I've got all kinds of useful tools that do helpful things, like check to make sure Amazon hasn't lost a bunch of my inventory or suddenly deindexed my product from search. These sorts of things happen without warning from time to time and are trivially fixable if you catch them, but you have to be constantly monitoring 10 different things to catch anything that could go wrong in a timely fashion.

I've similarly got an inventory/cashflow management system that's deterministic that would be fine, but some of my other tools, like one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/Whatsapp/Gmail supplier convos to keep my order status board updated, is finicky. I wouldn't be able to repair that once it broke.

For some tasks, I'd have to go back to freelancers. At this point, when I take over a new brand and want to refresh images or want to A/B test new ones with an existing brand, I can do that entirely with image gen. No AI would just send me back to Upwork.

For other tasks, I'd just have to do them myself. Right now when I acquire a brand, I have a Claude skill that runs through all of the Amazon search and ads reports to find the key search terms, analyzes the text of the listing and proposes updates to make sure we're hitting the ones that matter. I used to do that myself, but it takes somewhere between 2-10 hours depending how many products we're talking about.

The biggest loss would be the inability to expand. I started out just buying Amazon-only brands because Amazon provides a crazy amount of infrastructure that enables me to run a lot of them by myself. My most recent acquisition came with a Shopify site that had minimal sales plus a Meta ad account the guy who sold me the brand had done a little experimentation with. A year ago, I would've just discarded those, since my time is the biggest bottleneck. It takes a lot of time to run your own site and Meta ads, so it makes more sense for me not to bother and instead just make more Amazon-only acquisitions.

But now I'm having a great time really pushing Claude and ChatGPT to do most of the work. I redesigned the site more or less by just having ChatGPT do research on competitors and best practices, then having Claude run with that. That took maybe eight total hours of work.

I'm spinning up an enormous amount of creative to test on Meta, and I had ChatGPT research and spec all of the kinds of landing pages that are worth trying. Claude implemented them and set up the ads using Meta's ads APIs. I got all of that done yesterday.

So yeah, basically if I couldn't use AI any more, I'd get back to the original thesis of my business, which is buying small brands at reasonable prices and operating them as leanly as possible. It still works, but it'd be a lot less fun and profitable.

Silly obnoxious social proof popup is clearly on the ethical side in my view (my issue was never ethics, just that I personally find them very annoying). I'm not misleading anyone (it does in fact show real purchases) or forcing anyone to do anything. If that's the difference between you buying or not, I still feel perfectly comfortable that you made the choice of your own free will.

I ended up trying it. Boosted conversion rate meaningfully. Worth the price I pay in mild self-loathing.

Chesterton's popup, I guess.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288479

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

But you're right that it'd make sense to have an aggregate view on the level above (e.g. https://the-dwell.com/anchored). I shall go command Fable to figure out all the places where this would be appropriate and add it.

It started getting some search impressions and clicks, so I decided to launch the next 9 of the top 10 ideas that ChatGPT came up with for this type of site - won't post all of them here, but https://the-dwell.com/ (data on ship and truck dwell times/port congestion) is doing the best thus far from a traffic perspective.

First I had it send me a weekly analysis of the GA4/GSC data to see what could be improved about the site, but I've since automated that - each week it reviews traffic and search queries, then updates articles or creates new ones to meet demand. So now in theory I have a full engine to launch these sites and have them self-improve over time. Kinda neat to see all of that being done autonomously.

The thing that these sites really need are some backlinks, so I'm thinking through how to get those. I had ChatGPT generate some lists of places that might find real value in linking to these sorts of things, but I'm unwilling to let an AI agent start emailing people. I'm going to try sending some emails to some of the places that seem like a really good fit, see what the response is, and if it's good try to figure out how to do that on a larger scale without AI email spam.

I get why they used questions where AI models fail, but it also really reduces the value of this study. Nobody is really asking AI the color of a team's uniform in a movie, and if they do and confidently get it wrong, it just doesn't matter at all.

Asking trivial questions also feels like it would affect the rate at which people are willing to confidently say things that are wrong. If you ask me some question of pointless trivia and I ask ChatGPT, I'll probably just repeat the answer because who cares. If you ask me something even mildly important and I ask ChatGPT, I'll either verify the information before I repeat it to you, or I'll qualify that I looked it up with ChatGPT and didn't verify. But some things are just so unimportant that they don't even warrant the disclaimer.

The host made an offhand mention that there's probably a bunch of other similar sites that could be created with all the of useful but difficult-to-access government data out there. That sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a whirl!

Working on a few of them, including The Waterline (https://the-waterline.com/) for water info for the western US, The Scramble (https://the-scramble.com/) for egg prices, and The Dwell (https://the-dwell.com/) for container ship dwell times.

All pretty fascinating topics to learn about, plus it's been interesting to see how much of the website setup I can fully delegate to Claude. With Cloudflare to buy domains and put the sites up, a Google Service Account with access to Google Search Console and GA4 to create those properties and a Buttondown API key for weekly email sending, it's almost all hands off for me. Though it refuses to take control of the browser and create a new Buttondown account, which I was surprised is a red line.

> And when the brain encounters something it can’t process efficiently, it doesn’t simply adapt. Brain imaging studies cited in the review show it generates stronger neural responses in visual areas, consumes more oxygen, and in some people produces pain, distortion, or worse.

If the studies are of a person's initial exposure to these sorts of conditions, then that doesn't tell us anything about whether people adapt over time (and to be clear I have not read all the studies, but given the limitations listed I'm comfortable assuming they're not incredibly robust until someone tells me otherwise). I suspect the article's use of the word "adapt" is not the same as mine; from the context when they say the brain doesn't adapt they just mean that it shows a response at the time of the particular exposure they're measuring.

> This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectively measure susceptibility.

Flickering lights are about the only thing I saw in here that seem like they'd be a problem in the long term. Everything else your brain just adjusts to over time and stops noticing. Maybe the first few days in an office with bright colors would be slightly distracting, but after that you just stop seeing them. I would guess that a lot of the studies they reviewed probably tested people's reactions to these things when they saw them one time, not the hundredth time.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847672

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent.

One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out).

On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name.

One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there.

So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763049

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

In my experience, Claude Code is vastly better for doing tasks, writing code, etc., but Claude.ai is better for analysis and high-level planning. When I'm working on a new project, I've started using the latter to do the initial planning, get feedback and draw up a spec, which then goes to Claude Code.

For this project, I probably would've done something similar - use CC to get whatever you need out of the image files, but have Claude.ai do the actual review/diagnosing.

Either way, I often think about how far behind most of the world is in really understanding AI. The overwhelming majority of people would never guess that you get vastly different outcomes from the exact same model in a different harness (tbf most people don't know what a harness is). I spend hours every day using AI for a broad range of tasks and still feel like I know a fraction of what there is to know. I haven't even tried the new GLM model (or really any of the open source Chinese ones of the most recent generation). With so many people thinking that the free version of ChatGPT is SOTA AI, a lot of folks are in for a very rude awakening at some point soon.

Also, the comparison chart is just dishonest. People didn't e-sign proposals before your product? Come on.