As the father of a 2- and 4-year-old, this project is repulsive.
> Like many parents, I found that standard bedtime stories didn't always capture their unique imagination. So, I built Lyra Kids (https://lyra.kids) to turn our nightly ritual into something more magical.
We have the standard template product pitch here (“Unlike our competitors, our product does XYZ”) but turned against _the entirety of children’s literature_.
You really think that many parents find “standard bedtime stories” insufficient?
Look, we have a couple of those books that use your kid’s name and a custom illustration that resembles them. They’re about as sophisticated as a Hallmark card and equally unrewarding. The kids get a kick out of it, but it’s a rare amusement and not actual interest. You don’t talk about the plot or the characters of a Mad Lib.
I’ll set aside my moral outrage and assume that you wanted to build this project no matter what and backed into the product positioning later, because the alternative is too depressing to consider.
> We have the standard template product pitch here (“Unlike our competitors, our product does XYZ”) but turned against _the entirety of children’s literature_.
Thank you! As a 44 year old non-parent this claim was really bothering me, but ya, it's just product-speak! I really hope so, at least. I'm still imagining that there are actually parents out there who think there aren't good enough children's books out there. Like, there is so much good stuff. SOOOOOOO much. When I was being read children's books many of them weren't even contemporary for the time. My grandmother read me Aladdin in the 80s! I was obsessed with the genie of the ring and wrote a story about it. Then the Disney movie came out a few years later and it was all about the genie of the lamp. D'oh. But I digress.
made me cry. i bought the hard cover and im saving it for when my niece is a little older to understand the depth, just a little more. it's been a few years. she still needs to learn how to read!
Hah! This website throws up a modal and blocks browser-native Copy Text functionality with both Ctrl + C and right click > Copy. Haven't seen that in a long time.
Hilarious. It seemed to focus on something about Boolean logic that I don’t remember taking about, but otherwise awesome.
Are you sharing any of the prompts you used to generate this? Even if not verbatim, I’m interested to know how much you’re driving versus the model. How much more prompt is there than, “look at this comment history and write 3 roasts that the HN crowd will find funny”?
It's indisputable that glossy displays have advantages over matte displays. It's also indisputable that matte displays have advantages over glossy displays, most importantly, fewer reflections of ambient light. The choice is a tradeoff.
A sentence in a PR that highlights an indisputable advantage of a glossy display does not position glossy as being superior overall but merely superior in the respects mentioned, which is not controversial.
Moreover, Apple continued to offer a matte display in the MacBook Pro for years after that PR, so why would they sell an "inferior" option?
This article is based on vibes just like the trends it hypothesizes.
To pick just one claim:
“Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks.”
This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones?
AI coding allows you to build prototypes quickly. All the reasons big companies are slow haven’t budged.
>This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones?
Yes but there is a more fundamental problem. The claim doesnt even make sense:
>“Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks.”
That was never the problem. I mean really, what is the implication of this? That big companies moved slowly because the developers were slow? What? No one thinks that, including the author (I imagine).
Its from many layers of decision-making, risk aversion, bureaucracy, coordination across many teams, technical debt, internal politics, etc.
This manifests as developers (and others) feeling slowed down by the weight of the company. Developes (and others) being relatively fast is precisely how we know the company is slow. So adding AI to the development workflow isn't going to speed anything up. There are too many other limiting factors.
Even with all these tools available, big companies would still be unable to compete in speed simply because in 99% of cases they don't have the required culture set in place.
This seems right. The classic recipe of enshittification. You start with the a core of tech-adjacent power users, then expand to more regular but curious and creative people, but then to grow further you need to capture the attention and eyeballs of people who don't do any mentally engaged activity on their phone (or desktop, but it's almost always phone), and just want to turn off their brain and scroll. TikTok was the first to truly understand this, and now all platforms converge to short-form algorithmic feeds with the only interaction being a flick of a finger to "skip", or stare at the thing.
If people only pull out ChatGPT when they have some specific thing to ask or solve, that won't be able to compete with the eyeball-time of TikTok. So ChatGPT has to become an algorithmic feed too.
Initially Id probably spend 1 hr a day conversing with chatgpt, mostly to figure out its capabilities and abilities.
Overtime that 1 hr has to declined to on average 5 mins a day. It has become at best a rubber duck for me, just to get my fingers moving to get thoughts out of my mind lol.
> Like many parents, I found that standard bedtime stories didn't always capture their unique imagination. So, I built Lyra Kids (https://lyra.kids) to turn our nightly ritual into something more magical.
We have the standard template product pitch here (“Unlike our competitors, our product does XYZ”) but turned against _the entirety of children’s literature_.
You really think that many parents find “standard bedtime stories” insufficient?
Look, we have a couple of those books that use your kid’s name and a custom illustration that resembles them. They’re about as sophisticated as a Hallmark card and equally unrewarding. The kids get a kick out of it, but it’s a rare amusement and not actual interest. You don’t talk about the plot or the characters of a Mad Lib.
I’ll set aside my moral outrage and assume that you wanted to build this project no matter what and backed into the product positioning later, because the alternative is too depressing to consider.