john___matrix
Not exactly Terminators roaming the streets but an interesting angle.
I appreciate there may be more efficient ways to do things if you're an actual developer or engineer but I'm not and the tools I've been able to build so far have been both fun to make and add value to our workflow as a small 2 person ecommerce business.
I do at least have a background in web as a designer for many years and having worked with developers I can at least spec and understand how a product might work which is one thing Claude/AI isn't hugely helpful with and often it's the testing and QA phase as always where the problems and shortcomings expose themselves.
While I wouldn't say execution is necessarily "cheap" for everything, ChatGPT and Gemini helped me build out a little Spotify playlist generator [1] recently that scans my top 100 artists in the last 12 months then generate a playlist based on their bottom 50% of songs in terms of popularity with an option for 1 or 2 songs per artist.
Sadly the Spotify API limits will never allow me to offer it to more than 25 people at a time but I get so bored of their algorithm playing me the same top songs from artists it's a fun way for me to explore "lesser lights" and something I'd have absolutely never have been able to build before, let alone spin up in a couple of evenings.
It's quite liberating as a non-dev suddenly having these new tools available that's for sure.
At what point are content creators and publishers going to be paid for or given the option to block AI scraping tools using their material so blatantly to generate income for other companies and publishers?
Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.
I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?
It's the discussion below that I particularly enjoy even though I'm very much a lurker, the strong moderation and quality community feel adds massively to some complicated (for me) topics.
You would likely get the same results and time drop just by running consistent training mileage for 2 months instead of a big diet change like this.
I run a small business in UK and have had a few issues in the past where I've been unable to get any sort of resolution through regular channels and I've actually contacted my local MP and asked them to help intervene or at least reach a person in authority who could own the problem.
I may not agree with his actual political party but as a local MP he is good with small businesses and uses the clout of his office and name. Obviously YMMV on this depending on your MP but desperate times etc.
It's even more apparent on Netflix where the UI has got progressively worse over the years to the point it's basically unusable to discover stuff you actually want to see - I mean, large rows of "you watched this already, here it is again".
I'm almost at the point of cancelling my Netflix subscription simply because it's so much effort to find something of interest now.
Encouraging people to record every inane detail of their lives and hosting it must be a massive resource drain somewhere along the line.
This sounds exactly the same in that it's some vanity project under the guise of being indie or privacy focused but all he's really looking for is some more cash.
I'd probably continue to steer well clear.
Unlikely of course but it would be nice if they were turned off by default and they offered users the option to turn them on with a disclaimer about how inaccurate and shady many of them are.