about whether in aggregate, Teslas are safer than human drivers or not.

But what I definitely know from my experience is that the Tesla is already a better driver than many humans are -- especially those that don't enjoy driving. And as @modeless points out, the rate of improvement is now vastly accelerating.

drodio··on How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
DROdio here, CEO of Storytell.ai

Thanks for trying Storytell for coding work, Dan!

When you say it "I don't think it took too much longer to get working code than it would've taken if I just coded up the entire thing by hand with no assistance. I'm going to guess that it took about twice as long, but for all I know it was a comparable amount of time." → I'm actually amazed that it performed as well as it did for native code generation.

We put code generation in the "Use with Caution" bucket as I describe in https://web.storytell.ai/blog/the-intersection-of-ai-curious...

drodio··on Gemini AI
960 comments is a lot! I created a SmartChat™ where you can get a summary (or anything else) of the comments: https://go.storytell.ai/hn-geminiai and here's a summary output example: https://s.drod.io/Jrum2mQK -- hope that's helpful.
drodio··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Yeah agree with all of the above but with one modification: We can spend a lot of time reading through 1800+ comments, and that's time when we're usually trying to just get a question answered like "what does everyone think happened?" etc.

Storytell's vision is to distill signal from noise → giving you a different way to navigate 1800+ comments where you're the one in control of how you spend your time doing it is our objective here.

drodio··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Would love to know what you'd like to see us build to make it even better for you!

You can also get to the "ground truth" data by clicking on the [x] reference foot notes which will open up a 3rd panel with the Story Tiles that we pull from our vector DB to construct the LLM response.

Here's an example of how it works -- I asked for a summary of what happened in the voice of Dr. Seuss: https://s.drod.io/9ZuL6Xx8

drodio··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Cool, we're just getting started so let us know what we could build that would be helpful/valuable for you.

For example:

- We have a Chrome extension at https://go.Storytell.ai/chrome that I used to ingest all the HN comments; you can run that on any HN page to summarize all the comments in real time. (Here's an Adobe PMM talking about how he uses it: https://www.tiktok.com/@storytell.ai/video/72996137210752566... )

- We've also built OpenAI's Assistant API into Storytell to process both structured data like CSVs along-side unstructured data like PDFs: https://www.web.storytell.ai/support/engineering-demos-updat...

drodio··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Thanks for sharing! Privacy in Storytell is permissioned at the content level when you upload content. There are three privacy levels in Storytell:

- "anyone with the link"

- "only my organization" (i.e., people who have registered w/ the same biz email domain)

- "just me"

You can see those SmartChat™ dynamic container tags because I have at least one piece of "anyone with the link" content in each of them.

Our goal is to de-silo content as much as possible -- i.e., as much as the person who's uploading the content wants it to be open vs. closed.

More at https://www.web.storytell.ai/support/smartchat-tm/how-to-man...

drodio··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
1723 comments are a lot to get through. I just made a SmartChat of them for anyone who wants to ask for a summary. Anyone can chat with it here: https://go.storytell.ai/sam-altman-hn-comments-smartchat

I just tried "Write a summary of the content, followed by a list in bullet format of the most interesting points. Bold the bullet points, followed by a 100-character summary of each." Here's the output: https://s.drod.io/DOuPLxwP

Also interesting is "List the top 10 theories of why Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board in table format, with the theory title in the first column and a 100 word summary in the second column." Here's that output: https://s.drod.io/v1unG2vG

Helps to turn markdown mode on to see the list & table.

Hope that helps!

drodio··on Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
Here's the Storytell report summarizing the actual paper: https://app.storytell.ai/mdx/report/8E3KPJBxbGyjfzYVxjqFCT?e...
drodio··on GraphCDN is now Stellate and raised $30M
Good blockchain caching use cases though: https://stellate.co/blog/scaling-hasura-at-rmrk & https://stellate.co/blog/super-fast-hasura-graphql-for-stxnf...

"Given that the Bitcoin blockchain only produces new blocks once about every 10 minutes, Gamma’s data also changes at most every 10 minutes — making it an ideal use case for caching.

Thomas added Gamma’s GraphQL edge cache in front of Gamma’s Hasura GraphQL API, and immediately got an overall cache hit rate of 87%, which corresponds directly to a decrease in traffic to their Hasura instance.

Even better, their two most highly requested queries are sitting at a 97% and 92% cache hit rate, respectively"

drodio··on Starlink for RVs
I’ll be running Starlink off an Inergy solar generator at the Placerville adventure expo on June 3rd if anyone wants to see it in action. http://go.drod.io/InergyVanlife
drodio··on I Built a Shed (2020)
Replace “beach in Costa Rica” with any remote (or not) global location of your choice, which is the point.

