The description of the risk factors very much jibes with what I have seen in a friend recently. He is quite isolated, and spends most of his evenings writing using AI (he works in a blue-collar trade and wouldn't be typing stuff out by hand usually).
He's convinced that he has discovered a grand theory of human connection / relationships / energy / physics, and keeps interrupting in conversation to explain how something I've said is just an example of a deeper pattern.
Sadly, this theory of connection is cutting him off from actual connection - he gets so much validation from AI that he believes he has discovered a new world model. But the people around him aren't bought into the vision (mostly because it is bullshit), and so he ends up even more isolated.
People didn't previously have "social junk food" as an option, so they would either need to normalize to those around them, or give up socializing for good. And almost no one is ready for that second option. Social media, LLMs, and even books at TV to some extent provide a bridge to loneliness by being more immediately enticing but in the long term less fulfilling.
Not to get political but I suspect this kind of thing is also pretty analogous to how many otherwise normal but often unintelligent people get into things like neo-Nazism through online influencing. (I am just speculating that the person you're referring to is unintelligent.)
Don't get me wrong, but from a relationships perspective, your comment sounds more like a frustrated spoiled ex-girlfriend than a friend. I mean, friends don't go badmouthing their friends on the internet. It's a dick move.
Regarding "theories of everything" and stuff like that. Well, lots of people have those. If I were to call everyone that believes in god or horoscope lone losers, then the asshole would be me, wouldn't it? I know it's different, but also, it's not.
Friendship doesn't require that you buy into the other's vision in order to want them around. That's ideology. Perhaps you misunderstood what friendship means? It's ok, the world is in a weird place right now.
Well said - I'd say the hardest part of the job is balancing listening/gathering feedback, and maintaining a core vision for the product that's not just a wish-list of feature requests.
There's a dark art of making someone feel listened to, without necessarily doing anything about it.
Yep, guilty as charged and I look back on this experience and see a lot of things that could have been done differently.
To clarify, the video idea was about new users of the product not internal hires, so the production quality would need to be higher.
These days I'd probably whip up a Retool-style intro video using Loom + Wistia in a day or so.
This thread resonated with me a lot - instead of dividing time into 'good/productive' and 'bad/unproductive', it's worth acknowledging the signal my brain is sending when it wants to scroll HN/Reddit and responding to it directly, instead of scrolling on autopilot and then feeling vaguely guilty/dissatisfied.
The times when I'm able to intentionally take a break feel much more restorative than the times when I'm acting out of avoidance.
Congrats on your launch, and looks really exciting! I'm curious how this compares to tools like Snowplow [1]? I guess Jitsu comes with more sources and destinations out of the box?
Snowplow CEO here. We haven't used Jitsu before but are very familiar with Segment. It looks like Jitsu sits in the Segment product family, along with Rudderstack: basically a Customer Data Platform bundle of simple JSON event tracking, Fivetran-style transactional/SaaS data ingest, and then relaying of data out to various SaaS endpoints plus cloud DWs.
Snowplow started at the same time as Segment (2012) but has evolved along a separate tech tree. Micro-service architecture, cloud native, using Kinesis or Cloud Pub-Sub as the data transit, enrichment framework plus a Confluent-style schema registry supporting very rich and versioned JSON Schema-based event payloads. We are built by and for data platform teams; our open-source behavioral data engine doesn't have a UI (our commercial Behavioral Data Platform does). Hosted trial here https://try.snowplowanalytics.com/
Definitely room for both product families in the market! I'm sure Jitsu will do great.
Looking at Jitsu as a Snowplow familiar person I tried to do a quick browse of their marketing site and couldn’t find anything about their back end architecture. Was immediately thinking that wasn’t the focus here which is concerning when thinking about enterprise scalable data patterns.
Also appreciate you taking the high road “room for both” while the founder of Jitsu says “we are better”
I’ll stick with the product with a solid schema strategy, thank you…
Essentially we're doing same thing. But we build Jitsu to be as simple as possible: you don't need to setup multiple services (just one Docker service!), data goes to DWH almost instantly. And we can pull data from more that 100 external APIs
I really like this analysis! Given this hypothetical income growth, what would the distribution of wealth look like today?
As far as I know, the distribution of wealth is even more skewed in favour of the rich, with some fraction of people at the bottom having 'negative wealth' i.e. more debts than assets. Wealth also seems to have a compounding effect, in that richer people have a higher savings rate and access to better investment opportunities. So would more equal income growth necessarily lead to a more equal wealth distribution, or are there other factors to account for?
He's convinced that he has discovered a grand theory of human connection / relationships / energy / physics, and keeps interrupting in conversation to explain how something I've said is just an example of a deeper pattern.
Sadly, this theory of connection is cutting him off from actual connection - he gets so much validation from AI that he believes he has discovered a new world model. But the people around him aren't bought into the vision (mostly because it is bullshit), and so he ends up even more isolated.