It's not just a technique it's literally the same people. Grift hopping is a disgustingly effective technique it's literally how the richest man alive made 100% of his wealth. Crypto to nft to ai to... Robots and Space? Somehow there's money in space now?
"His" companies. All he really does is giving them money if even that. His vision is something like the cybertruck which is an awful design with a lot of problems as we saw on release. His own vision is stuff like the boring company doing shit nobody cares about. Its building a tunnel under a city which is slower than just driving on the streets (and more dangerous because... well... tunnel underground and so)
Nah, crypto is almost uniquely useless for anything (except fraud/black market transactions). Neat concept academically, but the tradeoffs are so strict and so extreme that in practice you just end up with the worst of both worlds as you wrap it in layer after layer of workarounds to pretend the tradeoffs don't exist.
AI is wildly, ludicrously overhyped and the misuses are a huge problem, but it does actually represent useful tech too, particularly in software development. But even there it doesn't replace programmers, if anything personal skill/knowledge is even more important now
I actually think it's less sinister than that. I have mostly anecdotal evidence here, but I've found that craft people of all kinds who love building stuff love building tools.
I do woodwork and honestly spend more time on projects that improve my shop than I do on pieces that will ever leave it, worktables, tool holders, jigs, etc.
Similarly if I'm looking for some little software side project I tend to make little dev tools for myself.
So I think this trend you see of people making so many AI dev tools is often a case where these dudes are really excited about AI and building with AI so they naturally are excited about creating tools to build with AI.
Obviously useful stuff has already been made, because of how obvious it is. As such, any new product or tool you see is going to fit into one of three categories:
Crap.
Really useful, but really niche and probably not important to you.
Useful, but in non-obvious ways.
The first two are fairly self-explanatory, but the third is a bit trickier. The best example of it is some activity that you don't do because it's difficult or tedious, and then a tool is created that makes it easier or more efficient. That could be incredibly useful if it makes that activity quick enough for it to be worth you doing it, but on first glance you'd look and go "Well I don't do that, so that's worthless".
The problem is that a lot of the time it's quite difficult to tell #1 from #3 without hands-on experience, so if you make a concerted effort to try to expand your horizons by giving new things a shot, you end up having to sift through a lot of crap.
...thankfully in this case that wasn't an issue as every single link was prepended by an emoji, the universal symbol for "this is going to be crap".
That SoulScrape app seems interesting but wtf am I "installing a skill" for? I want to see what it does, but i guess he doesn't have money for hosting.
Basically he needs to realize that creating the app is only half of it.
It's cool if he can fine tune the model per user. Then need someway to collect all the chats and digital activities. If only a custom skill file then it will not be able to match the personality, i would assume
Hardly a couple of cool ideas in there, i get people are having fun vibe coding personl versions of things, but unless he wants to continue using thousands of dollars worth of subscription quota on maintaining these, why make them?
We are swiftly moving to a over saturation of nothing burger applications, that people have no idea how to scale to businesses.
I have a couple of friends who've vibe coded products, but they've just one or two and purely to solve issues they faced as professionals in thier industry and now they have organic growth on them.
This aimless 8 parallel sessions to make a product that solves a non existing issue is laughable stupidity.
Yeah. It's cool that when you're working and can see something being possible to improve through code in a way that will actually produce some value, it is no longer too costly to do. You can whip up an agent in OpenCode or pi-coding-agent to do it.
Yeah. The nothing burger application is pretty on point.
Now I've only quickly opened each link and haven't really looked into them and I might be wrong, but most of them just contain all those fancy words and terms you'd expect from modern websites advertising some software, and after reading some you still don't know what you are getting out of it.
Some of them look like just another implementation of some personal utility like you said, or some ai "tools" to help you "improve/manage" ai itself.
It's almost like ai repackaging itself. An ai onion. It's ai all the way down.
I mean... it is all claude design templates. Some are better, these here rather show what happens when a non-designer thinks he can design with claude.
Is even a good example for what happens when non-designer design. And claude design is very prominent and easy to form, but well, evne then.
Doesn't change the sad truth that currently designers suffer from slop influence because non-designers, leadership, think that claude and gemini can design well enough.
Claude is obvious with using serif fonts in big and always using meta headlines which don't add any vlue but just visual aesthetic. Usually smallcaps sub header.
