As a parent of a new kid, being present is exactly why I wanted a pair - I didn't want to spend time looking at them through a screen, but still wanted to keepsake some precious early moments.
(didn't work out that way in practice, but that was the idea)
As a parent of older kids: I never remember the context of the old photos. "Yep, there's my kid laying on the rug." I do, however, remember them letting go of the coffee table and wobbling their way toward me for the first time.
Mindfulness >>> recordings, any day of the week. Be there with your kid and don't worry about capturing every precious moment. You're never going to have enough time to curate them anyway. Even if you did, the time spent curating is time you could've just been hanging out with your kid instead.
Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm)
We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.
It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.
Any workspace, real or virtual, descends into messy chaos without someone actively organizing or cleaning things up. It's bad enough by yourself, but the minute it's shared with others, it will devolve quickly. Think about any shared file system, data library, workshop, kitchen, etc...
This is why librarians, janitors, lab managers, document controllers etc. are essential to make spaces functional and organized.
Right after graduation, I worked at a large company that had Data Stewards whose job it was to enforce standardized schema registration for all company datasets following the standardized field names and descriptions from the ontology explorer.
I didn't understand the purpose at the time, but then I landed at a company that had no documented schemas for any dataset and kept adding columns and it drove me mad.
> It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did
I think this is where AI could be put to work. Before, what would be a toilsome digital clean up process (eg git commits) is now an instruction to an LLM to clean it up. If the chaos was clean-up-able, would your product have worked?
> and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.
Part of the appeal of a canvas like this is spacial memory: that things stay where you put them. So any AI based reorganization could be a frustrating rug-pull for users that value this feature.
We thought about it - but concluded that any auto-cleaning would fall under "undoing many of the benefits of the canvas." Like a housekeeper who straightens up your desk and suddenly your spatial memory is lost and you can't find the important thing you left sitting out yesterday.
Could be wrong, though! Devil is in the details with this one.
Probably similar to many of you on HN, I've spent years and decades building stuff for a purpose. To "do" something, to hit a metric, to solve someone's problem. Trying to create with unlimited agency and for its own sake can be hard, and there's a lot to unlearn along the way.
I'm working my way through the Artist's Way right now - it's basically a 12 week "recovery" program for creativity. If you can make the time, and it does take some time and commitment, something like this is worth the investment.
Becoming a better, more open creator will touch all aspects of your life in surprising ways.
I'm confused on the "short term growth" comment. Meta (Facebook) has been around for two decades at this point and I cannot remember the last time morals were even in the discussion with Meta/Facebook.
Both are major suppliers of oil and petroleum products. You have short term principles too. It’s not like you’re not buying things linked to Saudi Arabia or UAE for lack of human rights.
If you do business in a country you’re expected to follow the laws of the country. The device you made the comment from is most likely made in China or has several parts made there.
But Meta is evil…
I don’t like meta for their creepiness factor. Outrage on this one though is unwarranted. It puts their local employees at risk of prosecution.
> It’s not like you’re not buying things linked to Saudi Arabia or UAE for lack of human rights.
The fact that these criminals are embedded so deeply in our society is a reason to fight against them even harder. They are corrupting politics, they are corrupting the economy, they are pushing for lower salaries and less rights for the working class across the globe. They can be stopped and should be stopped.
One does not stop fighting cancer just because it has spread out.
Lots of agreement and think there has been a lot written about the sterilization of something that was once beautiful and creative. Sad but inevitable when your best kept secret club isn't so best-kept anymore.
Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?
I'm concerned that there's no real way to "opt out" of an AI future realistically. Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world?
> Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world?
No. I resisted for a bit but have started using it at work. Mostly because I believe usage is now being monitored. I'm in a very high-scale engineering environment involving both greenfield and massive brownfield codebases and the experience is largely a net loss in productivity. For me and some others who I've spoken to in my org, opting in is a theater that we're required to engage in to keep employment and not a genuine evolution of our craft.
These tools struggle with context once you get deep into a codebase with many, many millions of lines of code and sprawling dependencies. Even for isolated Python scripts or smaller, supporting .NET apps, the time spent correcting subtle bugs or bullshit, or just verifying the bullshit, often exceeds the time it would take to have written it from scratch.
Regardless, what I've observed is that these tools do nothing for the actual bottlenecks of software engineering: requirements gathering (am I writing the right thing?) and verification (does it work without side effects?). Because LLMs are great at generating text, they're actively exacerbating these issues by flooding our process with plausible looking noise.
Agreed. I think the starting comparison actually works here. It's a bit like the automobile. The advice of "just don't" doesn't work for cars. It takes a deliberate effort on every scale of society to accomplish, it's not something an individual can just do and succeed at. An American can't just not have a car the same way someone from the netherlands might be able to.
Over hundreds of hours of actively using AI for basically every area of my life, it has just never actually achieved anything besides giving me the feeling of productivity.
Ideas are mediocre. Plans are arbitrary. Research is untrustworthy. But telling it "generate me 100 ideas for X" feels really productive.
I think a version of me with no access AI will not just stay competitive, but even outcompete the version of me with unlimited access to AI.
There isn't. Just like with climate change and governments, we're all effectively in one big boat together. You can stop paddling towards the waterfall, but you can't stop everyone else from paddling and you can't get off the boat.
I'm not an OAI fanboy by a longshot - but I'd view lots of experiments that didn't work out as a healthy thing, especially for a company trying to find footing in a new industry.
Right, depends on your use cases. I was looking forward to the model as an upgrade to 2.5 Flash, but when you're processing hundreds of millions of tokens a day (not hard to do if you're dealing in documents or emails with a few users), the economics fall apart.
(didn't work out that way in practice, but that was the idea)