FinnLobsien

That's great! I think anything that's not passively consuming a screen will be known as "good for your brain", the same way that regular food has become known as "health food".

Eschewing eating ultraprocessed, factory-made food is now seen as a deliberate health choice, even though it used to be the default. I think the same is happening with the brain.

Reading a book is now seen as some erudite choice. Having a hobby like knitting, birdwatching, etc. will be some kind of "good for your brain" activity. Things that used to be the only option are now "healthy choices".

I believe that we'll see a lot of "x is good for your brain" news (with X just being any activity that doesn't involve a screen), now that attention spans are so short and everyone feels like their brain isn't the same anymore.

The same way we got gyms when people realized physical inactivity is super unhealthy.

Did Jev take off briefly and stopped getting talked about a few days later? Yes.

But that doesn't make it a failure. In the era where we have:

a) an AI hype cycle where the benchmark of "successful product" is ChatGPT, Claude Code, etc. b) a social media environment that only rewards the most-engaged content

It's easy to declare something "fell off" because it didn't immediately revolutionize how everyone does their daily work.

But by that measure, nearly everything is a failure, even if it creates great businesses. That's especially true for infrastructure that runs in the background.

Yeah exactly. Reimburse $20 for whatever AI paid plan if applicants don’t have one. Many will anyway, and one can’t expect Claude Max and Free users to compete for the same job.

Yeah I agree. The exact mechanics are fungible, but the point is that it’s definitely possible to give applicants AI access without giving them a seat on the enterprise plan.

I think there are a few interesting things here:

-If the AI part is so important, why doesn't the company use OpenCode/Kilo etc. and fund it via OpenRouter? That way you could even level the playing field by giving everyone the same access to the same models.

-I believe some of this is temporary. Just about everyone is now constantly using AI, so I believe we'll soon care more about someone actually being able to explain how they'd go about something and why rather than just "can you produce code that does this"

-The idea of "applications are a numbers game" and spewing hundreds of resumes everywhere is dying. I know extremely highly qualified people whose resumes never get looked at and recruiters who never look at applications. Everyone is making application materials with AI and HR teams review them with AI. I believe we'll enter an era that's much more manual and high touch.

I feel that beyond the proper social events (e.g. dinner parties, hangouts etc.), another important part that has declined is the little social stuff.

Having a chat with the butcher, barista, etc. or just bumping into people you know and talking for a few minutes is pretty uplifting when it happens regularly.

I feel like the containerization of life erodes this.

though I guess that's still mainly an iPhone pitch, not them acknowledging a specific competing product.

I find this page super interesting because it's what you'd expect from a B2B SaaS vendor, not from Apple. You'd never see them build an "iPhone vs Samsung" page, for instance.

I think we’re past the point where making the best model guarantees company success.

At this point a lot of stuff happens at the product level.

OpenAI and anthropic have distribution and data advantages now that are hard to replicate.

A smartphone is also a tool. If you could have a smartphone without all the compulsive checking, endless scrolling, etc. it'd be incredible.

But the smartphone bundles the productive (but not addictive) capabilities with addictive, anxiety-causing wastes of time. The latter consume the vast majority of time spent on phones.

LLMs have the same problem: they bundle so many capabilities that they enable our worst tendencies. I can use it in a precise manner and reserve the decision-making, cognitively demanding work for myself. But realistically that's not what most people are going to do, and even those with the best intentions will frequently produce AI slop because they're in a rush or whatever.

I think it’s a downward spiral:

-fewer people are asking questions because they’re asking AI instead or AI obviates the question by solving the challenge immediately.

-Asking a question is less likely to get you good answers because fewer people know the answers (or give you an AI response you could’ve generated yourself)

This could be great for documentation. Screenshots in docs are frequently useless because they show me a screen and say "click X" where I still have to search X visually. And I could just to dhat in the other tab I have open.

I believe the “vibe-code an xyz replacement using AI” works well for personal or small internal projects because you can build the 20% of features you actually use.

I’m much more skeptical about a tool being replaced at scale because AI code tends to be way more brittle as you accommodate more use cases.

The data model you can vibe code for the 2 integrations you need won’t work when you need to support 200 integrations.

Google seems to have some desire to enter the gaming world, with Stadia before this.

Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.

I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.

Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?

And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?

Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)

No, but I think this is wrong on three levels:

1. Truck drivers are not deciding to take a Ferrari instead of their truck. The company knows roughly how much gas a given delivery is going to consume and how much that is.

With AI, that definitely happens if you default to Claude Opus/GPT Sol.

2. A truck driver's value scales with gas usage. The further they drive, the more valuable.

Not true for tokens.

3. Gas doesn't create extreme outliers. One developer can easily consume 100x the tokens of another, which makes AI economics much more extreme.