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Correspondingly, if you are beginning the project, you should not make choices that will result in failure.
And if the moment's gone, well... that's the way it goes. That's not the same as "choosing to fail."
The complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development.
Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together.
This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure.
The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.
Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.
The alternative is to listen to less filtered/signalless stuff (which isn't hard - bandcamp new releases lists (or my bandhiking app) or even their trending charts which seem to be unpopular enough that it's not entirely controlled by marketing (lots of unlistenable stuff makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.
Some of it will suck.
Don't confuse the people playing the marketing game to try to win big with the whole world out there.
Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon.
I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually liking.
You have to be willing to sift through junk. Which I think is hard for many to accept. However, the algorithms are often giving you junk anyway. Kind of no way around it.
Still, in that 300, there was about ~30 albums that I hadn't hear of that I ended up really liking.
Took awhile to sift through them all, which is why I haven't done it again, but it was a fun experiment all the same.
"There are only two ways to find good new music - listen to a lot of bad new music, or outsource your listening choices to someone else - and the second doesn't protect you against the first."
Outsourcing your listening choices can look like lots of different things: that friend who goes to lots of concerts and always has an amazing new band they've heard recently, radio DJs, algorithmic suggestions like Pandora or Spotify, the Billboard Top 100, your local bar's live band choices, the Grammy Awards, going to clubs where DJs play new music, etc - but ultimately they come down to the same thing, letting someone else decide what you listen to.
And while my pithy version mentions "bad new music", included in there is anything which is not "good new music", including lots of mediocre or inoffensive stuff which doesn't rise to the level of being "good".
I first thought about it in the context of music, as I was looking for new songs to choreograph to, but it's true of discovering any new products where the quality is a matter of taste or subjective assessment.
- Want to find new food you like? You either eat lots of weird foods, or you find someone (a friend, a food blogger, the NYT food reviews, your mum, anyone) to recommend you try something they've discovered.
- Want to read a good new book? Either pick up random books, most of which will be trash, until you find something you like, or find someone to filter down the books (a small bookshop which carefully curates its titles, a library's recommended reading list, the best sellers lists, Oprah's book club, etc).
- New TV shows? Watch many bad shows until you find a good one, or wait for recommendations or awards nights.
- Restaurants, clothing designers, shopping malls, Youtube channels, content creators, movies, directors, websites, etc - the story is the same.
The only places where this does not apply, is in contexts which have objective measures which can be used as filters: if you want a new monitor, you can go to any store and filter or sort the options they have by objective measures like "display size", "resolution", "response time", "weight", "connectivity" etc, and find new products which meet the criteria. This is still dependent on someone to go and collate the information about all the products, but you are not forced to try lots of incorrectly-sized monitors to find one which optimises your preferences. Similar for microcontrollers, CPUs, car trailers, light bulbs, etc.
But even things with objective measures often have subjective qualities which have to be assessed - you can filter laptops on weight, RAM, clock speed, and storage, but how it feels to hold, whether the keys have a nice feel, whether the machine overheats too quickly - so you're often back to the original observation on these matters too.
Or like: one time I listened to a bunch of new music I had dug up and wasn't sure there was anything I liked. Two days later, I had a song in my head. Turned out to be one of the ones I had listened to. But I had to listen to everything all over again to find it! ദി(ㅠ﹏ㅠ) Glad I did - there were other gems in there.
Anyway, great quote.
Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake!
It's worse if you read the context[0]:
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?
Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.
[0] https://www.billboard.com/pro/digital-marketers-secret-tacti...
This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.
I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.
IOW, maybe, it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet (brain with pattern recognition) and live in a blizzard of haystacks (online today).
Of course I highly doubt that's what actually happening here, but the idea is unpleasant. I hate advertising, I don't want it messing with real interactions with other humans. I'm not sure how to express the idea, it's like its so pervasive I'm thinking about it when its not even present.
So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects.
Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it.
If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to keep you watching those commercials. On the internet, everything is trying to filter you into conversions or purchases, or steal your identity and cut out the middleman.
PBS and NPR like to say they're advertiser free but they aren't, they just call it "underwriting", and it entails the same wariness over bucking the advertiser's wishes. sorry, underwriters wishes.
edit to add a solution
the solution is value for value. You publish, if people like your stuff, you tell them to contribute time, talent, or treasure to your product, be it a youtube channel, a podcast, or even an e-zine (remember those...)
Then again, I'm sure some loopholes would be found.
This comment is interesting because you took a narrative that was being pushed and marketed (Cursor was close to Opus) and accepted it as the ground truth.
The dominant narrative I saw around that, at least in my bubbles, was disappointment when they actually tried it and discovered it was not, in fact, close to Opus.
My own experience was relatively similar, good, but with a notable gap that went beyond cherrypicked benchmarks.
Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest.
Also bring back blogrolls.
As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.
The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't.
I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it.
There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven't sold their soul to marketing. Or at least are clear when they say things that are marketing.
But it is ever harder to find those voices, especially if you're new to an industry.
> We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
And how do we know that? How do we know Cursor is "withing spitting distance of opus" (whatever it means)?
Let me guess:
> that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that
curating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion
But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)
It’s existed for a long time, is quite good, and it is under-marketed (ironic for this thread).
(Double-ironic disclosure… I work for Cursor. If you have ideas to make agent better hmu)
This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...
So much so that i've yet to invest in CC. Finally downloaded the desktop app but use it exclusively for chat and cowork.
Cursor's purgatory UX is what'll finally get me to invest in CC and codex. Not model performance.
I do think there's a caveat that it's pretty standard nextjs with rails api.
edit: found your blog post about your experience, i'll read it! https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
edit2: maybe it's because i spend a lot of time being clear with small and surgical asks after doing purely thought exploring prompts to confirm and home in on approaches. At the point I hit build or do Agent mode, Composer is mostly always spot on.
with Opus (haven't tried) maybe people are doing large-scale multi phase and single shot prompts that trigger a swarm of sub agents?
Came here to say this - I have always been extremely cautious and assumed most things online were just marketing tactics. But I never realize how far and how strategic some of these campaigns are.
I’ve recently started really getting my hands dirty with marketing for an app I’m building and the things I’ve learned in the past year have made me questions many of my views on things. At some point you realize that it’s all marketing or some form of effort to exert influence.
A good book somewhat related to this is Attention Merchants
I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.
In my eyes:
* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.
* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.
* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.
All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.
If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)
"The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.
I just hate the fact that I feel jaded and cynical about this as my default position.
Yes, exactly this. It is extremely difficult to get attention these days, no matter how good your offering.
Really made me concerned w/ ad tech.
But seriously, more than psyop, it’s the stupid recommendation algorithms pushing the same thing to people. It’s quite apparent when browsing music on Youtube and finding new discoveries. Everybody in your same niche is pushed the same new bands, rather than the algo pushing different bands to different people, as one would expect.
The reason that I completely missed Geese until the psyop reached HN is probably because it was pushed by TikTok which I don’t interact with, so I was insulated from it until the word-of-mouth phase of the viral spread.
We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. This dual reality (deep reality vs the surface reality we see) creates the feeling of being in a simulation; we have a feeling that there's another reality beyond our simulation. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is (until you reach a certain point?).
We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether and those things appear to not exist. Value creators are often terrible at marketing. It's hard to sell to people who are inside the simulation when you are outside of it because you don't speak the same language.
The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form.
To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts.
Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in otherwise perfectly satisfying explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.
The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.
But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
I'd love for this kind of scam to be regulated, at least. "Not a real fan - paid endorsement".