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Herd Market

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The world we live in today is a herd market. The moment someone finds gold, the herd rushes down the same path. We’re all eating the same dish, just in different flavors. It’s like a chef discovering pasta. The instant people fall in love with little wheat cylinders, every chef puts pasta on their menu. One makes spirals, one makes tiny cylinders, another makes massive cylinders. The shape changes - but it’s all pasta. The key is, it’s the same underlying ‘unlock’: people like wheat in shapes. And that’s exactly what’s happening in tech. At the scale of large companies, we have 10 companies building the same LLM. We have 5 apps serving the same short form content. Zoom in to individual indie hackers and small companies. The moment this simple habit tracker app started making money - the market was flooded with ‘simple’ habit trackers. Same with this AI Calorie tracking app, and the same with my Lifehacks app that I built years ago. Zoom in further to individual content creators. Dif...
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Notes from Visiting Munich's Biggest Robotics Automation Trade Fair

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I spent a day at Automatica, one of the world's largest robotics automation + photonics trade shows hosted in Munich once every two years. Here are my notes from it: Hooooly cow there are so many companies in the world! There were about 900 robotics automation companies, and 1200 photonics companies (!!). I really liked stepping out of my little software world to see that there is so much more tangible/physical world tech going on in the world. The robotics automation world seems to be split into 3 parts: The arm manufacturers - they make the arms, and sell them to system integrators The robot fingers (or any special grip, suction cup etc) manufacturers - they sell to system integrators too The system integrators - they go out to find customers, beverage factories, food industries and the like that need automation for specific use cases The system integrators operate on finding niches, and there are 2 types of niches: 1. Country / localization as a niche.  "We serve customers ...
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AI is useful and scary good

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Me: I have a png. black lines with transparent background. Can you help write python code to make the black lines slightly more thick please? Claude: Yeah, here's the python file.  Me: Ah, can you just run it for me? I've attached the file image, it's a turtle. Claude: I've run into an error. I can't find the file's name. (keeps thinking) It seems like I can't directly access the uploaded file through the analysis tool. This might be a limitation of how files are handled in this environment . Let me think of alternative approaches: I could create an HTML artifact that allows the user to upload the image and process it in the browser I could provide them with JavaScript code they can run locally I think the best approach would be to create an interactive HTML artifact that lets them upload their image and see the result processed in real-time. Me: Claude: Here's the tool you can upload your file to. (and then I upload the turtle) -- Yikes, this is good....
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Claude Code is SO good!

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Claude Code blew my mind. It is SO good! I spent about a day with Claude Code fixing up old bugs on my website that I never made time to fix. The fixes are all in my private repo, but they were all the same bugs listed in the public one here . What blew my mind is my mental shift from coding things myself to just asking it to do them for me. 10 minutes in and I stopped writing code myself. It still takes some back and forth, and it doesn't yet get everything right, but the fact that I didn't have to write code myself was a big shift. What Claude Code did Made my website responsive.  My website had a whole lot responsiveness problems . CSS is a tedious little monster and so I never got myself to learn Bootstrap and other front end frameworks. With Claude Code, I just had to tell it in English what I wanted it to do, and it did them exactly as I wanted them. No more CSS for me! Added Dark Mode. I've always wanted dark mode. With Claude Opus 4 it basically three shotted it,...
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Notes from the Zurich AI Conference 2025

These are notes from when I went to The Zurich AI conference 2025. This was the first time I've attended a conference solely for networking. Here's what I learned/experienced: The people Of the ±200 people that attended, I interacted with very few product/startup people, researchers / engineers, and especially no engineers from big tech. There were primarily 2 types of people:  Business hunters / leads of consultancies and agencies, Management at traditional businesses (insurance, data companies). It seemed like many traditional businesses are actively trying to find use cases for AI, and so when I asked them what they're doing with AI I got one of two responses: It's confidential. Long complicated sentences that I couldn't make simple sense of. This might be naive, but it sounded to me like they're forcing AI use cases or trying to shoe horn it into their businesses, rather than having a solid business use case for it. I live in a small ecosystem at Big Tech. I...
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Shake It Up | Time to leave BigTech

tl;dr: I am a senior software engineer, and I know I can easily do this work for the rest of my life. So, it's time to shake it up. - Big tech "levels" people, putting them in categories of seniority. I've reached the "terminal" level at BigTech - the Senior Software Engineer. A place where a significant number of software engineers spend their lives. I know for a fact that I can do this work at this level for the rest of my life. The tech industry has* jobs at this level. Given where I am today, a 30 year old with limited responsibilities, I have the freedom to shake it up.  Join a startup, change my role, start all over, work as a barista, work at a farm. The worst that I can do is stay where I am, that is, continue with my current team. Slightly better is to change within BigTech, but I'm pretty confident it'll be the same problems any team I switch to. So, I must shake it up. Do something where I don't know what that future will be.  I can al...
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Growth at BigTech

Growth at my time at BigTech meant several things to me: Become the person everyone in my working radius knows. Be responsible for a good chunk of work, and in turn get promoted for it. Learn how a big org works, and learn to be effective in them. Eventually be in the room that leaders make decisions. Based on these metrics for growth, here's what I learned you need: Visibility. Visibility Visibility. Assuming you're already a top tier engineer, a team lead, and a go-to person in your project, here's how you get visibility: Be where leaders are. Don't try to play the ladder game from a remote office. It's futile. It's like trying to climb an extra greasy ladder. You will eventually get up there, but no one will recognize nor reward you for having climbed the greasy variant. Look where leaders are looking. Don't work on things you think are important. Don't work on things your users think are important. Work on things leadership thinks are important. T...
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P(ai)r Programming

Over the last 2 months with Claude Pro I've reached the point where I work with AI the way I work with humans. I'm working on a fairly non-standard app - it's got a long living foreground service and interacts with the device from that service. And I'm surprised how helpful it has been for this non-standard use case. Simple tasks First, for simple tasks, I tell the AI what to do and ask it explicitly not to write code. We first review what it's going to do before letting it code. It takes us about 2 to 3 iterations, and then it codes. For most tasks, it's really good. The reviewing started as a way to work around Claude's tight token limit, but now it's just a really good tool to make sure Claude and I are on the same page. This is exactly what I do at work with my team. Every meeting is us writing high level bullets of what they will work on, and once we're on the same page, I just review their code - which usually takes them 1-2 days to come back w...
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AI: Asteroid Incoming

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Before we know it, everything around us is going to change. Here are my notes as of Jan 2025: We live in a world where computers can communicate more naturally, professionally, and even compassionately than most people. Computers have become sorcerers of words, and yet everyone is going about their lives as if nothing has happened. It feels like AI is that Earth shattering asteroid headed straight towards us from the movie Don't Look Up. If you haven't see the movie, please watch it. It’s a brilliant take on human nature. Half the people don’t believe AI will change anything. A few are sounding the alarm. And politicians? They’re doing what they do best—grabbing more power. Unfortunately we live in a hyper world, and people are tired of hypes. In 5 years, we've had Web3 Crypto NFTs AI may be hype, but for good reason. There's substance here. Of course, Rule 34 of the Internet prevails. I find it amusing that there aren't killer AI applications yet, except search and...
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What am AI to do?

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What am (A)I to do?
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