I own a bookstore and about 90% of back office work is automated by software and AI. Probably most fulfilling project I've worked on in the past few years after taking a long break from tech.
332 karma · joined January 1, 2020
Sad to hear she passed away recently this month.
Highly recommend Bakto's natural flavors.
Then a few months later, another nontechnical CEO did the same thing, after moving our conversation from SMS into email where it was very clear he was using AI.
These are CEOs who have raised $1M+ pre-seed.
I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.
After my interview, I immediately knew why. The team was so junior they didn't know how to evaluate senior talent. They didn't know what they wanted. I've arguably interviewed more candidates than the person interviewing me.
Last I checked, they still haven't filled that role.
The strong hires I've given all came from underrated candidates who didn't come from trendy backgrounds. Still think Dan Luu's advice holds up even more at early stage startups. https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/
In the best cases, they were able to reach funding or paying users. Architecture debt is one of the worst kinds of tech debt, so if you set it up right, it’s really hard to mess up.
In the worst case, after my contract ended, the CEO fired the whole US engineering team and replaced them with offshore resources. This was an example of messing up despite the architectural and procedural safeguards we built.
Having the AI ask me questions and think about the PRD/spec ultimately made me a better system designer.
If you have control over the recommendation system, you could deliberately feed it contrarian and diverse sources. Or you could choose to be very constrained. Back in RSS days, if you were lazy about it, your taste/knowledge was dependent on other people's curation and biases.
Progress happens through trends anyway. Like in 2010s, there was just a lot of Rails content. Same with flat design. It wasn't really group think, it just seemed to happen out of collective focus and necessity. Everyone else was talking/doing this so if you wanted to be a participant, you have to speak the language.
My original principle when I was using Google Reader was I didn't really know enough to have strong opinions on tech or design, so I'll follow people who seem to have strong opinions. Over time I started to understand what was good design, even if it wasn't something I liked. The rate of taste development was also faster for visual design because you could just quickly scan through an image, vs with code/writing you'd have to read it.
I did something interesting with my Last.fm data once. I've been tracking my music since 2009. Instead of getting recommendations based on my preferences, I could generate a list of artists that had no or little overlap with my current library. It was pure exploration vs exploitation music recommendation. The problem was once your tastes get diverse enough, it's hard to avoid overlaps.
Recently, I was inspired to do this on my entire browsing history, after reading https://labs.rs/en/browsing-histories/ I also did the same from ChatGPT/Claude conversation history. The most terrifying thing I did was having an LLM look at my Reddit comment history.
The challenges are primarily with having a context window large enough and tracking context from various data sources. One approach I am exploring is using a knowledge graph to keep track of a user's profile. You're able to compress behavioral patterns into queryable structures, though the graph construction itself becomes a computational challenge. Recently most of the AI startups I've worked with have just boiled down to "give an LLM access to a vector DB and knowledge graph constructed from a bunch of text documents". The text docs could be invoices, legal docs, tax docs, daily reports, meeting transcripts, code.
I'm hoping we see an AI personal content recommendation or profiling system pop up. The economic incentives are inverted from big tech's model. Instead of optimizing for engagement and ad revenue, these systems are optimized for user utility. During the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated tech and design content and it helped me really develop taste and knowledge in these areas. It also helped me connect with cool, interesting people.
There's an app I like https://www.dimensional.me/ but the MBTI and personality testing approach could be more rigorous. Instead of personality testing, imagine if you could feed a system everything you consume, write, and do on digital devices, and construct a knowledge graph about yourself, constantly updating.
Once I am in the clear, I’d be happy to open source the process of acquiring a SMB and running it. I basically become a business broker myself for this one deal, thanks to the broker I worked with.
> The five spiritual faculties are said to be like a cart with four wheels and a driver. If any of the four wheels is too small, wobbly, or not in balance with the others, then the going on the spiritual road will be rough. The four wheels symbolize faith, wisdom, energy, and concentration. If the driver is not paying attention there will also be problems. The driver symbolizes mindfulness. [See SN 48.18, also Visuddhimagga, IV, 45.2.]
> The five spiritual faculties have also been presented in another order that can be useful: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. In this order, they apply to each of the three trainings, the first of which, as discussed earlier, is morality. We have faith that training in morality is a good idea and that we can do it, so we exert energy to live up to a standard of clear and skillful living. We realize that we must pay attention to our thoughts, words, and deeds in order to do this, so we try to be mindful of them. We realize that we often fail to pay attention, so we try to increase our ability to concentrate on how we live our life. In this way, through experience, we become wiser in a relative sense, learning how to live a good and useful life. Seeing our skill improve and the benefits it has for our life, we generate more faith, and so on.
https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-i-the-fund...
I let my manager know that there may be times where I have sleep issues. Sometimes it lines up with a 2-week sprint cycle. When I meditated seriously, it was +/- 4 hours. Now it's more like +/- 2 hours. So if I normally wake up at 9am, sometimes I wake up at 7am, other times at 11am. I actively search for companies that are flexible with core hours, and have a later standup (>11am).
This article comes close to describing how I experience "Attention Deconcentration" http://deconcentration-of-attention.com/deconcentration-soft...
Here's a video of it captured live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t8KvdMtT4A
When I first reached stream entry, or the first stage of awakening, a slightly less filtered state, it felt like a massive relief and dropped a huge weight out of my body. My day to day is filled with far less suffering and I would rather die than return to how I was before.
On the other hand, simple guided meditation by a licensed therapist, or the many apps out there are great introductions to the vast majority of people, without the risks that come with insight practice. It's especially important to be cognizant of when you get into "insight territory", which a good teacher should be equipped to deal with safely. The sad part is some Goenka retreats completely neglect this concern for safety.