It is a constant lure products and tools have to create the feeling of sensemaking. People want (pejorative) tools that show visualizations or summaries, without thinking about the particular visual/summary artifact is useful, actionable or accurate!

Made in wordpress over a decade ago, and wordpress gradually enshittified. It's been a long-running wish to switch to something else, but it's never been important enough relative to other things I could be doing.

Now, I'm bootstrapping (in stealth) a B2B service with 3 employees. The basic service exists. To continue funding, I can get VC investment, or I can get business customers to pay up-front development costs, to customize to their use case.

Let's say for a normal customer, the service costs $X / month. I want to write a deal with a business customer where they pay $Y up front, for us to build the service for their use case. Maybe in return, we discount their usage cost: * their cost is $ 0.5 * X per month for Y/X months, OR * their cost is $ 0.5 * X per month for (1.5 * Y/X) months (like a loan with interest), OR * their cost is $ 0.7 * X in perpetuity (permanent discount), OR * no discount at all, and we the cost to the customer as early access.

If a company is offering a discount, sale, coupon, etc., they've done the math and determined the reduction in revenue to them is offset by your increased likelihood to purchase, or share in your mind. (Algorithmic) discounts are a technology in the sense that they're part of modern data science-driven consumerism. Just like going to a casino, the house is always going to win. So, I offer no mind share to these. I've bought many games from Steam sales I don't play, for an innocuous example.

I'm not going to throw out a coupon if it's thrust into my hand (e.g. Wonderville, a gaming bar I love in Brooklyn hands out wooden drink tickets and one is in my wallet.)

The problem goes like: "Ah, I remember having a conversation with someone about [algorithm], then recording an important insight. Let's find that."

This isn't a problem solved by an LLM. The blocker is that there isn't a way to run search code on all this plain text.

Services:

* Email (gmail, synced to my macOS disk with Apple Mail)

* Dropbox

* Notion

* Google Drive

* Obsidian

* Github

* Apple Notes

* Discord chats

* Trello

* My own blog

If I had everything synced to my mac's disk, maybe I could do a plaintext search there. However Spotlight's indexing is always incomplete and misses obvious files. My Dropbox is so large I don't sync it all locally.

Some services I no longer use, like Evernote. When I archived this service, I exported everything and moved it into my Dropbox. So, if I search Dropbox, it also searches old notes from Evernote. There's no way I could be doing this for all services I actively use.

The way I search now is I guess the service the result is most likely in, and search there. When finding no results, I search the next most likely service, ad nauseum For my own blog, I used to use Google's site search, but I recently discovered this was incomplete: https://bsky.app/profile/dustinfreeman.bsky.social/post/3m5l5tto6pk27

I could imagine a solution where there's some 3rd party service that has access keys to all my services. But, let's be real, that's a huge amount of trust. Also, my access to all these services is 2FA'd with expiry, and so I'd be continually re-upping auth to this third party service. At that point, it makes sense to just do search how I do it now.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45990113

Points: 3

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