What’s the one line pitch? You need to grab attention. What problem(s) are you solving? Not features - problems. You talk about “losing context” - that’s interesting but a little abstract. Unpack it. Imagine you have one sentence to explain to the person whose life you’re about to make better. What sentence will make them pay attention?
Edit: to be fair, “replace your project manager” did make me pay attention, but perhaps what is the sentence after that?
Most jobs don't involve formally verifiable outputs. Lots of things involve judgment, nuance, parsing ambiguity and indeed just being a human who can be in a meeting and explain themselves. Maybe those jobs will go too, eventually, but it's not purely a function of applying 10,000 agents to the problem.
Much though jobs may involve those things, it has been rare for me to be in a position where management has valued those things to an extent where they would discern between me and a frontier reasoning LLM's capabilities on those same decisions.
Sure, there’s an argument for improving the default too. I was just replying to what I thought was someone saying “it doesn’t matter, most people won’t use it, give up”
Fair enough. I legitimately hate people who do that - gaslighting people into not wanting change. I don't even understand what drives that mentality half the time.
To some extent, the U.K. They’ve had flock-style cameras for years, and while there is of course police abuse there’s far greater accountability. Brits are more comfortable with the idea of police having those powers - but of course that’s partly to do with the fact their police don’t have guns, so are generally less terrifying.
UK police officers are not routinely armed, but there armed response units, and under certain circumstances in e.g. railway stations and airports you will see pairs of officers walking about with machine guns on a regular basis.
Accountability: misuse of cctv or bodycam footage can lead to disciplinary action of various kinds including being sacked. The link below will give you an idea of the volume of formal complaints and the 'pipeline' from complaint to potential dismissal and criminal proceedings against officers;
Appeal to the "Golden Age" is just built into the way they do propaganda, it's particularly popular if that Golden Age is long enough ago that everyone around during it is dead and can't ask awkward questions like "Golden for who though?".
The appeal to "Halycon Days" is strong but then I'm aware that based on the city I was born and the socio-economic group I was born into I'd statistically already be dead (average life expectancy was lower than my current age) and historically aware enough to know that when my country was "Great" exactly who it was "Great" for.
I'll take 2026 Britain over 1926 Britain and especially 1826 Britain.
Sadly true. I just felt the person I was quoting was waving it away as if it was a harmless irrelevance. But you’re right, appalling views have become mainstream.
> “I realize that there’s a population of people who just refuse to use anything associated with Musk because politics have eaten our brains”
People have values.
Many people strongly disapprove of Musk’s actions. Many don’t - fine! Personal choice. But for people who do, refusing to support him commercially is hardly brain-eaten territory. There’s plenty of competition, and competition isn’t the only value at play.
Yeah, OK. You’re making excuses for letting politics eat your life. Enjoy yourself, I guess.
Setting aside the actual legitimacy of whatever complaints you have about Musk, you aren’t “supporting” him by using Grok, any more than you’re “supporting Xi Jinping” by using DeepSeek, or “supporting Jeff Bezos” by using Amazon, or “supporting the CEO of Exxon” by using energy. Or “supporting” any of a million other people you probably don’t like simply by existing in the world as a consumer. What you’re actually doing is called spitting in the wind.
Major conglomerate providers of commodities are not controlled, or even operated to the benefit of, any single person. Musk is the operating officer of a corporation of many thousands of individuals. He has shares in that company, but so do millions of other people. It would be far more rational if you could point to some specific “evil” thing SpaceX is doing as a company that you oppose, but you can’t even do that. It’s all gotta be about one guy who you don’t like.
I imagine we’re not as far apart as you might think.
Leave Musk to one side for a second. Is there no one, even hypothetically, whose actions would make you turn away from their company’s products and services? Even if it has no effect on the overall viability of their business? A local restaurant where you know the owner is a bully to his staff? A tradesman who was unbelievably rude to your friend? A newspaper whose owner personally made sure they trashed the reputation of your business? A wedding photographer who proudly refuses to work for couples who had children out of wedlock?
Surely your devotion to the principle of competition doesn’t override all your other beliefs?
You're forgetting the part where he is a near majority shareholder in spacex, so half of the profit made on your dollar spend winds up benefiting him personally.
> so half of the profit made on your dollar spend winds up benefiting him personally
No, it doesn't. Aside from the face-slappingly obvious fact that SpaceX is losing a half a billion dollars a quarter, that's not how corporate revenue works. Unless the corporate profits are paid out in dividends, you don't just get to hoover them up as a shareholder.
You say it's "letting politics eat your life" yet we're talking about alternative services that are all very similar. Clicking a different website's checkout button is to consciously decide who benefits from your decisions. I think that's how you should live -- pick the oat milk too.
There are other reasons to not use Elon Musk's AI beyond politics, though this month he's investing $200 million to sway the Texas midterms back to an awful politician, far closer to home than what Xi Jinping might be doing.
It wasn't long ago that Elon tried to bias Grok to not say bad things about him to the point that Grok would say that Elon was the best piss-drinker in the world and that Elon was in the top three of every category (basketball, mathematics, physics, etc). https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro...
If I have to tie-break between competing AI services, I'm hella not choosing that one.
> yet we're talking about alternative services that are all very similar.
Yes, that's what "commodity" means, and why I used the word.
> There are other reasons to not use Elon Musk's AI beyond politics, though this month he's investing $200 million to sway the Texas midterms back to an awful politician, far closer to home than what Xi Jinping might be doing.
