V0ldek
I literally learnt about Kagi like a week ago from a Cory Doctorow’s post. I was like oh, cool, someone there to fight google.
The higher-T among us seem significantly brain damaged since high school (myself included). I wonder what the mechanism would be here…
Any sensible statistical analysis of brain damage must control for common brain injury factors, chief among them American football and frequenting Less Wrong. My money is on rat poison and not T poison.
But here’s a recipe for success according to the theory:
- start slamming testosterone and amphetamines to get your workaholicism, betterThanEveryone complex, and drive for power
Yet another dude who watched Wolf of Wall Street and thought “yes, this is what peek success looks like, I’ll aspire to be like this”. Absolute rubes the lot of them.
Embed physics into computation? Bro, that’s called “electricity”.
I think this is even worse as it’s backwards! “Computation” is not a thing, you can’t embed something into it. You can embed computation into physics – that’s what we do, we figured out how to compute stuff in the framework of transistors and electric currents and built a CPU.
In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”; “Ronan Farrow is the only person who could truly relate to him”; “No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance?”; “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now”; “Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism.” There are jokes about taking Greta Thunberg’s and Barron Trump’s virginity.
The lesser work in “My First Book” sinks to high school graduation speech level. “We are the future of the planet” and “I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going” and “Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now” and so on.
I’m sorry, “lol girls with mustache fingers” is high literature but “we are the future of the planet” is stupid? Did the author flip a coin on each of those to decide where it’d go?
Also what the fuck is this about Adderall, I don’t even understand what it would mean to collectivise “the Adderall sector”, but wasn’t there a shortage of ADD medication not so long ago where people who needed it couldn’t get it? Wouldn’t we want to collectivise this??
Browse the web sites of Notion, Figma, or Slack
I did out of curiosity, especially since I’ve never heard about the first two and “Figma” sounds like a bad attempt at a Ligma joke.
Notion
Tagline:
Write, plan, organize, play Turn ideas into action with Notion’s AI-powered workspace.
Plus this gem
“Your AI everything app.” ~ Forbes
Wait I thought X was the everything app.
I scrolled through and I have no idea why anyone would pay for this. It doesn’t seem to be able to do anything that a GitLab instance can’t and “AI” here just looks like a hook to ChatGPT.
Figma
balls! haha
How you design, align, and build matters. Do it together with Figma.
What the hell does “align” mean here? Align like a div to be centered? It seems to be a design tool so that’s what I assume, but it’s a weird thing to focus on.
Co-create in one space Work together in real time and empower designers to create in new ways.
Okay, this at least gives me a product pitch - design tool with real-time sharing like in Google Docs. That sounds actually useful.
Keep workflows efficient with tools that give every team visibility throughout the process.
… aaand this is just word salad, you lost me.
The rest looks like a regular pitch for a prototype tool for UX, which I think is a pretty specific and useful tool though, so I’m not 100% sure why it’d fit with the theme of the blogpost. Maybe I’m missing something, I never actually dealt with serious UX design.
Slack
This one was I surprised by since I thought I knew what the entire Slack product is - it’s a chat. You have channels, direct messages, and pings. That’s about it, right?
Move faster with your tools in one place Automate away routine tasks with the power of generative AI and simplify your workflow with all your favourite apps ready to go in Slack.
God what.
The rest is a normal pitch, flexible communications, remote work, channels, etc. But why would you start with AI? Again, Slack is a chat app why would you want gen AI in a chat app?
I used to argue with people that from all of the giants (the FAANG nonsense) MSFT was “the good guys” because they were doing god’s work with FOSS. I still think .NET is an amazing technology and everyone working on it should be praised.
But then I got actually hired by MSFT and… you quickly realise this is just surface level shit. No one in management could give less of a fuck about open-source, or anything other than Growth™ for that matter. I speedran disillusionment and quit after little more than a year. In the end, it’s just a big corpo doing big corpo shit. It has no values. It has no morals. It has no vision, other than that of a high $MSFT number.
If MSFT did anything good it’s despite internal pressures and incentives, not thanks to them.
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