intersecionist, designer
Lisbon šµš¹
Joined April 2021
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bought into the @paper hype because designer twitter would not stfu about it
it doesn't have components.
not even a little work around.
are all these hype people imbeciles? i don't get it
Cyberpunk was a documentary
there's opportunity in an email agent that doesn't just summarise, but knows your personal goal-context and re-frames the emails and subs you get to it
The threat to @beehiiv isn't marc lou (guy's a jester).
The actual threat to beehiiv is that humans will stop reading their email.
AI agents don't read newsletters.
Even today, the Apple summary front-runs the need to open for a percentage of readers.
This means the ad model for newsletters is gone in 3 years.
The conversion math also becomes tougher and tougher, even with a huge list.
If everyone is using Claude/Muse/Grok as their LifeHQ (which they will), the only newsletters that get read will be personality/opinion driven (for fun).
The "own your audience" frame also dilutes when the layer between your words and the human buyer is designed to avoid consuming it.
This is not a beehiiv problem, it's an email problem in general.
Beehiiv is diversifying into other products, which is smart.
But one of the core tenets of audience building (just get their email and you're golden) is starting to weaken.
Dating apps always fascinated me, you're both the product and the user, and I think most everyone knows this to some extent.
There's a fine-balance showing what you want and showing what you can GET...
Tinder then shows higher RSRR members (we used to call it ELO?) to maintain interest, knowing you might not get the same response back, so they have to balance with equal matches that both are not what you want, but give what you wantāactual matching.
Like a Casino really, gotta blend some small wins while showing triple diamonds.
your unique point of view on camera is a moat.
AI can do everything, but it can't do YOUR point of view.
right on time.
Weāre doubling down on video on š.
Today, we're piloting Video Kickstart Bonus, an invite-only program that rewards creators for posting their video content here.
A few things to know:
ā¢ Videos must be vertical, under 3 minutes, and content youāve created yourself.
ā¢ Videos youāve already shared on other platforms are eligible, as long as they donāt have watermarks.
ā¢ You must post at least 15 videos across 15 different days within the 30-day period of the campaign.
Invites are rolling out over the next few days, and enrollment closes October 30. Happy posting!!
Please use AI
Be sure to use AI when making
your next, I donāt know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not call
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals,
because you will end
up talking for longer than you had hoped,
hearing, perhaps, about her fatherās cancer
diagnosis or how lonely sheās been or even
what sheās planted in her spring
garden and then lost with the early frost.
And be sure to use AI when planning that next
camping trip, the last one you will take
with this particular child. Definitely do
not text your friend who has fly-fished every
river in Pennsylvania and biked every
backwoods trail, because you might end
up texting back and forth for the rest of the day
or even meeting up late for a beer and hearing
how he has ended each recent night black-out
drunk, or perhaps youāll hear how his
cousin is an idiot on Facebook or maybe just
that he repaired his own washing machine
and is pretty damn proud of that.
And be sure to use AI when your next child
gets married, so that you can write them
the perfect toast or poem or speech or song
because no one wants to hear your
words, the actual poorly written words
of a parent (you) who changed
hundreds of diapers for said child or fed
them in the middle of the
night from your actual body. Or cried
when they were late home because
you were positive they were dead. We don't
want those wordsāweād prefer the sterile
words of a machine that never lived, never
had an original thought, never felt
the pain of miscarriage or broken
relationships or the joy of a friendship restored
or of seeing springās first
robin dancing on frost.
And be sure to use AI when working on your next
book or essay or piece of art or photography,
and then smile or even laugh at your own
cleverness when you see how good it is,
and how easy,
because who the hell has time
to work at something, to give time to craft, to
create with their own minds, to spend
years being mediocre. Why do that when
mastery, or at least competency
is so simple
only a good prompt away?
How magnificent
the funeral song our children or contemporaries
will write for us, a song they will make by
taking our obituary and Facebook posts,
plus random quotes from our algorithm,
and feeding them into Chat
or Gemini
or Claude.
The tears that will fall in the face of such
sanitary sweetness!