We’re 1 year away from a low latency, gigabit speed ”shedquarters” workspace being available anywhere in the world for under $10k.

drodio··on I Built a Shed (2020)
The longer original shed writeup is here: https://drodio.com/creating-your-own-remote-workspace-for-un...
drodio··on I Built a Shed (2020)
San Mateo: under 120 sq ft; no electrical.
drodio··on I Built a Shed (2020)
I’m using Ruckus setup which is bulletproof inside the house but wasn’t consistent in the shed, so yes, worth it
drodio··on I Built a Shed (2020)
I’m such a fan of this. Nicely done! I opted for a $3k Costco shed and went off grid with it even though it’s in my back yard: https://drodio.com/going-all-in-on-an-off-grid-workspace/

Off grid = No need for a permit but more importantly, a proof of concept that with starlink, this small office “shedquarters” could be placed anywhere in the world — say a beach in Costa Rica for example!

drodio··on Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
For our Founder community, we went from Slack, to Discord, to Circle: https://www.founderculture.net/c/new-noteworthy/our-communit...
drodio··on Gitlab from YC to IPO
Honored to have you as an investor, jedberg!

And I’d modify one thing you said: I believe the #1 most important skill for a startup CEO to master is storytelling —- which is critical for selling, fundraising and recruiting. https://www.founderculture.net/c/new-noteworthy/the-1-must-m...

drodio··on Is Y Combinator worth it?
I sold my last company https://drodio.com/socialize-was-acquired-by-sharethis-heres... and Armory was my 4th startup. I also probably don’t qualify as “young” having been doing startups since 2000.

I found YC to be extremely valuable for all the reasons I shared.

A side story: After I sold my last company in 2013, I met a guy (who worked at the acquiring company) that had big startup ambitions. We were on a bike ride one day (probably around 2015) and I told him I was going to apply to YC the following year to do a startup. He scoffed, and said the same things as you above — “YC is for young founders w/o experience.” He said he, too, was going to do a startup, but not apply to YC.

Fast forward five years. Armory is growing very fast. My buddy is unemployed after spending $350k of his own money attempting his startup.

Was YC the difference? Impossible to say. But I know my story is true, and I’m thankful for the intense focus YC provided — even for a startup veteran like me, with a successful exit, who didn’t necessarily think he needed it.

drodio··on Is Y Combinator worth it?
Yep.
drodio··on Is Y Combinator worth it?
What’s it called? I’ll recommend you, if you previously built a $100MM company. Email me or DM me on Twitter.
drodio··on Is Y Combinator worth it?
I’m a 4th time founder (but first through YC) and also found it to be very valuable.

We spent too much time coding behind closed doors in previous startups.

drodio··on Is Y Combinator worth it?
Tell me what this means: `I’ve tried a few times to start. Still looking for my pit chief.`

Specifically what’s kept you from starting?

There’s a whole community of people who can help you. Start by starting.

In case it’s helpful; some resources: http://go.drod.io/startups

drodio··on Continuous Integration with Armory (YC W17)
Continuous Integration with Armory (W17) using Jenkins and HashiCorp Terraform with Spinnaker on Amazon EKS
drodio··on Releasing software to the fleet far too quickly broke stuff
We're Armory (YC W17) and we bring Spinnaker into complex enterprise environments. Happy to answer any ?s about it. Or you can learn more at https://www.armory.io/learn/what-is-spinnaker/ and docs at http://docs.armory.io/
drodio··on Tools you’d miss if you left a company
Armory (W17) can help with spinnaker. We offer a managed version for exactly this reason. Probably still way too heavy for an eight person engineering org but helpful for larger companies.
drodio··on The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read
@ianmiell awesome post. Part of the issue: The word “culture” does not fully describe the intentional “Org OS” choices that need to be made to optimize how people can better work in a knowledge economy. https://drodio.com/creating-an-open-source-culture/
drodio··on Gitlab ‘rethinking’ third-party telemetry
Agree re: HiPPO problem: https://drodio.com/counteracting-the-cultural-hippo-problem-...
drodio··on The Secret to getting really good press
Aah the great "good engineers don't need marketers" debate. I guess the only point I can really make is, what if you had someone proactively reaching out to others that didn't write about you, but would have if they'd heard about it, since SproutRobot is so awesome? By your train of logic, then, you could've gotten 100x the return on a marketer's efforts, and their job would've been an easy one because they wouldn't have to do any convincing.