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shalmanese

13,002 karma · joined October 8, 2008

shalmanese@gmail.com

I've done so much startup stuff I'm equally bad at all of it.

I currently work coaching Founders globally from a base in Singapore: https://coaching.figuringshitout.com/

I formerly was a 3x Founder and have worked in Engineering, Design, Product & Growth.

I also have a background in Computer Vision (designed a single camera 3D tracking algorithm), Augmented Reality (Designed a AR prototype for FEMA to manage disaster response workers), Tabletop/Touch Computing (Studied how people's collaborative behaviors change when put under time pressure), HCI (Studied it for 4 years), Interaction Design (ditto) and am well read in Psychology (esp. Social Psych), Economics, & other random trivia.

I also cook... a lot.

submissionscomments
shalmanese··on Tesla takes on $30B in credit as it approaches unprofitability
Tesla does not have CarPlay/AA support.
shalmanese··on Why AI Cannot Save an Enterprise That Doesn't Understand Its Data
It would have been much more useful if the authors just shared the prompts.
shalmanese··on Waymo in Singapore
A lot of people get a car when they have kids as taking grab with a car seat can be unwieldy. Also, COE wasn’t always $100K, many people are still on legacy COE when it was $30-$50K
shalmanese··on Remember Hong Kong
We don’t have to rely on polling as the 2019 district elections happened in HK that November and the message was extremely clear that the bulk of the population was pro-protestors and anti-the HK government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_local_elections

> Nearly three million people voted, equivalent to 71 per cent of registered voters, an unprecedented turnout in the electoral history of Hong Kong. The election was widely viewed as a de facto referendum on the concurrent anti-extradition protests.[3]

> All pro-Beijing parties suffered major setbacks and losses, including the flagship pro-Beijing party Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), which received its largest defeat in history, losing 96 seats. Executive Councillor Regina Ip's New People's Party failed to obtain a single seat, and was ousted from all District Councils as a result.[4][5] Dozens of prominent pro-Beijing heavyweights lost their campaigns for re-election, including Junius Ho, a controversial anti-protest figure who had expressed support for the triads behind the mob attack in Yuen Long on 21 July.[4][5]

> In contrast, the pro-democracy camp in conjunction with the localist camp achieved its biggest landslide victory in the history of Hong Kong, gaining absolute majority in votes and electoral seats in all of the 18 District Councils and tripling their seats from around 124 to about 388.

shalmanese··on Maybe we shouldn't be reviewing all this code
But that's the entire point. Pair programming isn't for producing more working code in this session faster. It's that it empirically is the fastest way to erase knowledge gaps because the two of you are working on a shared artifact.
shalmanese··on Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+
> Except OpenRouter sees all your prompts, sends your requests to different providers with pinky promises that they dont use your data, and is therefore a non starter for any company who cares about compliance.

OpenRouter provides a Zero Data Retention option and is SOC 2 Type II compliant which means there's real penalties involved if they don't do what they say.

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/zdr

shalmanese··on Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?
> Probably. But I like reading a lot of articles I'm not the target audience for, because I like learning things.

OK, but the definition of not being the target audience is you bear that burden, not the author. If the author bore that burden, you'd be the target audience!

shalmanese··on I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
I’ve been caught in a bug the last month where every day, it will ask me to complete a captcha, it tells me my account is banned, I click a button and it says congrats, I’m unbanned now and the first five likes I click tell me about how I’m improving the timeline.

I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.

shalmanese··on The Shape of Things to Come
Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created some absurd token burning architectures.
shalmanese··on AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest
They don't need to care, they just need to learn to tune it out, after which it becomes ineffective.

Characteristic of this style of AI art is pseudo-detail: the artwork looks busy but when you inspect the detail, it contains no informational value. How could it, you cannot extract more detail from a prompt than what was put in.

Contrast with a Where's Waldo picture, for example that is equally information dense but contains actually delightful jokes and variation that makes it interesting to look at.

