ji_zai

$200 / mo is leaving a lot of money on the table.

there are many who wouldn't bat an eye at $1k / month that guarantees most powerful AI (even if it's just 0.01% better than competition), and no limits on anything.

y'all are greatly underestimating the value of that feeling of (best + limitlessness). high performers make decisions very differently than the average HN user.

> So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.

I'd disagree with "half" here because I can't imagine it being anywhere close to 50/50. I expect a power law distribution: most won't be able to write well. The ones who do will have a massive advantage, in the same way that those who can concentrate in our age of distractions have a significant advantage over those who can't.

Congrats!! This is super neat. I've been looking for good ways to have AI browse the internet on my behalf - the way I normally do, and give me a presentation / summary of the highlights, so that I don't have to open myself up as much to social media and the chance for doomscrolling, etc.

I'm going to be playing with this.

Agreed.

It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.

Neat! I'd love to play with this, but site doesn't open (403: Forbidden).

> This type of attitude sometimes makes the world a worse place. If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down

Or: bad actors speed up the rate at which the system improves to not rely on the goodness of individuals in order to operate.

Agreed. My point was that most of us are far from the optimal - in the direction of overconsumption vs. actually doing.

Ofc this is difficult to show with clear evidence. It's my intuition based on observing myself and conversations with other builders.

Too many people fall into the trap of over consuming knowledge.

The only knowledge that matters at the end of the day is experiential: the kind that is learned by doing.

The kid who ships a product to a dozen users, learns and iterates with determination and focus, will have learned far more than the intellectual reading and waiting for the right opportunity to strike.

Of course there is value in intellectual knowledge, but most are far from the optimal balance - too skewed towards the intellectual vs. engaging with, and learning from, reality.

Teams like Cursor remind me of the importance of excellent execution.

To many, a product like this was almost obvious, esp after Github Copilot gave us a glimpse of what an AI powered coding experience could feel like. And there have been many attempts to do this right. But this team got the hundreds, if not thousands, of product / engineering micro decisions right, and seem to move quite fast.

Well deserved. Congrats, and all the best!

This is so creative and super useful!

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” - Einstein

Thank you! I've been itching for a product like this. Hate the strain computer screens give me. Kindle, and Remarkable felt too restrictive. Building on Android is a good move.

Absolutely. Higher quality inputs actually reduces the forcing function for the education to be high quality - since you'll get good outcomes anyway.

I believe the underlying cause is that the pay-to-learn model itself is not feasible because the value of a good teacher's time cannot be compensated without charging students and ridiculously high fee, and a student can't justify a high fee when the outcomes aren't guaranteed.

Colleges have worked in the past because the outcomes were more or less guaranteed (i.e. if you got good grades and graduated, you would very likely land a job), but even that is no longer valid (outside of regulated domains like medicine, law, etc.).

I predict we will see many, many more pay-to-learn companies, institutions fall in the coming years. ("fall" could also mean become irrelevant, and catering only to those that don't understand how the world has changed and still incorrectly think that such programs will prepare them well).

BloomTech, in order to survive, had no choice but to try and play the games they did, and mislead. It's a byproduct of not having a business that is viable.

Bug: I chose French, and I had to type “quelqu'un” - but no apostrophe I used was accepted.

Neat project though!

Aaah, I can imagine the panic I'd be in.

Yet, such pain is where the innovation comes from :). Wishing you all the best! And plan to try this out once it covers more product categories.

> Using a Mistral-7B FT trained on GPT-4 outputs allowed us to parse through hundreds of thousands of Reddit threads in a simple way with just hundreds of dollars of compute.

Great idea. These sort of clever approaches are needed to be able to build these sort of products that benefit from scale. When the cost of inference goes down, it enables new experiences. And clever ways to reduce cost before the big providers do, is a massive competitive advantage that makes it tough for those who wait to compete with you.

Anyone building AI products should take note.

I agree with the author, but they don't seem to get into what we can do to get it back to a more delightful experience.

I don't think the solution is to have more passionate builders in existing organizations that have overly short-term priorities (increase revenue this week vs. re-imagine a market).

I only see things changing through better competing products. Similar to how LLMs have enabled products that completely circumvent crap in search results (e.g. low quality listicles), we will see the same happen for most products and services.

Some products are going to be tough to displace, and it might take a new airplane startup that owns the entire ticket purchasing to inflight entertainment and last mile transportation (airport to destination) to show the world what an incredible flying experience could look like, that will force other airlines to at least try and catch up.

I hope more people with these sort of frustrations (which I share!) try to re-imagine experiences from the ground up and not shy away from tackling problems in big ways. We need more of it.

Right now using Obsidian (without being good about connecting notes). I'm just writing, dumping into a folder, and leaving further organization / analysis for later.

> If you're willing to do a lot of rewriting, you don't have to guess right. You can follow a branch and see how it turns out, and if it isn't good enough, cut it and backtrack. I do this all the time.

I feel like even if you guess right, you can't help but do a lot of rewriting and exploration because otherwise you'll always feel that "something's missing", and that you're further from the truth than you could be, that there's a better explanation around the corner if you study this subtree a bit more.

In the process of an essay I'm currently writing, I've probably written a short book of meandering thoughts / notes. I can't imagine it any other way because doing so would be imagining me actively not exploring an interesting subtree / implication of something I wrote, that I feel could impact the crux of the essay.

And of course none of this is wasted effort, as PG talks also mentions. Identifying the next essays from those ideas I've left out of this one is simply an act of observation and organization based on the exploration I've already done.

And likely when I start the next essay, this process will repeat itself.

Agreed. I was talking about folks that wish AI were being built differently (i.e. more transparent, etc.) as opposed to being against the rapid pace of AI development itself. I should have made myself more clear.

It's sad to see many comments here assume that Sam was at fault for something without really knowing what happened behind the scenes.

Let's try not to jump to conclusions, as hard as that may be.

And if you're actively wishing people to fail, then I ask you to try to understand where that stems from.

If you think Openai should be run differently, and if you have the inclination, I genuinely encourage you to build a competitor. I actually mean it.

People think that Openai is too far ahead, but the fact is that someone with a capability to understand things from first principles will often find a unique, valuable insight to compete with. And the world is sufficiently decentralized such that you can't be stopped from pursuing this, even by Openai.

As technology becomes more powerful, first principles reasoning >> factual knowledge (information) about how things work. In a sense, Openai's work reduces their own moat.

If you don't remember the past, slow down relative to what?

This is my worst nightmare as a bootstrapped founder. And that there's no way to put a limit on spend is ridiculous. Someone that doesn't want me to do well can simply ddos me into bankruptcy out of nowhere.

Just went through Vercel's docs:

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"Vercel helps to mitigate against L3 and L4 DDoS attacks at the platform level. Usage will be incurred for requests that are successfully served prior to us automatically mitigating the event. Mitigation usually takes place within one minute.

Usage will be incurred for requests that are not recognized as a DDoS event, such as bot and crawler traffic.

You should monitor your usage and utilize Edge Middleware to protect against undesired traffic based on its IP, User-Agent header value, or other identifiers."

---

That doesn't help me sleep well.

I feel that by now, these hosting providers should simply adopt best ddos protection practices and take responsibility for failure to protect.

"You should monitor your usage and utilize Edge Middleware to protect against undesired traffic based on its IP" - there should be some really good defaults for this right?

Clearly it's possible - Cloudflare's ddos protection is worded more strongly.

I'm willing to pay more for the service for peace of mind. Like, even $10/mo more to insure against getting smacked out of nowhere.