Update: I hope that didn't come across as a detraction; it's cool that you're building this. PostHog is open source, so if you haven't looked at their implementation yet, take a look, maybe it'll be useful to you!

Software vendors should be providing the platform, including any hard-to-build widgets, and "stock" look-and-feel so that the software is usable out of the box, but then the customers should be able to send their product feature requests directly to a chatbot, whether it is embedded into the platform (i.e. same vendor) or rides on top (i.e. different vendor).

This is the new form of UGC. The vendor can turn it into a marketplace within that platform, promote popular 3rd party features in that marketplace, etc.

Similarly, when effort is applied to an open problem, such as the Riemann hypothesis or P v NP, without progress, it "hardens" the problem: it makes the problem feel more daunting to whoever takes a stab at it next.

Andrew Wiles, whose interview also hit the homepage today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075264), couldn't just tackle Fermat's Last Theorem head on, he had to wait until a different, modern problem reduced to it, because FLT had gathered this mystique of unassailability through its 300 years of existence.

A thing I worry about is that as AI transmutes tokens into effort, it'll split the world into two: some problems will yield, making human effort entirely unnecessary, and others will harden to the point where human effort will feel increasingly less worthwhile, because "even AI couldn't solve it". I don't like this. AI is spiky, so I suspect it'll continue having major blind spots, and yet its mere presence will probably have a chilling effect on what would have otherwise been useful human effort.

The main thrust is simple:

- Technology is not good or bad, it is an amplifier of human values and our collective ambitions.

- Those of us who are terrified of where technology is going are actually terrified that humans are, on the net, bad, and technology will amplify that, bringing about dystopia.

- Believing this this is self-fulfilling. By embracing such beliefs you surrender your agency, which is what actually brings about dystopia. If you, instead, have a positive vision of humanity, then you are one of the people that drives society forwards rather than backwards.

We are currently at a moment in history where this message bears repeating.

A lot of things feel unstable, and as a result we have an opportunity to redefine the world in good ways and bad ones. Those who choose to redefine it in ways that are intractably bad will often do so from the point of view of a system observer, not a system participant. This is cope, because in reality everyone, whether they choose to accept it or not, is a system participant.

Persuasive prose, in particular, which is probably the majority of the things that get posted here, is less persuasive to the extent to which it includes obvious "AI tells". Even in the cases where AI is more articulate, (1) the emotional weight of the text feels manipulative when it is clear that the emotions were, at best, "vetted" by a human as opposed to having been produced by one, and (2) I think we have a built-in "bullshit-proximity" sensor, and have recently been trained to expect AI to be more willing to engage in bullshit than humans due to their obsequious disposition. (For the record, I think humans are also full of bullshit, so this one's more of a toss-up.)

Businesses have the incentive to give their users that low friction experience (at the point of need) using already familiar rails (i.e. "install app from app store").

The makers of both iOS and Android treat the ability to "bookmark" a web URL onto your home screen as a power user feature that requires navigating through complex, technical-sounding menus. Does it have to be like that? Of course not. They just have a business interest in pushing users away from the open web and towards their walled gardens.

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Mind you, I'm not saying, "advertising doesn't play a role in this". A clump of well aligned motivations is obviously going to be more powerful than a single isolated motivation. But let's not forget that apps built for non-technical users, which—I cannot stress this enough—IS MOST USERS, benefit greatly from lowest common denominator solutions where they never feel like they have to learn anything to get going.

Anything we make gets to participate in this evolutionary process, even if it sounded dumb at the outset. In fact, doing dumb things is how we get "unstuck" from outdated ways of thinking.

At the same time, access to abundant entertainment establishes in us an unrealistically high baseline that we're destined to fall below whenever we're not actively "plugged in". When you fall below baseline, unrealistic though it may be, you feel lacking, like an addict, and you respond to that feeling exactly like an addict.

It's all too easy nowadays to forget that boredom is good. Adversity is good. Having the time to sit with your thoughts is good. We grow stronger through any form of perseverance, and weaker through any form of surrender.

To use an analogy: imagine your friend is the author of an unfinished book. They die with 19 chapters written, and on their death bed ask you to write the 20th chapter. Assuming you're up to the task, you can only do this well if you take the time to absorb the entirety of what's been written so far.

This is how LLMs work. Context caching is an optimization on top of this, but it has its limits.

I guess the way this could work itself out is that if you prefer a hyper-reality, your genes do not pass on, and someone else's do, and within some number of generations we bounce back in response to evolutionary pressure.

I learned a fun fact in a recent interview of David Reich (by Dwarkesh):

> Every mutation that can occur does occur. There are eight billion people in the world. There are maybe 30 new mutations every generation, so that’s 240 billion new point mutations every generation. There are only three billion DNA bases in the genome, so every mutation that can occur does occur about 100 times every generation. We’re not mutation-limited anymore.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/david-reich-2

Part of becoming an adult is learning how little most people care about that particular goal, and how big the buffet of alternatives is: creating shared meaning, understanding each other's values, building trust, giving/receiving emotional support, processing grief, etc. (Think of this as an upfront taxonomic exercise, followed by lots of in situ calibration exercises.)

Even for something like "decision making", which, naively, one might assume should be grounded in facts, a lot of the "facts" wind up being fuzzy and subjective. This is baked into the social fabric.