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Punch yourself in the face with reality

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Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#41

Post by ryandrake »

inigyou wrote: post #34
a_c wrote: post #30

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…

It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.

It seems like an absolute dream for corporate execs who don't know anything about development, see a taped-together prototype built in a day, and think to themselves "Wow, we're 90% done... we could almost ship that!!"

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#42

Post by pizzafeelsright »

inigyou wrote: post #35
quirkot wrote: post #8

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

Is it really? Most startups don't seem to solve anything for anyone, not really, but they do enough to get investor money, using pitch decks and logos and landing pages, and the founder gets paid from investor money while the product collapses, which seems like a success for the founders to me.

The goal isn't solving a problem (for founders) but to get investor money. The VC system is designed to 100x investments.

People who solve problems while being profitable do not take investment money unless they want to expand or sell.

"What is the exit?" that is the question for every startup.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#44

Post by rmah »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #28
inigyou wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe things are going bad suddenly in the near future. For instance, the projected weather cycle later this year is four times as powerful as a Super El Niño. The US is one week away from running out of gasoline (was 4 weeks away, 3 weeks ago). Are these not things that should be reported?

I don’t think it’s about what should or shouldn’t be reported. It’s about your relationship to those things. If you wake up on July 21 and there are no headlines saying “The US has run out of gasoline, no driving!”, will you breathe a sigh of relief and be happy things weren’t that bad after all? Or will you browse the headlines for other scary things that might happen in the near future?

This is, IMO, quite the insightful thought experiment. I suspect, however, that it is very difficult for most people to face.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#45

Post by SoftTalker »

a_c wrote: post #30

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…

It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#46

Post by ryandrake »

inigyou wrote: post #35
quirkot wrote: post #8

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

Is it really? Most startups don't seem to solve anything for anyone, not really, but they do enough to get investor money, using pitch decks and logos and landing pages, and the founder gets paid from investor money while the product collapses, which seems like a success for the founders to me.

Many startups simply solve the following problem: Rich person has a massive amount of money, and wants to use some of that to chase risky returns. They don't really know what to do with it, so they become an LP and act as part of a risk sink for crazy ideas. In that way, the pitch decks, logos, landing pages, and breathless hype is, itself, the "problem" in the process of being solved.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#47

Post by pixl97 »

NopIdoN wrote: post #31
Grombobulous wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity. It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes. But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you. This sit…

> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store. dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me

And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences?

The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done.

Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that for us. Modern technology has made it so you don't spend your entire life trying to get something to eat every waking moment of the day. This leads to some problems of your ideology of hardships lead to growth. Which hardships? Which growth? Should you go back to living in a cave like a mammal to get the full experience?

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#48

Post by a_c »

SoftTalker wrote: post #45
a_c wrote: post #30

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…

It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.

I find it highly similar between running agents and running human teams.

Clear goal, share context, delegate but verify. Running a team of engineers also inevitably generates pages and pages of material, design spec, code, test, review. Just that we now do that with agents and agents are way less trust worthy

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#49

Post by SoftTalker »

> I have seen way too many startup founders delude themselves into building more and more for months without a single conversation with a real user

This has been a problem since the beginning of tech startups. I worked in a dot-com in the late 1990s. Lots of investor money. New offices. Hundreds of employees. The product was well thought out, fairly well built, and it worked. But they had no customers. It's even in the same market niche as products that today have millions of users, but those folks weren't ready for it in 1999, at least not enough of them and quickly enough to matter.

Building something quickly is only a small part of what it takes to have a successful startup. You must solve a problem for people who are ready for your solution and willing to pay for it.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#50

Post by pixl97 »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #20
totetsu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a nice quote. But what about the notion that we’re always believing in something, and sometimes those beliefs tune closer to something objective but if we keep tuning past that into something else, then that reality becomes hard to conceive of and really does seem like it’s gone away.

No matter how much you don't believe there is a tiger behind the bush. The tiger really believes you are going to be tasty.

So you build a machine that kills all tigers and now you don't have to worry about belief.

The problem with objective reality is 1. it changes. 2. it can be different for different people in different places.

If I live in rural India, there is probably not a tiger behind the bush. If I live in downtown Chicago there is almost certainly not a tiger behind the bush. This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic thinking which requires a lot more energy than black and white thinking.

Lastly, humans are real, and even incorrect belief systems create a reality you have to live in. God, for example, is almost certainly not real. Saying that in a forum will have some percentage of people downvote you and try to reply with a relatively poor argument. Saying it in the wrong place and time outside of the internet can most certainly get you killed. So just because something isn't real doesn't mean you should open your mouth at an inopportune time and learn the reality it created.

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