Good design doesn't work because people notice the clear information hierarchy. Good design works because good information hierarchy means people don't have friction trying to interpret it.

shalmanese··on Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
I had an amazing AI system that did this and worked well for me.

What you did was you started off with the high level vision of the story, you'd figure out the characters in detail, supply their motivation, think about how those things might conflict with each other etc. Then you'd think about how to add various plot points into it so different characters with motivation might find productive tension with each other. You map it out chapter by chapter, what beats go where, what things happen to push interesting conflict.

But the amazing thing about this AI system was it let you go deeper, you could go into individual conversations and actually place the words people said to each other, add color to the words by appending it with stuff like "she said, hesitatingly". Entire descriptions of scenes could be vibe generated by you imagining in your head exactly what it would look like and finding perfect words such that the image in your head would be transmitted over to the reader.

Finally, the AI system had a way to inspect the psychological state of people who might want to read your work by recruiting people who are friends of yours to read each work in progress and you can interrogate them just like a chatbot over what worked well, what didn't, did you understand what was going on over here? Did you feel invested in the characters? You can use this feedback to spin up a brand new version.

Anyway, all this stuff is a lot of work but don't believe the people who say you can just press a button and get a good story out. If you put in the effort, this AI program called notepad.exe can have you generating genuinely human sounding prose!

shalmanese··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
> I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason.

Because it's populist slop, just like how every long enough discussion about government incompetence will lead to someone proposing all political leaders should be paid minimum wage to fix the problem.

Don't forget, the entire Web 2.0 winner ecosystem of companies that make up our modern Internet was founded by Engineer GodKings who leveraged their product prowess to gain a distribution advantage: Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Stripe, Github, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. They were also the ones who transformed their companies to what they are today, nobody forced them to do this. Contrary to populist opinion, it's not because they were stupid or brainwashed, it's because the proposed scheme has known, predictable downsides that a leader actually has to reckon with while internet commenters only have to worry about preserving their egos.

shalmanese··on Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.

No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.

shalmanese··on ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud
ICE was a reshuffle of the INS and a few ancillary departments but the core functions are continuous. It's like saying Meta has only been around for 5 years, most of the engineers were doing their previous job unchanged by the rebrand.
shalmanese··on Mickey Mouse Sells a Bundle
Why not submit with ?utm_source=hn instead which is far better understood by indexers etc. and is generally supported inside of CRMs to allow for paywall free access.
shalmanese··on Nuclear war survival guide reveals seven everyday items if disaster strikes
"Survival", as conceptualized as an industry, is that you're holed up in a secure location with adequate food, ammunition and other essentials to last months to years. Plenty of preppers who diligently prepared bunkers for the end of the world emerged from those bunkers, not because they ran out of food or ammo, but because their hair got too annoying to deal with and cosplaying survival did not extend to actually learning how to cut their own hair vs giving up the pretense and having a professional do it..
shalmanese··on "Stop Cutting Down Flock Cameras " (Mass Surveillance Is Good) [video]
The Youtuber AwakeWithJP has constantly shifted his apparent political beliefs over time in a cynical attempt to find new audiences. He started off as a crunchy granola hippy, then an "anti-woke" activist before going full Trumper during COVID. Now he's moving away from Trumpism and becoming a privacy/civil liberties activist persona.
shalmanese··on Young women are identifying as less straight; young men, not so much
I think it's impossible to grapple with this without fully reckoning with the impact of porn.

One thing I like to ask people is if they can name me an openly straight female pornstar. That is, a female porn star that has never appeared in scenes where they have sex with both men and women and have stated or it can be inferred from a long enough career that they refuse to be booked for those scenes. Then I ask them if they can name me an openly bisexual male porn star That is, one that has opened appeared in scenes where they have sex with both men and women.

The disparity of how hard it is to name either category reflects back onto our social beliefs of the acceptability and commonness of each.

shalmanese··on Nuclear war survival guide reveals seven everyday items if disaster strikes
One test I now use on survival related material, especially ones written pre-COVID, is how long does it take them before they start talking about how to cut hair.