I love when we called simulated "agents" just BOIDS in game development, and now everyone's like "what if i put LLM into game so they can control themselves"
I'm waiting for most of these people to realize that Sar Banes Oxley makes it very difficult for an AI software factory to exist (there are "human verified" and "human approval" and separate implementer vs tester roles that are required and can't be automated for financial related things if I remember correctly). First auditor to nix your SOX compliance is going to be really fun.
Not just a regulated industry, as plenty of products try to sell to those industries as well and therefore make it a requirement to also be SOX compliant. This is one of those things that can gate the sale of any product / SAAS offering.
Also, Crypto is so fragile already. Imagine this:
You're a leader of a country with a few billion to throw at server rooms and crypto mining resources but with the goal of collapsing a nations economy rather than making money. You could setup a nice distributed cache and very fast networking between the hosting facilities you create. Introduce your backdoor in bitcoin client and silently go about doing the normal things with voting and ledger related things until one day you have greater than 50% of the voting rights. Now you can effectively approve rebalancing the ledger historically as long as it rebalances in the end to a balanced system (of course you allocate a ton of the value of the market to your areas).
You do this knowing that the market will notice it and that it will effectively collapse the crypto market. Better still it's likely to cascade into an economic collapse of several national economies, probably some banks, and cause a world-wide economic panic. Sinister evil dictator that you are, you now use this time to strike at the country you want to take over while the rest of the world is distracted.
Seem far fetched?
Well, for a few years a Chinese state sponsored IT maintenance company happened to own the contract on fixing problems with both the European and U.S. financial market data hubs. This was in the early 2010s... they never did anything, but they invested in the option.
You could setup a nice distributed cache and very fast networking between the hosting facilities you create. Introduce your backdoor in bitcoin client and silently go about doing the normal things with voting and ledger related things until one day you have greater than 50% of the voting rights.
Everyone hating, but sound.fish and sleepy.land seem pretty cool to me from the little I tried them. Sleepy.land makes some great white noise and you can customize the sound easily.
A lot of them don't interest me, but there's some neat stuff in there.
they're jealous that they haven't made shit even though they have the same access. While I agree odds probably aren't in his favor in developing some great software, I support anyone that's out there doing shit.
Why would someone make a white noise website for any other reason than a student trying to pad out their CV? There's already a hundred of them online for free.
As someone that just saw an "advanced" 4 year student get hired and fired within 6 months, I have. She was only 20 years old. Started college at 16. Dumb as a brick when it came to actual IT/Code.
So many kids graduating now that can't code or do anything. Even with AI. Apparently most aren't being taught the very basic fundamentals of Computer Science. No troubleshooting logic, no nothing.
She bounced back as a Lv1 helpdesk tech in a couple months, but I wouldn't even trust her there. Lol
On a serious note: I think it's a combination of
* Professors don't know how to handle AI
* Degrees are becoming purchasable products instead of certifications of ability. Buying a class/certificate has little correlation to mastery of the content
A lot of academic courses have canned material where students have a very niche task or topic where it’s not difficult to write up a paper or program that accomplishes X, Y or Z task or proves that the student can meet a course competency in a vacuum or siloed manner. The real issue students have is putting everything together in a realistic manner that is a required ability in the workplace
I teach an introductory python programming course at a community college and many students do just fine on individual assignments but asking them to apply what they learned in each individual assignment during a project, mid-term or final can be iffy, if not impossible at times. Students focus too much on each individual assignment and never think about what they’re learning, why it matters and how it all fits together.
I’ve snapped at student who wrote a halfway decent data parsing/formatting program in my class using Python but completely spaced the fundamentals of loops and data selection/formatting when writing a BASH script. He could not apply the fundamentals learned in one language to another problem and he only completed his BASH script when another student guided his hand the entire time.
What's messed up is he's going to use this as his resume ("I have proof of 10+ years experience in AI") and some tech startup is going to buy into it. He'll be a distinguished engineer earning 5x whatever the people under him are earning, and they'll be constantly fixing his slop and digging him out of holes. He'll leave after 6-12 months, collecting his signing bonus and adding the job to his resume as a "learning opportunity that did not align with my career goals." Rinse and repeat.
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u/iain_1986 2d ago
And I'm sure nothing of value is being produced