> You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
That works when you are starting a new company from scratch to solve a problem. When you're established and your boffins discover a new thing, of course you find places to use it. It's the expression problem with business: when you add a new customer experience you intersect it with all existing technology, and when you add a new technology you intersect it with all existing customer experience.
Apple was a well established company when they came out with the iPhone - I don't think anyone but Jobs would've been able to pull off something like that.
That sort of comprehensive innovation (hardware, software, UX - Apple invented everything), while entering an unfamilar and established market, I'd argue would've been impossible to do in a startup.
He had a customer experience in mind, so he found the intersection with every existing technology, and it was impressive. But there are also times when you add a new technology to your collection, so you find the intersection with every existing customer experience.
> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain users, today.
> We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve.
We've always had that.
In olden times the companies who peddled such solutions were called "a business without a market", or simply "a failing business." These days they're "pre-revenue."
Maybe it will be different this time, maybe it will be exactly the same but a lot more expensive. Time will tell.
I think you’re missing the point. Of course you can make such a product. As Steve says right after, he himself made that mistake a lot. The point is that to make something great (at several levels of great, not just “makes money”) you have to start with the need and build a solution, not have a solution and shoehorn it to a need.
The internet is an entirely different beast and does not at all support your point. What we have on the web is hacks on top of hacks. It was not built to do all the things we push it to do, and if you understand where to look, it shows.
I feel like if Jobs was still alive at the dawn of AI he would definitely be doing a lot more than Apple has been - probably would have been an AI leader.
> I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the millennium Apple culture.
Instead of doing almost correct email summaries Jobs would have a LLM choose color of the send button with an opaque relationship with the emotional mood of the mail you write.
It's still very good I'd say. It shows the relation between big oil and tech: it began in Texas (with companies like Texas Instruments) then shifted to SV (btw first 3D demo I saw on a SGI, running in real time, was a 3D model of... An oil rig). As it spans many years, it shows the Commodore 64, the BBSes, time-sharing, the PC clone wars, the discovery of the Internet, the nascent VC industry etc.
Everything is period correct and then the clothes and cars too: it's all very well done.
Is there a bit too much romance? Maybe. But it's still worth a watch.
I never really could get into the Cameron/Joe romance, it felt like it was initially inserted to get sexy people doing sexy things onto the show and then had to be a star crossed lovers thing after character tweaks in season 2.
But when they changed the characters to be passionate stubborn people eventually started to cling to each other as they together rode the whirlwind of change the show really found its footing for me. And they did so without throwing away the events of season 1, instead having the 'takers' go on redemption arcs.
My only real complaint after re-watching really was it needed maybe another half season. I think the show should have ended with the .com bust and I didn't like that Joe sort of ran away when it was clear he'd attached himself to the group as his family by the end of the show.
IMO it really came into its own after the first season. S1 felt like mad men but with computers, whereas in the latter seasons it focused more on the characters - quite beautiful and sad at times.
I vaguely remember that they tried to reboot it several times. So the same crew invented personal computers, BBSes and the Internet (or something like that), but every time they started from being underfunded unknowns. They really tried to make the series work.
That's not really what happens at all. The characters on the show never make the critical discoveries or are responsible for the major breakthroughs, they're competing in markets that they ultimately cannot win in, because while the show is fictional, it also follows real computing history.
(MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW)
For example, in the first season, the characters we follow are not inventing the PC - that has been done already. They're one of many companies making an IBM clone, and they are modestly successful but not remarkably so. At the end of the season, one of the characters sees the Apple Macintosh and realizes that everything he had done was a waste of time (from his perspective, he wanted to change the history of computers, not just make a bundle of cash), he wasn't actually inventing the future, he just thought he was. They also don't really start from being underfunded unknowns in each season - the characters find themselves in new situations based on their past experiences in ways that feel reasonable to real life.
Subscription apps often have to target a wide userbase. However, most users only need a small subset of the entire feature set, and would be better served by a tailored version. This means that vibecoded apps can get away with being much less complex (specific featureset, no login etc), while still being more useful.
I have also created tools with LLMs that are exactly tailored to what I need, and still much more polished than what I could do without LLMs. Will have to think about if there is anything else I can do this with.
I had to download file attachments from a specific niche web forum that's behind login. I could've went looking for a browser plugin or a 3rd party tool to do it.
Once again, it took me about an hour while watching my shows to get a custom one made.
The first version operated by me downloading the pages one by one to a directory, the Python app parsed the html, downloaded the files and renamed according to thread name.
After a few iterations the tool just grabs a cookies.txt file exported from Firefox and can take any thread URL, browse through it, skipping existing files and determining if everything is already downloaded
I could easily have it just watch a set of threads for new content and download automatically, but the current system is fine =)
That’s pretty great, I’ve done something similar by hand many moons ago. It was very tedious.
I need a simple S3 compatible API to store some files with basic auth and ssl certs using let’s encrypt. Nothing crazy, Garage is overkill, Minio is overkill. I may see if Claude code can handle that for me using python or something.
/btw, I work in consulting and the above project would have a budget of probably $100k and a schedule of 3 months. I see a lot of change for swe consultants coming.
Does anyone have any use-cases for long-running, interesting tasks that do not require perfect accuracy? Seems like this would be the sweet spot for running local models on low-powered hardware.
I created a loop in the drum mode, and then wanted to add a melodic track to it, so I clicked the melodic button. This erased my drum pattern instead - would be good if they could play over each other, and would not be erased by switching.
I just saw your comment, I couldn't reply to it there, but I just added the edit layer feature, along with other QOL features.
Also, did you try the preview with loop button? It's in the preview drop down. It should let you preview the grid along with what's already in the loop.
I did that, so maybe I'm just missing something but after adding them to the looper and deleting the notes to start a new layer, the old layer doesn't play anymore.
I'd suggest instead of making the loop layers and editors "siblings" ontologically, instead default on app load to have a single layer, then have the option to add more layers and switch between them - add layer then edit, instead of creating a layer and adding it to a list.
I really do like the randomization though, it actually sounded surprisingly nice. Took me a moment to realize what was happening but it's actually a seemingly simple feature that's hard to achieve in full blown DAWs.
Companies are always slow to expand production capacity. It takes time to react to unforeseen shifts in the market - but once it does happen, the scale can be quite huge.
Another thing to try could be to rank people in realtime instead of the one-off submission approach. I do this in https://spaceword.org (create tight crosswords using 21 letters), and I think it's quite motivating to see how you compare to others as you improve your solution. On the other hand, its a bit more taxing on the server, and then you also could not show the optimal solution.
I would prefer not being distracted by that, and not having information on possible solutions before submitting. Trying to find the best solution with added hints like that is a different game. So it should be opt-in.
Cool game! One minor feature request. It would be helpful to have some way to move the entire block of placed tiles around at once to give myself more room in a particular direction.
https://spaceword.org - a daily word game inspired by banana grams, where you need to arrange 21 letters in a tight square. Has around 400 daily active players.
I'm pretty familiar with the underlying stack, which helped a lot since I knew the pitfalls. But pretty much all of the code is written by an LLM.
I think about 4x for greenfield development. For example, I implemented this motion controlled game from scratch in 5 days: https://motionparty.net
For this kind of no expectations, for fun development I find AI makes it much easier to develop and test hypotheses. For other styles it's different, especially if the stakes are higher.
My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire. Maybe applicable to AI too?
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