When is it Safe to Sleep in a Newly Painted Room?

Google Disabled Add-On That Blocks Politics & News Media from Youtube Recommended Feed

6 Signs Your Home Needs a Fresh Coat of Paint

Brahms, Beethoven - Piano Sonatas

<https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1683656350046232578>

From Elon Musk:

*"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.*

*The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.*

*In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."*

Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

With Reddit users mass protesting over recent changes, many people are looking for alternatives.The question is, are there any serious viable alternatives to Reddit? What would it take for a competing platform to overtake Reddit's market share?Personally I think it will be extremely difficult for any platform to replace Reddit because it is extremely difficult to overcome the chicken and egg problem where nobody cares about your site if no one else is already on it.Whether or not another PC meme dumpster actually manages to replace Reddit doesn't interest me because I'm not 12 anymore. What I've always wanted is a Reddit-like website where spending time on the website and commenting doesn't feel like being the one grown adult amidst grade school kids, where reading comments and engaging in debate expands one's mind rather than feeling like a depressing waste of time. Reddit post and comment quality has been garbage since the early 2010s, and because downright toxic and completely lost the last bit of trust I had during COVID when no one was allowed to question anything about COVID lockdown policies.I have yet to see any Reddit alternative that accomplishes that or even cares to. But high discussion quality is the primary goal of zsync. If this site cannot achieve that, then it has failed and it shouldn't exist.If you believe in this mission, then you're in the right place.The biggest challenge in retaining users is incentivizing the creation of high quality content. I haven't figured out the solution to that yet. But I think that prioritizing high discussion quality as a core part of the mission is a necessary requirement to retaining a high bar of discussion, otherwise history shows that as social media sites grow, the general quality decreases.I'm very anti-censorship and anti-authoritarian. I think that ideally machine learning algorithms would enable users to see more of the type of content they like (of course with the ability to tweak this or opt out so one isn't enslaved to the algorithm).Also in an ideal world the tech and data would be decentralized rather than monopolized by some private entity, but I don't think the tech for that is there yet. The fediverse seems like a lackluster compromise to me because users are still dependent on private servers that can shut you down anytime.Anyways enough rambling. I hope we'll finally start to see some real competition and innovation in this space because Reddit has had way more staying power than it deserves having been such a garbage platform for such a long time outside a few solid niche subreddits.

Reddit Alternatives

Trump's Truth Social has lost $73 million in less than 2 years, new filing says                

This is super inspirational. Long read but well worth it. Also his blog is great and he posts very frequently there and on Twitter [@alexwestco](https://twitter.com/alexwestco)

*"There is no epic launch. No epic event. No going absolutely viral.*

*I built the website with a no-code tool and launched it on ProductHunt out of the blue. If people did indeed subscribe, I would rush and create it before by the 1st of the next month and deliver them the list, as my website stated.*

*No pretend work this time.*

*Even those mockups, soft launches, Reddit posts and cold emails had started to feel like "pretend work" now.*

*Just launch already.*

*The launch went well, and I got ten paying customers. Just like that. With a $29/mo price tag, I was at $290 MRR!*

*Some subscriners had business emails as well. I had officially built a B2B product at last!*

*All and all, I went from no idea to $290/mo in two weeks."*

Alex West (getcyberleads.com, $500k/yr) - Two and a half years of building products [2020]

This article will guide you through the ***process of creating a support agreement*** and explain each clause in detail.

How to Create a Support Agreement

Making this thread so people can introduce each other!

Hi, I'm Jeremy. I made this site last year out of frustration with the comment quality on sites like Reddit, and the anti-crypto rhetoric and lack of "subreddits" on HN. I posted this site to HN last night amidst all the Reddit drama and explained a bit more there so won't rehash everything here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36301337#36304390>

Anyways I'm a semi-employed full stack web developer from the U.S (Virginia originally, but used to live in NYC). Been traveling the world for the last 5 years (47+ countries). Just landed last night in Seoul, South Korea.

I'm currently building <https://mindgarden.app>, a Notion clone I plan to open source that lets you easily publish collections of documents (eg. as a blog or digital garden).

I've been a pretty staunch advocate of universal basic income and remote work for about a decade now, ever since I worked my first office job. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_YMxx095As) I made on wage slavery got 121k views.

These days when I post online it's mostly on Twitter ([@jeremybernier](https://twitter.com/jeremybernier)) and this [crappy Wordpress blog](https://jsavage.xyz/). My personal website is <https://www.jbernier.com/> (I made it myself...well other than borrowing that super cool animation)

Curious to learn about the other visitors here. Also curious to hear your ideas on what it would take to make a better Reddit / HN alternative.

**EDIT: Updated Introductions thread here: [https://zsync.xyz/p/introductions-k5fcffhx](https://zsync.xyz/p/introductions-k5fcffhx)**

Introductions (June 2023)

Hi I'm Jeremy. I'm building this site because I'm not satisfied with other online community type websites and their lack of innovation (see the /about page). The goal is to make a superior, more open, and more decentralized online community.

