Enormously useful timesaver
82 karma · joined June 21, 2008
When I saw the DaVinci API in July 2022 I was floored - I realized you'd never have to write a college essay by hand again Whenever it was Stability's Stable Diffusion appeared - that was ridiculous too When I saw Code Interpreter for the first time I was obsessed, I said yo codegen is the path to AGI When I took a crack at solving ARC-AGI 2 using SOTA methods my mind truly opened to the fact that LLMs can reason, albeit through brutal enumeration and discovery When I encountered Claude Code and Codex as well
Basically ... I've been drinking the kool aid the whole time. It has almost always tasted great. Many times I've retreated back into "oh it's just a technology it has limits" and also sometimes I've lost myself to a touch of "AI psychosis". But overall I have a great relationship with it. It's nowhere nearly as addicting as e.g. internet porn was when I was a teenager. And one gig I had at a Fortune 10 enterprise, our small team of 5 shipped 12 apps in 15 months in an enterprise where typically they ship 1 app and 1 feature per year. This was 2025 ... so clearly we realized we were getting ~10x productivity thanks to Gen AI koding.
Bananas.
FTR I also do not question that we will possibly reach fairly general and yet poorly controllable intelligence with multi agent systems in a few more iterations. I give that a 30% chance of seeing a genuine flash of that at some point in 2027. And 80% in 2028.
I'm not yet afraid of being left behind this is one happy Lobster.
I find the technique mind-blowing efficient and efficacious. It has transformed my productivity completely. YMMV but take a look!
Excited to hear how you guys are getting your coding agents to do bigger and bigger tasks autonomously.
IMO all digital content is going to have to be signed so the provenance trail can be crawled by an AI across devices.
https://aditya-advani.medium.com/how-to-defeat-fake-news-wit...
Recommended plan 1. Find a new-ish laptop immediately. You can get a decent used one for $1K on backmarket.com. Invest in an ergonomic mouse and an iPad for 2nd monitor as well. 2. Do only high value tech work that pays or you learn something that will pay. Be hungry and stay homeless but do not work as an Uber driver it's a poverty trap by design. 3. Find a host family, welcoming community or marry up. You can't beat depression or get back on your feet alone. One suggestion is: go to SLC and get involved in Hacker and / or rock climbing communities.
Def get rid of the desktop computer. You don't have a desk and are unlikely to for long time.
Again my $0.02 please it's hard but you're on the right track IMO
Great starter template
Generates awesome explainers, even when the topic is probably not part of the pre-trained data. They aren't production quality of course, but fairly accurate and great explainers. I liken it as relatable to a whiteboard session.
Looking forward to feedback - especially on how we can make the output better and do LLM evals as well!
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet
Being able to get data joined across sheets is priceless.
I also see that it's not an end-to-end language tutoring solution but a companion you can use to test your real-world language skills. Awesome stuff.
If you're interested in reaching out to real language schools, I run a marketplace for pre-college programs, Language Schools are like 20-30% of our business. Let me know!
Great UX direction, cool idea, congrats on launching! Was fun and easy to play with.
I argue that with Code Interpreter, GPT-4 can indeed reason in lots of cases, although it's more brittle and expensive than it seems to be on the very polished surface level. Working on proving this in lots of cases.
What I meant was that when going out for fundraising in Silicon Valley your financial model is often compared to that of a B2B SaaS as they are both asset-light web software companies. Having studied those, I now realize why investors are so gung ho on B2B SaaS. The relative predictability of success, high profit margins, stickiness and network effects are quite simply hard to beat.
Now we're more looking into nondilutive funding and our lines of credit are burgeoning so it's possible VC won't be needed altogether. Not ready to close the door yet though, especially to the most selective programs and institutions both now and down the line. If we got into YC we would definitely accept, or even some other selective program like NFX FAST we would definitely consider very seriously.
About Best Parents
1. It sells the world - we have customers from over 30 countries now
2. Demand is inelastic - families are always going to seek out programs for their kids abroad / away from home
3. Cannot easily be substituted or copied - the suppliers have to trust you, that trust has to be earned over years
4. Minimal labor requirements - our website is automatically translated into 4 languages with AI
5. Enjoys low overhead
6. Does not need big cash outlays
7. Cash billing - we have a 6 month billing cycle, we hold all the cash
8. Relatively free of regulation - also common sense prevails
9. Portable / easily moveable - we live in SF but have spent 3 or 4 months travelling this year
10.Loads of fun intellectually - thinking about how AI can guide teenagers to better and more diverse experiences, teach them and their families how to appreciate and contextualize those experiences, teach suppliers what to offer and how to improve their offerings ... v fulfilling. Feels like the real future of education
11.Leaves me with some free time now, prospectively lots later. Still just our startup's second year in sales, my first year full-time, lots of product to build
12.Income is not limited by personal output
What I was surprised by was how little VCs in general seemed to respect my reasoning. I had not been anticipating that kind of a tepid reaction. There's a lesson I learned here - that the businesses VCs are generally looking for are far from the ones entrepreneurs logically probably want to consider. I believe that after the popping of the crypto bubble the whole ecosystem as it recovers will wend its way back to a more balanced, forward looking place where enriching the lives of children and helping families overcome their generational trauma by joining an international parenting community is seen plainly by many as exactly what it is - world-changing and relevant.
Another thing I did come to realize was just how sweet a business B2B SaaS and Enterprise SaaS really is. Wow. It's a money printing machine, makes marketplaces look relatively paltry even though eBay was "The Perfect Store" like the book @Animats cited. Oh well, at the end of the day the business has to satisfy your intellectual and emotional needs for you (i.e. me) to give it that 150%. And this one's a winner with 20%ish gross margin and really decent basket sizes.