191–200 of 295 posts
On the contrary, you can solve the tree problem with money. There are nurseries that sell mature trees -- most people though will not choose to spend $20k on a tree.
You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut in a nursery, lol. And forget about 20k. If you find someone willing to sell their tree you're looking at at least 10x that for the logistics of moving a 20 ton root system.
What's funny, is that I had many other projects attempted over the years, but many rise and die quickly, yet the one that lasted the longest is also the one that is likely to last longest from now.
[0]: https://uxwizz.com
Maybe the response is to slow down a bit—revisit what matters, and use it with some sense of proportion and coherence.
This has been on my mind for a long time.
I used to be all about frictionlessness. Speed! Convenience! Make it smoother!
Then I found... actually, paper based systems work way better for me. Digital systems just turn into big piles of bloat. It's too easy to add stuff. So they grow until they collapse under their own weight.
(Take a look at your contacts list. How many should still be in there? How many did you add for a one time thing and then keep forever? Should there be a temporary folder? Shouldn't it be the default? That's how it works in nature!)
Ended up using paper as a temporary improvisation, then realized it solved all the problems I had with digital systems.
Friction is good.
With communication, it used to cost money to communicate. Now it's free, and we now have a sea of noise where most messages are "adding negative value", because they steal your time and energy.
Same with the app stores. Do any search and you find an ocean of slop! The gems drown in the sea of slop.
Friction is good.
The desire to make life faster instead of better was identified as a neurosis of civilization in the 19th century.
With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…
Exactly this. Velocity is a vector. It has magnitude (aka speed) and direction.
Our industry has chased magnitude over all else for so long. Now we can put nitro in everyone's car and we get to where we wish to go very fast. Suddenly bad direction-setting is getting feedback where there used to be friction and natural time to steer.
My greatest hope is that a ton of bad leaders and middle managers end up finally getting exposed due to the advent of AI. (Will I be disappointed? Almost certainly yes.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still faster and cheaper to just build the right thing to begin with. As the old saying goes, spend your time sharpening your ax.
Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right
I find myself sympathetic to the author's PoV, but I am incorporating LLMs into my workflow, with a resultant jaw-dropping (to me) increase in velocity. But I am not just dispatching to agents. I work interactively with a chat interface, and sometimes, I will just bin a whole hour's worth of back-and-forth, because we're not getting anywhere (in fact, I did exactly that, about 30 minutes ago). But that hour is peanut…
One more thing I try is give same prompt once in a while to ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok. Than take the 2 out of 3 ideas forward.
All leading AI seems to have some blind spot. Like some kind of intricsic character. 1 will completely overlook some particular bug while finding other excellent bugs and edge cases.
Getting the code through all 3 before commiting has shown excellent results to me.
With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…
>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.
Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them to upgrade and were never on the latest version.