The site is still in early stages in active development (see the dev masterthread here: https://zsync.xyz/p/zsync-dev-update-masterthread)

Join us if this sounds interesting! Feel free to send me any feedback or reach out directly!

Six Steps To Garage Painting

Contract automation refers to the use of technology and software solutions to automate various aspects of the contract lifecycle, including contract creation, negotiation, approval, execution and management.

Contract Automation: The Ultimate Guide

MetaGPT takes a one line requirement as input and outputs user stories / competitive analysis / requirements / data structures / APIs / documents, etc.

Internally, MetaGPT includes product managers / architects / project managers / engineers. It provides the entire process of a software company along with carefully orchestrated SOPs.

MetaGPT - Given one line Requirement, return PRD, Design, Tasks, Repo

Mitch McConnell escorted away from cameras after freezing  during a news conference

The Latest Trends Driving Demand for Home Improvement

 A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday. Then he gets back to work 

[Fable](https://venturebeat.com/games/fables-the-simulation-lets-you-build-a-society-of-ais-based-on-character-nfts/), a San Francisco startup running a big project dubbed [The Simulation](https://venturebeat.com/games/the-simulation-by-fable-makes-everyone-robert-ford/), has released Showrunner AI technology, dubbed SHOW-1, which can generate new episodes of TV shows

Paper: <https://fablestudio.github.io/showrunner-agents/>

AI-Generated South Park Episodes (by Fable)

Solid thread by Sam Hogan <https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan>

6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years. 

With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case. 

Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising. 

Let’s start with the losers. 

Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised &gt;$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money. 

The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy. 

Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own 
@LangChainAI
 and 
@trychroma
 infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way). 

In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round. 

(This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.)

This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity. 

There are two causes for this:
1\. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended.
2\. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to 
@elonmusk
 reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen.

Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates \~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas."

These are the 
@levelsio
's and 
@dannypostmaa
's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition.

This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing. 

LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing. 

I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology. 

The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch. 

A few companies I would put in this group are:
1\. https://cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written.
2\. https://harvey.ai - AI for legal practices
3\. https://runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor

This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for.

If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious.

Lets recap:
1\. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling.
2\. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups.
3\. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets.
4\. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns.

It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see.

And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category. If you're a founder in the same boat, I'd love to talk. My DMs are open.

If you enjoyed this post, don't forget to follow me, Sam Hogan. I share one long-form post per week covering AI, startups, open-source, and more. 

That's all folks! Thanks for reading. See you next week.

```markdown
```

AI Startup Market Outlook

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Digital Nomad Residence in Antigua

&gt; "There will be no programmers in five years.” -Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI (Stable Diffusion)

I agree with this, except I’d put the timeframe more conservatively around 10 years.

I think in 5 years, most software development will be done by computers. Humans will prompt AIs that generate the code. AI at that point will be able to work within existing codebases and implement trivial feature requests on its own, detect and fix bugs, and debug itself.

In 10 years, AI will unquestionably be superior to humans in software development – just like AI is already better than humans at chess and Go. Handwritten code will not only be considered useless, but writing code by hand will be considered bad practice because humans will be considered less reliable and more error-prone than the machine.

A “software engineer” in 2033 will be more of a CTO-like managerial position where that person is in charge of the tech of an organization, but they’re delegating the tasks to AIs. Companies will need less and less software engineers as the AI advances and ultimately displaces humans. Of course there will be engineers building and maintaining the AI, researching, and working at the bleeding edge, but overall there will be significantly less demand for human engineers. What few jobs remain will be higher demanding since AI will only improve – and a human has to be able to do what an AI can’t in order to be useful – a bar that will only get higher and higher until it is eventually unattainable.

With humans rendered economically obsolete to machines, governments will have no choice but to implement a universal basic income in order to prevent mass poverty and chaos. Unfortunately a lot of workers will be displaced and people will suffer before governments implement UBI due to the enormous capitalistic brainwashing against UBI.

### Why this time is different

The reason technological advancement will actually result in net job destruction this time is because technology is getting better than humans and approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can reason, and thus solve problems it hasn’t specifically been programmed to. In the past, technology had to be built to solve a specific problem in order for the human to be rendered obsolete (eg. the loom), but AGI can solve any problem. As we approach AGI, the only value that humans can provide will be that which AGI is not yet capable of solving. There is no upper bound on how smart AIs can get, but humans have a clear biological ceiling.

### AI will beat humans at software development

Just like AI is superior to humans at games like chess and Go, there’s no reason that AI won’t reign supreme when it comes to programming. AI can already pass Google’s coding interview, the bar exam, MCAT, etc. at a speed that no human could even come close to – like a flashlight competing with a sloth.

Humans look at ChatGPT now and laugh at its often nonsensical answers and hallucinations. Yes, but you’re looking at the equivalent of one of the first computers in the 1950s, or dialup internet in the 90s, a floppy disk with 1MB capacity, or mobile in 2007. Remember, ChatGPT was only released November 30, 2022. OpenAI’s Code Interpreter was released in beta last week to ChatGPT Plus users, an AI that can execute Python code and that you can upload files to. We’re in the first inning of an AI arms race, and at the speed at which things are progressing, it’s pretty clear that AI will be drastically more developed even just another 6 months from now.