It's amusing that you can't even help yourself from mentioning politics when you're trying to deny that it disproportionately impacts your thinking. Literally, "there are other reasons to not use it...but I'll spend the rest of my comment listing a bunch of reasons I don't like Elon."
I've heard all of it before. I'm telling you that it doesn't sway me, any more than telling me I should stop buying things at WalMart, use energy, or any of a million other things I do on a daily basis that probably, very likely, in some direct or indirect way, benefit someone I don't like.
You do you, but if I eliminated every product or service that was associated with a "bad person", I'd be living in a cave in the wilderness, crapping in a hole and eating berries.
My point isn’t “president should be above law”. My point is that, if Trump and admin go to prison on charges that are not so strong that it sways a large portion of the public and republicans, we’re fucked. Regardless of the underlying truth of the case, regardless of what I think is just or unjust, we’re fucked. Because unless it’s convincing enough that republicans also agree, then it’s death spiral.
So I’m hoping the justice department either doesn’t have enough of a case to convict, or has enough of a case that the whole country falls in line. The in between, it’s time to get out. Because shit will go downhill very fast.
> Because unless it’s convincing enough that republicans also agree, then it’s death spiral.
So what you're saying is that the Republicans would become an angry party consisting of those who embrace impunity for their politicians regardless of the brazenness with which they break the law.
It’s reasonably clear to anyone paying attention that Trump has been systematically engaging in various flavours of corruption. Prosecuting the man for illegal activities isn’t predicated on his party losing an election; it would be a matter of law. If you cannot support upholding the law because of some fear that MAGA would revolt, then the downfall you predict isn’t a remote event, it’s already here.
There was no way in your country to pay and watch it? FIFA will have sold the tv rights there to someone, surely. In which case your complaint is what, that it was expensive?
Free on both, but not with the narration in my native language.
On Brazil the world cup was being transmitted on youtube. in NL only on traditional TV channels or Online for the same channels (all for free but in Dutch).
And literally as I write this I receive an email saying that my youtube premium was raised from 33 to 38 EURO. So there we have piracy getting juicier and juicier.
There is also a ton of tv shows, movies, music and books that you cannot buy, for now real good reason. I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions. With things increasingly only being available on streaming platforms or behind DRM in other ways, we risk looking back on the current era as a black hole 50 years from now.
My concern is that less popular content is just erases, lost in mergers or lost in massive datacenters, never to be seen again.
> I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions.
I can already think of a couple examples I've run into in the audiobook world. I have copies of Douglas Adams himself narrating his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books. As far as I know, these recordings are not available for purchase anywhere. I got them because someone was kind enough to upload them. I would have preferred to buy them but didn't have that choice.
Some of Iain Bank's audiobooks were only available in Europe for a time (and maybe still are). For those I was able to convince Amazon I was buying in Germany at least.
Indeed, art. And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Add up the cost of buying the DVD/Blu-Ray releases for the 1500 or so films that make up the canon of cinema. That's a sum of money daunting even for people in developed countries, let alone most of the world. Piracy is going to be the realistic solution. (And before you say "Use the library", you know well-stocked libraries don't exist in most of the world, right?)
If you're saying "piracy is justified in those parts of the world where access to any art or culture is prohibitively expensive", then that's a pretty defensible position, not unlike "It's ok to steal bread if you are starving".
But that's not what many people defending piracy are doing. Many of them do indeed have great libraries nearby, and art and culture on demand at prices they happily spend having food delivered to their house.
I don't know if you have noticed, but piracy has declined greatly since the introduction of streaming. The scene is a shadow of its former self. The communities today that are keeping high-quality releases of canonical music and films available are overwhelmingly based in regions of the world with a dearth of good libraries.
Even if not all art, once something becomes canonical, it then becomes something that people should be able to easily familiarize themselves with for the sake of an educated and edified citizenry. And indeed, many countries subsidize public libraries and live performances for this very reason. But no state can manage to provide free or nearly-free access to the entire canon, so piracy helps fill the gap.
There’s “how to be a good parent” advice and there’s also “oh boy how do we manage mealtimes and laundry and the school run” type advice. Someone with lots of kids is going to have great insights into the latter at very least.
I am the father, and I have a ton of involvement in the day-to-day work of running the house. This brings me and my wife a lot of satisfaction and it undoubtedly wouldn’t be possible if I was still commuting to work in Silicon Valley.
If you extended this to allow assembling audio from multiple takes of the same dialogue, you’d have something very useful for audio drama post-production.
Thanks tene, from your comment i believe this functionality does exist, and i realise that i don't express it very clearly on my website. Essentially when you select text, it tells you how many 'matches' that text has. So if the same line is repeated, you can quickly seek between the matches to cut/AB multiple takes very quickly!
Great! But is the focus exporting short clips? I’m thinking more in terms of assembling long pieces of audio scene by scene, like 30+ mins. That’s a major workflow headache you could make radically easier. Depends on your target audience but you’d save them dozens of hours.
the initial idea came from exporting lines and multiple takes for video game voice over delivery, but the functionality is there for doing longer clips too by making longer text selections. i'd love to get some feedback from this group if you'd like to discuss further? wesley@vocalslice.com
Edit: to be fair, “replace your project manager” did make me pay attention, but perhaps what is the sentence after that?
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