“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I tell this to everyone who will listen. This... paragraph? Statement? Whatever is pure gold.
Quit watching YouTube videos, quit reading tutorials, quit listening to podcasts. The only way you learn is by doing something, and by doing something I mean fucking up doing something. Over, and over, and over.
Just do the thing. That's how you learn. And after you make a whole ton of things that suck, you'll start making a few things that don't.
I think the safety of other humans eyes (lidar exposure) is the real negative for lidar use.
The MKBHD YouTube video where he shows his phone camera has burned out pixels from lidar equipped car reviews is revealing (if I recall correctly, he proceeds to show it live). I don't want that pointed at my eye.
I love lidar from an engineering / capability perspective. But I grew up with the "don't look in a laser!" warnings everywhere even on super low power units... and it's weird that those have somehow gone away. :P
The issue is the ingestion (extracting the right data in the right format). This is mainly an issue in PDFs and sometimes when there are tables added as images in Docx too. You need a mix of text and OCR extraction to get the data correctly first before start chunking and adding embeddings
Slight tangent counterpoint; sometimes conveying knowledge requires the prettier / flair of a miro/lucid/figma or even full infographic style solution.
I like md, and I like mermaid, and I like text / simple. But I know to help others, sometimes the visual medium and storytelling justify the alternatives.
Yep. Totally agree. It's situational. IMO, a marginally prettier presentation is rarely worth the opportunity cost of what else I could get done with the time, but sometimes it is.
This is a high area of focus for me and I agree: following a complex convo, especially when it gets picked up again 20-30 min later, is difficult.
But not impossible. I’ve had success with prompts that ID all topics and then map all conversation tied to each topic (each seperate LLM queries) and then pulling together summary and conclusions by topic.
I’ve also had success with one shot prompts - especially with the right context on the event and phrasing shared. But honestly I end up spending about 5-10 min reviewing and cleaning up the output before solid.
But that’s worlds better than attending the event, and then manually pulling together notes from your fast in flight shorthand.
(Former BA, ran JADs etc, lived and died by accuracy and right color / expression / context in notes)
On the digital ID part, the government + regulated industries like banking will enforce validating specific types of IDs via third party companies and data sources to use said government / regulated industry services - which is used as a hacked duct tape and silly string version of digital ID. Other than that… yep you got it.
My guess - he’s avoiding political risk. If something goes bad, it’s better to say “it was encrypted but they got the keys” than to defend data wasn’t encrypted.
It’s semantics in terms of actual difference to an attacker, but it’s a world of difference when explaining to executives.
I’d encourage you to pursue it.
I remember the old @breakingnews on Twitter when it first started, people listening to police scanners and typing info-dense one liners on what they heard. To this day the best news service of my life (until someone bought it).
A real time, AI snips version for my area in a running feed would be amazing. There are lots of formats and use cases; and the info is already out there.
It’s a great idea. Don’t let citizen sway you away from it.
I want to say thank you for writing this. 100% same opinion. I've stuck with Apple - despite their downsides - specifically for their zeal in areas like this.
My phone works, I'm glad it blocks others from integrating because I need it to always just work. That's why I still have an iPhone over all the often paper superior alternatives.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”