As a software engineer, I have full awareness that most of what I know that makes me valuable will be obsolete within a decade because AI will be able to do it faster, cheaper, and better.

The stages of AI progress in software engineering look something like this:

1. Chatbots tell you the answer, for example by giving you code, which you then need to copy & paste in the right files – adjusting to fit within your codebase.
2. AI assistants write the code directly inside your codebase (eg. like “autocomplete” except with a task more complex than simply predicting the end of the word you’re typing)
3. AI assistants/agents execute the code, and debug itself to correct any errors

The reality is that the vast majority of dev work has already been done before, and thus is very trivial to replace with AI.

Humans basically get paid by arbitraging knowledge and producing some output. Software engineers have knowledge of tools, libraries, frameworks, commands, version control, infrastructure, data structures & algorithms, networking, APIs, etc. and use this to write computer programs and create software.

Search engines, Stackoverflow, open source, internet forums, tutorials, Youtube, books, etc. democratized much of this knowledge – but still require a human to research and utilize this information to create software by writing computer code.

AI can do all of this far superior to humans because AI has all of the world’s knowledge, and can execute at the speed of light.

Even if AI code were to be inferior to human code – which by the end of the decade certainly won’t be the case (just like AI beats humanity’s best chess and Go players), humans are still going to be rendered mostly obsolete. Businesses don’t care about code, they want solutions that improve their bottom line. If an AI can solve the problem with half the performance and code quality in a couple minutes, is available 24/7, and only costs pennies/dollars, vs. a team of engineers with $200k/yr salaries taking a month, only available during business hours, and with vacation time, maternity/paternity leave, and other liabilities – who do you think is going to win out? Remember the AI is only going to get better, faster, and more knowledgeable, while humans are biologically limited in work output, and there will be a point where humans no longer have the edge.

I think it’s fairly obvious at this point that AI will supplant humans, but **most people are drastically underestimating how quickly this is all going to happen because most humans struggle to understand exponential growth.**

I don’t have a crystal ball, but here are some rough conservative predictions I’ll make off the top of my head:

- 2024-07-14 – AI agents can create codebases, write code in existing codebases directed by prompts (eg. “add this feature”, “create this API endpoint that does this”), and debug itself (eg. detect compilation/runtime errors and patch them). The tech will be slow and awful at first so engineers will initially laugh at it claiming they’re not worried about their jobs.
- 2025-7-14 (2 years from now) – These AI agents will start becoming reasonable enough to where they’ll automate the more mundane / trivial work. People will still have to know what to prompt to get the right results, and modify and fine tune the resulting AI-generated code, but AI will start to take the driver’s seat. Instead of the default being for the human to start tackling the problem and ask the AI for help when in need of assistance, it’ll start to become expected to let the AI tackle the problem, and bring in a human when that fails.
- 2026-7-14 (3 years from now) – AI agents start becoming competent enough to where their belonging is no longer questioned. Everyone is using them in some capacity. AI is the driver, but humans are still necessary to direct them and handle the edge cases where they fail. Typical dev work like building trivial web apps and APIs is a commodity at this point and nobody is doing that by hand.
- 2027-7-14 (4 years from now) – AI is the norm. At this point as an engineer you’re either working on building the AI itself, or you’re using the AI. The job of an engineer has evolved from less hand-writing code, to more of a managerial CTO type position, except instead of delegating to other managers and engineers, one is delegating to AI agents.
- 2028-7-14 (5 years from now) – So much human work has been made obsolete by AI that all governments in the modern world have implemented universal basic income.

### How to position yourself

Tech was always a rapidly evolving field that required constantly staying on top of the latest advancements, but that’s only going to exponentially increase.

- Stay ahead of the curve on AI advancement. Ensure you’re leveraging the most advanced tools.
- Don’t be overly married or emotionally invested in any one programming language, library, framework, or technology. Assume it will get displaced sooner than you think.
- Learn architecture and systems design. As we move up the ladder of abstraction, an engineer’s focus and responsibility will be more on deciding *what* to implement, rather than actually implementing the thing. Individual contributors (ICs) will become more like managers directing AIs.
- Stay humble. Assume that everything you know will be irrelevant in a few years.
- Either seek to become more of a CTO-like generalist, entrepreneur, or pick a specialty/niche (eg. machine learning, distributed systems, product, etc.) to stay at the forefront of. If you specialize, realize that you’re competing with AI.
- Get your government representatives to implement a universal basic income so that AI advancement can become unquestionably a good thing for society, instead of the current system where it results in the masses losing their livelihoods and an arms race for an ever-dwindling pot of human jobs as robots overtake us. This can either result in the freedom and leisure utopia that Keynes envisioned, or mass poverty coupled with enormous wealth inequality – and inaction will lead to the latter.