"We have a million pieces of content to show you, but are not allowed to editorialize" sounds like a constraint that might just spark some interesting UI innovations.
Not being allowed to use the "feed" pattern to shovel content into users' willing gullets based on maximum predicted engagement is the kind of friction that might result in healthier patterns of engagement.
It reminds me of that Apple ad where a guy just rocks up to a meeting completely unprepared and spits out an AI summary to all his coworkers. Great job Apple, thanks for proving Graeber right all along.
Hrm. Mitchell has been very level-headed about AI tools, but this seems like a rare overstep into hype territory.
"This new thing that hasn't been shipped, tested, proven, in a public capacity on real projects should be the default experience going forwards" is a bit much.
I for one wouldn't prefer a pre-chewed machine analysis. That sounds like an interesting feature to explore, but why does it need to be forced into the spotlight?
This has been my experience even before AI. We are a small bootstrapped company, and we have major competitors with free offerings and much more resources than we have (due to VC funding or other backing). While they've achieved some success, they've come nowhere near close to out-competing us.
Paying for AI is much more accessible than getting venture funding, so it's less of a differentiator. They could pay for more AI than we could, but that's already been true with humans, and it hasn't necessarily helped.
Knowing what to build is still the game. As well as the actual business side of business - building a trusted brand, relationships with customers, smart marketing etc.
But even without that, in a normal threaded channel, you can see all messages in all topics chronologically. IIRC that's the default view when you click a channel in the sidebar.
mother of god. its perhaps time to revisit zulip. now if I could perhaps disable the topic group heading this would make perfect sense and effectively be a chatroom.
Zulip being fully open-source and self-hostable helps this. It's what the Bluesky team have been calling "credible exit", and Zulip has it way more than Bluesky does.
On the other hand, I would love to see more tech companies being co-operatives, where their members get a say in governance. That'd be the ultimate hard-mode for a business that was dedicated to being rugpull-resistant.
Being a cooperative seems (having never run one) harder than being a regular private company. It seems like it would constrain a business from being able to do what it would otherwise want to do. So I think of it as doing business "on hard mode". I think it's socially worth doing, and I aspire to be part of one someday. But I don't think it comes for free, especially in a market where you'll compete with businesses that aren't also playing on hard mode.
I see, I agree with it too. I think that's why many tech projects prefer a "private company owned by a non-profit foundation" structure such as Mozilla and Signal as the examples off the top of my head.
Not being allowed to use the "feed" pattern to shovel content into users' willing gullets based on maximum predicted engagement is the kind of friction that might result in healthier patterns of engagement.
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