One thing we learned during COVID was a significant limitation in people's willingness to stay isolated was their hair was getting out of control. It's the exact, boring, unsexy topic that you omit if you're selling the fantasy of survival and you include if you want to cover the boring, day to day logistics.

The entire survival industry is not acquitted well in being revealed as how much the industry is an aesthetic movement.

shalmanese··on The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous
No, by far the most parsimonious explanation is they got slapped by a capricious US government so they went overboard on caution in an attempt not to generate any more controversy. A predictable response of chaotic government regulation.
shalmanese··on Schizo founder story (terrorist to tech exit)
Whatever else it is, it definitely isn’t AI written.
shalmanese··on Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
Software owner learns that posting blog posts about their support woes also doesn't lead to an outpouring of love.
shalmanese··on Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access
> Why can't my password be a 5KB long

Because that opens you up to an entirely new class of attack. You have to set the limit somewhere and if you set it at INT_MAX, then a malicious user could find a O(n^2) path in your password validator and input a 4GB password that locks up the machine. Or they could create 1000 users in a row with 4GB passwords and fill up your storage.

shalmanese··on We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
The purpose of a system is what it does. You're never going to have success optimizing a system towards goals that are not the goals of the system. You need to first assess what the system is optimizing towards in the first place and now to change the incentives, otherwise you're going to misdiagnose competence as incompetence.
shalmanese··on How to ask for help from people who don't know you
I think the most important thing to be aware of is that your own personal estimation in how willing some group of people is to help is regularly off by several orders of magnitude.

I've had people assume that person X must be asked several times a day for help when they're really asked once every few years. Alternatively, I know people who assume they are sending some totally unique request to someone who gets a dozen of the same inquiry every single day.

Until you get a good baseline figure of how competitive your request for help is, everything else is pre-mature optimization. The best thing is to just be lightweight about it and dash something off as soon as you think of it and to not be too emotionally invested in whether you get a response or not. Only when you gather evidence that the response rate is below what you expected should you try to optimize how you ask.

shalmanese··on Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
What I'm curious about is why all AI written articles try to hide they were written with AI vs being open about it. I'd actually be far more willing to engage with an AI written article if the author shares the chat transcripts that lead them to the finished piece and I could load that context into my own session and ask additional questions/interrogate my own ideas branching from it.

Instead, people always try and pull the illusion as if the AI didn't exist.

shalmanese··on Why jet engines aren't made in China
The more parsimonious explanation is that commercial jet engine production is downstream of commercial airbody production and China's currently limited by COMAC's scaling woes. All the money and talent in the world can't replicate real users generating real data that you can use to improve.

I'd argue the opposite that jet engines have a market structure that's uniquely terrible for traditional free market societies. There's a few industries where structurally, companies can only exit the market but it's almost impossible for a new company to enter. Airframes, jet engines, CPU manufacturing, lithography etc.

What this dynamic doesn't make any company immune from though is corporate rot. You've seen the rot take down Boeing and Intel from the inside as a slow moving car wreck. There's no reason the rot can't take down ASML, TSMC or Airbus as well. The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem, excess capital is taken out of these companies during good times and then they run to governments seeking bailouts during bad times but governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.

I think a lot of the jet engine manufacturers are seeing this same corporate rot process, the number of high profile scandals across the industry and reports of insiders on how the number crunchers are taking over the business are strangely reminiscent of what we heard out of Boeing and Intel.

shalmanese··on Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
> It's a shallow article.

Yeah, because it was generated by AI.

As soon as I got to "That is the pattern worth naming. Most rewrites answer to the engineer - ", I stopped reading.

shalmanese··on Americans see their country's past, present and future
This is a counter intuitive result around surveying. Best way I’ve found to explain it is if you want to test if a soup is too salty, it’s about the size of the spoon, not the size of the pot.
shalmanese··on Job: Head of Stonehenge
Be warned though, the equity you are granted will be exceedingly illiquid.
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