Be sure to use AI
and while you do Iāll be over here in my 50th
year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
lest I scare away this moment,
lying here melancholy about my older
children moving out and my middle
children no longer needing me, at least
not like they used to, weary about this body
that fails me now in ever increasing ways
that will never be restored. Sighing
over stories I tried to write but never hit
the page the way they felt in my mind.
But isnāt that, my flesh-and-blood friend,
the natural order of things?
the longing for something that could always be
a bit better
or the way that anything
worth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful,
especially at first
or hearing another human voice and somehow
realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these
subtle imperfections
by Shawn Smucker
Really liked this piece, but he doesn't seem to have X so I figured to share.
shawnsmucker.substack.com/p/ā¦
i think we'll see a 'GPT-OS' (CodexOS?) in the near future
one thing is becoming very clear:
the way GPT lays out their app, they want to become the one-stop shop for how work is done
Agent on the left, apps on the right
so I think we'll see them compete with with mac, linux and windows sometime next year
even if not explicitly in their roadmap, its naturally going that direction
which means you should start considering your software headless from the get-go, onboarded via plugins and MCPs
maybe we won't even need sign ups and logins in the future... your agent connectors will be enough of an unique identifier
Taste is decided by cultural north-stars of the moment
Loro Piana
Material Design
Apple skeumorphism
Chubby monarchs
all were tasteful once
taste is NOT quality of execution
can LLMs become the cultural north-stars? Maybe
would be interesting to see
Day 1 of getting on the vibe-game train
I grew up on RTS and city building games, but they never leaned on multiplayer as much I would've liked to see back then, so we're going to do something about that.
Setting up landscape and remixing Monument Valley for art direction right now
the woman in the bus is watching AI soap operas.
they exist.
this somehow is more visceral than "AI in general"
Broader commentary, but I think we will see massive tax hikes and special conditions on "AI labour output" in the next 10 years, probably measured as token input x output
not less... because the social state has already been in collapse for a while now, and there are no signs of turning around
This if AI actually leads to mass unemployment and there is no replacement, and we do end up needing social benefits (pre-UBI?)
AI users are starting to sound like crypto users
sense of entitlement "where are my tokens?!"
Models don't drive retention anymore, its all about the output (in crypto, was all about the bag) + ecosystem
tbh outside of niche cases, models are all (very!) good enough now
The OpenAI situation keeps getting worse.
Yesterday Tibo announced a global reset for all paid ChatGPT accounts at 10am PST today. It's been over 2 hours. No reset.
Builders literally scheduled their whole day around this.
First they cut usage in half.
Now they promise a reset that doesn't show up.
You can't keep doing this to the people paying you.
study industries that got commoditized overnight
commoditization = indistinguishable
an economist would say price becomes the only competing factor
a creator would see brand, status signalling and UX becomes where value flows
could it happen to software?
Lots of founders are crashing out
A year ago AI felt like an incredible opportunity.
Most of us were able to ship faster, remove admin, and get time back.
Lots of engineering founders were even able to explore marketing for the first time: SEO, organic social, outbound.
Building complex systems that felt extremely productive.
But since then, a lot has happened.
Hereās some of the themes Iām seeing:
AI marketing isnāt working. At first it feels impressive and it looks good but for most itās not driving results. This is made worse by the fact everyone has access to the same tools. Inboxes are flooded, buyers are fatigued, the economy is flat.
Engineers are fried. Yes you can ship more but for many the flow state has gone. Itās a new way of working and itās not for everyone. The speed leaves many of us exhausted before 11am.
Thereās a feeling of whatās the point? Is my productās next feature going to be redundant in a year, or a month? Canāt AI do what my business does, better?
SaaS valuations have collapsed. From 3-4x revenue to 1x. Thereās a sinking realisation that a large number of SaaS companies will go to 0 in the next few years. Building to exit seems almost crazy right now.
Thereās far fewer buyers and far more sellers. These include vibe coders cloning products without the care or craft, contributing to the distribution challenges from people doing it the right way.
Lots of people are trying to make money by selling shovels. This just adds to the frenzied energy.
Build in public stopped being fun. A few makers realised that the new game is attention, and now everything feels insincere and stunt-driven. They are influencers not founders. Changes to the X timeline compounded the issues.
There are exceptions and there are still moats remaining, but the challenges feel existential