“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”

-Stephen Jay Gould

Maybe your dog has been taking German classes while you’re at work…

3 days of side project work is about all I had in me anyway

VandalAds was fun (and subversive!).

I wonder if you’ve hit on something interesting… are interactive ads a thing? I don’t know much about adtech but it seems like it could be a good idea.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one.

Glad you liked it :)

Interactive ads exist in some form, but they’re usually quite controlled and safe. What interests me more is the moment when the user actually does something to the ad - even destroys it. Then it becomes an experience, not just a banner, and stay in you memory.

The idea actually comes from a personal experience - when I was younger I spray-painted over a real outdoor ad, and I still remember that ad to this day. Not because it was good, but because I interacted with it. In thhis project I basically playing with that same idea in a digital form.

Interactive ads are actually huge in mobile gaming - they're called "playable ads" and companies like ironSource and Unity Ads have been pushing them for years. They consistently outperform static/video ads on engagement and conversion. Outside of mobile games though, they're surprisingly rare on the web, which is kind of what makes VandalAds feel fresh.

I remember them being a thing back in the days of Flash. Typically nothing super impressive, just small things like cursor trails to grab the eye.

I would hope a founder wouldn’t waste time on home-brewing their own web form when there are tons of off the shelf ones that all have no discernible difference.

It would be like writing your own email servers or calendar software. It would be a distraction at best.

> If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have an army of 100x devs.

This seems maybe a bit reductionist.

AI will have diminishing returns because at a certain point, coding is not the bottleneck and coordination is or some other thing that hasn’t been optimized yet. The exact bottleneck seems like it depends on the organization.

My theory is that in general, augmented devs are much more productive, but 100% of that gain doesn’t translate into 100% more software delivered to customers, and there is a point where coding isn’t the longest pole.

But I don’t think most orgs are at that break even yet, and I think we can still get more out of engineering before we plateau.

What you say is accurate. Just remember that generating code is not the only way for an engineer to amplify themselves.

Most of which can be managed with good SAST tooling and process.

Unhook also does this (among other YouTube clean-ups)

> That might be banned from platforms (though not illegal)

They are currently trying to fix this: https://www.hickenlooper.senate.gov/press_releases/hickenloo...

chances of that passing are roughly in-line with chances of passing a bill to prevent our congressmen and senators from insider trading (you can also bet this as well :) )