I'm still stuck on superpowers. Can't seem to get better plans out of native claude planning - superpowers ensures I have a reviewed design that actually matches my mental model. Typical claude planning doesn't confirm assumptions sufficiently for my weak brain dumps/poorly spec'd tickets.
The thing with microbes is not if they can grow in a place it's whether they can get there first.
Beer is basically knocking out natural bacteria and trying to get yeast growing before the bacteria can turn it into cleaning supplies. The alcohol is kind a there because it kills bacteria.
So for instance I put winecaps (Stropharia rugosannulata) into wood chips that had already been exposed to the elements for six months, and ended up with more than I could possibly eat.
Meanwhile oyster or shiitake mushrooms want a fresh log, cut with a sterilized blade, and cross your fingers and hope. I haven't even tried because I've watched people who know way more than me about mushrooms, fail.
I think I have some logs that might have lions mane in them, but they're fighting the turkey tail that was already in my local environment and also on the property of the person who donated the logs.
I think that, for possibly a very long time, AI will just increase the quality bar and scale of expectations when we produce things. We might take the same amount of time (or longer) to produce something, but with significantly better outcomes. Ultimately human preferences and tastes prevail and the world is full of problems that are not simple I/O, that are not repeatable, and that require human taste to improve. The people who will immediately survive economically are the ones who leverage AI to produce stuff that wasn't possible before.
If anything, I see a decrease in the quality bar. Code is sloppier, there are more bugs, more outages, more security issues. Whatever alpha AI provides is being spent on feature velocity and AI integrations at the cost of those other things.
I've tried all the Q&A skills, confidence meters and little hacks to get agents to clarify and propose better solutions. Clarification and planning has gotten a lot better using some skills (e.g. obra/superpowers), but counterproposals and negative feedback are rarely up to snuff with something a staff level colleague would come up with - this seems to be amplified when you already have an extensive PRD or plan together. If a plan is already fleshed out but is inefficient or contains some anti-patterns, I've had better results just throwing these out, taking what I've learned and summarizing tradeoffs in a brand new chat.
Once you have a comprehensive plan together, or a fairly full context window, agents have a lot of issues zooming out. This is particularly painful in some coding agents since they're loading your existing code into context and get weighted down heavily by what already exists (which makes them good at other tasks) vs. what may be significantly simpler and better for net-new stuff or areas of your codebase that are more nascent.
Yes, we're in for more headless interfaces and there are existing products that will struggle to serve these new interaction models due to organizational constraints. But I don't think it's as simple as asking "are they a system of record" as we think about the companies that will adapt and thrive and the new ones that will come. Enterprises are investing AI spend into improving core processes and responding to competitive pressure, not saving money and introducing risk into areas they have historically delegated to vendors. AI is going to give us more software, and increase spending as firms seek efficiency in new areas, and they're going to continue to knock on doors of vendors to do it as they always have. Not to mention the demand for auditable, repeatable workflows is still there and always going to be there and dedicated systems are needed to solve this in each problem domain.
Yeah, I guess this take is tempting for a technologist, but Gen Z is buying iPods and walking around in wired headphones because it's cool and nostalgic, not because of usability. Cycles of nostalgia are well understood to be getting smaller. The creative industry is creating new things less frequently and referring back sooner (the old 20 year cycle of fashion repeating itself is contracting). There is an element of disenchantment, of wanting to disconnect from the present, but that has always sort of been there as people reached for vintage cameras, record players, and old clothes in the niche cultural movements that have preceded the current Gen Z 2000's obsession that's happening.
> walking around in wired headphones because it's cool and nostalgic, not because of usability
Can only speak for myself, but I purchased some $15 wired USB-C earbuds to use on flights while the Airpods were charging.
And I've been increasingly just using them. The Airpods would often not connect in one ear without a few tries, and the pairing was a pain (disabled the auto-pairing as that was even worse), even on a medium-length flight I'd have to charge them at least once, and I'd often find a way to fidget with the case and have everything disconnect.
I think I overestimated how much value their noise canceling or audio quality was bringing me when I mostly used them for podcasts.
Wireless earbuds are convenient sometimes, but that comes at the price of inconvenience other times (thinking about charging and connecting).
I think the noise canceling is overhyped to oblivion. Sound isolation with good tips has been more than fine since the 2000s, and most of the annoying, hard-to-block noise comes from physical transfer via vibration anyway.
Aren't we roughly right on schedule for 20 years? Plus or minus a few years here and there (giant jeans, for instance, were more 90s, which is 30 years now. lots of 90s or even 80s influences still popping up in fashion that were definitely not there 10 years ago).
The article has a niche example of some pulls from 2014 too, but the dominant thread is older. 2004 kids not-infrequently went through Nirvana/Pearl Jam grungy phases too for a 10 year loop.
iPods certainly are 20-25 years ago. iPhones and iPod Touches are about to hit 20. N64s are 30.
This is a fair cautionary tale but it's worth understanding the specifics of the situation – Windsurf maintained a relatively easy to replicate product with no moat, and employed a bunch of attractive talent. The company got gutted of these employees and lost its valuation because no suitable buyer thought their IP was exceptionally valuable on its own. Just because this was the outcome for Windsurf does not mean there are no longer opportunities to join startups building sticky customer bases with valuable IP and walk away wealthier when they exit – yes there is a liquidity problem[1] but let'a be honest with ourselves about the specifics of the case for Windsurf.
I don’t understand why the specifics of the situation matters here. We know the company got acquihired for $2.4B, the problem is, why did all of it go to investors and founders and nothing for employees?
I’m not sure customer churn rate has any impact on liquidation preference.
This take doesn't really highlight the fact that the most competitive foundational model companies are innovative application builders. Anthropic and OpenAI are vying for consumers to use their models by building these sort of super applications (ChatGPT, Claude) that can run code, plot graphs, spin up text editors, create geographic maps, etc. These are well staffed and strategically important areas of their businesses. There's competition to attract consumers to these apps and they will grow more capable and commoditize more compliments along the way. Who needs Jasper when you can edit copy in ChatGPT, or an AI python notebook app, or, now, Cursor?
ISPs / other middlemen can monitor and modify unencrypted traffic. In Egypt, Syria and Turkey for example ISP’s injected malware into unencrypted sites that led people to install spyware when attempting to download legitimate programs (link). Other state actors have changed the content of news media, etc. Without HTTPS you lose the ability to trust the integrity of a given webpage.
