9,536 karma · joined January 10, 2016
Recently there's been more intricate graves and sometimes tombs, but time by time, people fall back to the original traditions. After all, the big caliphs who ruled empires were buried under two stones.
They gave out discounts but that doesn't magically solve the problem of capacity and led to the service being overloaded instead.
Now you tell some idea of what you want and AI gives you a better thing than what you originally imagined. Then you go into a rabbit hole... simulate productivity, sales, customer, cash flow, materials for the building, make it curvy, make it pop up in 3D, populate it with NPCs, give your NPCs wages and background, write a dialogue with the ghosts of Christmas. It ends up being a game in itself.
It's good fun. It costs me $20 and I can do it and deploy it from my phone.
For everything else, MCP.
It's more that releases have become the new devlog these days. Someone who only talks about an idea and hasn't written a line of code will likely never do the idea. If they're open to reading comments and discuss feedback, it's cool.
But using HN purely as a marketing channel is rather rude.
They're fully dead from what I see. With low code, you'd drag a component onto the screen, click it, look for a field (which may have a different name to the original field), fill that in, and then spend 30 min trying to align it on screen.
With agents, you just tell them what to do. Draw boxes on a piece of paper, take a photo with Claude on your phone, and you'll have a functioning UI.
If you wanted to modify layouts, you can do it straight from the toilet seat on your phone.
The other big feature in low code is maintaining API specs. You'd tell it what the tables are, what to connect to, data objects, and all that. Another thing that AI does better.
Tools like Cursor do something very similar. They claim to be using 2 million tokens or something, but those are cheap tokens which make the code space more searchable.
Assets are harder to measure. Facebook used to say something silly like every user was worth $100. That sounded ridiculous for a completely free app but over a decade later, the company is worth more than that. Revenue is an easier way of measuring assets than profit.
Profit doesn't really matter. It gets taxed. But it's not about dodging taxes; it's because sitting on a pile of money is inefficient. They can hire people. They can buy hardware. They can give discounts to users with high CLTV. They can acquire instead of building. It's healthy to have profit close to $0, if not slightly negative. If revenues fall or costs increase, they can make up for the difference by just firing people or cutting unprofitable projects.
Also when they're raising money, it makes absolutely no sense to be profitable. If they were profitable, why would they raise money? Just use the profits.
What matters after death? What matters before it?
Avoiding death is impractical. The lifehack is to propagate a bit of your life forwards, i.e. children. Make sure they end up with all the advantage you can give them. Many can't do this, so the other trick is to propagate similar cells - family, humanity, earth creatures.
I'm a believer in occasionalism though. The philosophy/theology takes a few years to click, but in the end I think all that matters is patience and perseverance.
Patience for the trials and temptations of life. Perseverance is the struggle. Some call it a journey, but I think the anime Berserk captures it perfectly. To struggle as if you're branded for death and all odds are stacked against you.
If you believe in a judgement day, then these virtues will be rewarded. If you do not, then throwing yourself into whatever gets in your way is a more enjoyable way of living life than being passive. And in engineering terms, if you channel a lot of energy somewhere, something happens.
Some people think aiming at goals is the most important thing you can do. Sam Altman is one of those people. You can spend a lifetime aiming and still miss.
After pitching a price comparison app to the consumer ministry and getting lowballed, I decided I could make more money just making the app and selling ad space to groceries.
A lot of stuff happened. We pivoted to recipes instead of price comparison. We segmented that into low carb recipes, hardcoded it all. 1200 downloads in 24 hours. We found a grocery partner who was selling low carb stuff like flaxseed. 3000 downloads in the 12 hours after that, with 3% of users actually trying to buy something. We didn't actually build a shopping cart yet, it was in the validation space.
I ended up doing this for a year. We got rabid fans. Our users were losing crazy amounts of weight, like 5 kg per week. We moved our users into WhatsApp groups because it was easier than coding a chat in the app. The fans eventually became so damn rabid, like at one point people were recommending eating fish head with slabs of butter to lose weight. They were passing out from ketosis and malnutrition and telling each other that the passing out was part of the process.
They were becoming so rabid that our suppliers didn't want to deal with them. I didn't want that kind of liability. As admin, I'd correct people and get snapped at.
We sold the company to a weight loss pill company. They offered about a little over a year's salary, and after a year of taking $30 monthly salary, me and my partner were happy to let it go. Plus no taxes and I could actually afford a real computer and chair and freelance.
Since our traffic was organic, the acquirer saved money just putting their product in the app. They hired an SEO consultant. Traffic dropped. They pivoted away from the low carb stuff, hired a motivational speaker, dietitian and tried to make it legit. Traffic dropped further. People were losing healthy amounts of weight on eating veggies and exercising, like 1-2 kg/week. Nobody wanted to eat veggies and exercise to only lose 1-2 kg/week, when they could eat flaxseed pizza and steak and lose 5.
From wikipedia: Many Daft Punk songs feature vocals processed with effects and vocoders including Auto-Tune, a Roland SVC-350 and the Digitech Vocalist. Bangalter said: "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune. It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesiser. They said it was taking jobs away from musicians. What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just for replacing the instruments that came before. People are often afraid of things that sound new."
This is a vocaloid break up song: https://youtu.be/9pQR4a5sisE
The first isn't bad by any means. There's a million break up songs and that's one of the best sad ones. Most are just... angry? Blaming? Empowering? They work fine. They sell records. Many have have a billion views.
But the second one, even with the clunky translation, strikes somewhere deeper. It's written by someone who had enough time ruminating on a break up. The ending hits a little harder, because break up songs are about endings.
Both are sincere, but the first feels more formulaic. I'm inclined to think the first one is the soda.
I feel Suno leans towards this group of songwriters and poets who have something to say. Sora doesn't.
There are exceptions though. FUKOUNA GIRL by STOMACH BOOK, for example. AI can't come close to replicating something like this. Not the cover art, not the off-key voices, not the relatable part of the lyrics. I don't believe this is a top #100 song, though it certainly is popular.
Free runs out in two, yes two uses on peak hours, on Claude Sonnet.
The basic paid has 5x the use, which hits the limit at 10 uses. The $100 plan is 5x of this, which is still a limit at 50 uses on Sonnet.
At one point, Cursor would give you the same usage limits as the $200 plan, but now the pricing has changed.
The reason I switch is because something always breaks with these AI providers, Anthropic being a common offender.
TikTok and social media is a strange mix of both, people posting response videos to everything.
Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist. It's free, it's good enough, and it's not grating to hear after a few days of that favorite song.
The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
But I guess the desire to create something that others would consume is also different from the desire to simply create.
A lot of people recommend OpenAI Codex lately, but I feel it's more suited to vibe coding, where you're giving it a very high level idea.
On stuff in the wild, we also very rarely see prompt injections and hacks. Not to say they're not a problem, but somewhere around #6 on the list of issues to be worried about.