Ha, it's an ambiguous title. Yeah the post is about not using AI in the actual note-taking process.
You will be unsurprised to learn though that I largely haven't used AI to program it.
The main ways I do are documentation/research questions, obviously autocomplete when writing code (which I do, still exclusively in an editor), and some ancillary scripts and tools.
That’s like saying you haven’t used cocaine often. And using the autocomplete that uses LLMs to write out entire functions from a signature is still using AI.
I guess the whole point of it is that it isn't a transcription / automated summary tool :-)
It's a tool for people who want to use their own brain to pick out the key notes and actions in a meeting and get (and create!) a lot of value by doing so - not hand this off to AI.
Obviously some will do that but this tool isn't for them. It's not for everyone.
deleted comment - I will never learn to ignore this kinda thing (referring to GP comment).
It's difficult to not get defensive when you put a lot of work into something and you receive what you feel are very unfair / unjustified comments.
Of course like anyone, when I do a substantial launch on HN I do tell friends. Most probably the referenced comments came from one of my friends trying to be helpful, but I don't actually know that - I have no idea who the account is in fact.
But I feel (perhaps wrongly) an accusatory tone in the very deliberate pointing out of this, and I just don't understand what is trying to be acheived. If you look at my submission history, comment history, and account age here I think one could probably assume good intentions and treat my submissions here with grace and benefit of the doubt.
But anyway, I regret making the original defensive comment and have re-learned the lesson to not do this as it just detracts from the quality of discourse. My bad.
You're good, man. I get it. Your heart and soul goes into a thing and the only comment you get is 'hey, look at these other posts with this suspicious user activity'. Nothing about your work.
I've had to deal with this in various areas of my life. I can't say I have a good solution.
I would say GP is in the wrong, based on their explanation. I think this type of thing is not okay. (The "I told my friends and they made a comment innocently"). You're basically causing activity that goes against the spirit of HN and these users have clearly not bothered to read the guidelines, and then you're washing your hands off of this, even though you directly caused it.
Look at this thread for example. [0] I'm sure it's a case of the same phenomenon. What are these people adding to the discussion!?
Sure, it's not a big deal. Refusing to acknowledge that it's annoying or that it happened because of you is just weird, though. It's not even a good look for your post, anyway, and HN has even gone so far as to penalize posts for direct-link upvoting, so they very clearly don't want this and you probably had to explain some kind of shady workaround to your friends if you still ended up on the front page.
Yes, it's annoying, and blame does lie with me for it happening because I did let friends know about the launches for this on HN, and the comments that come from that are entirely predictable.
Actually it's annoying on a deeper level for me too: I've realised through the referenced comment links that I thought the account in question was an actual user on the original launch post, where I responded to them with an enthusiastic thanks, but in fact it wasn't real positive feedback just one of my friends trying to help. Which is nice, but not very useful for me. I still don't know which friend this is, by the way :-D
Overall I learned for future to just not do this again at all. It just doesn't help on these launch posts anyway, the amount of interest they need to actually get on the front page and stay there is way above what just a handful of friends upvoting or commenting can do for you. When it happens it always happens because people find the actual thing interesting, so there's no point trying to induce that if it doesn't exist. But it's so easy to feel like you want to do everything possible to help get something out there that, as the parent says in a downstream comment, you've poured your heart and soul into.
And you're right, ultimately it's against the spirit of HN and not how we want this place to work. I'm a long time member of this community, it's my favourite place on the internet to be honest, I want to see its standards maintained, and should be doing my best to do that.
> Overall I learned for future to just not do this again at all. It just doesn't help on these launch posts anyway, the amount of interest they need to actually get on the front page and stay there is way above what just a handful of friends upvoting or commenting can do for you.
There's also weighting in effect, not all upvotes are the same (upvotes from the same IP don't count at all, and upvotes from long-time accounts — like yours? — count extra). I'd imagine upvotes from new accounts barely count, if at all.
Selling to individuals can be a hugely more robust predictable business, the problem with selling by the pallet load is spiky revenue that can also quickly fall off a cliff if larger customers stop buying. The other problem is sales negotiations driving down margins for bulk buyers etc. Consumer hardware is a very attractive market in lots of ways, just look at Apple.
Right. It's probably important to distinguish what the hardware manufacturers' incentives are when their supply is constrained and when it isn't. (I am not an expert on anything.) As long as supply is strongly constrained they're naturally going to sell to the highest bidders, which are the big LLM SaaS players. If and when supply is no longer constrained, though, things will look very different:
1) The LLM SaaS companies are a form of vertical disintegration for the hardware providers, a middleman covering costs and taking profits out of the money that comes from customers to the hardware providers. That changes somewhat if there are no longer good models available for local use at no cost to the hardware guys, but only somewhat
2) The LLM SaaS companies are efficient users of their hardware resources. While supply is constrained this helps to make them top bidders and so attractive customers for the hardware manufacturers. When supply is not constrained this should reverse. Which is the more attractive class of customer to a hardware maker: the company full of people with higher degrees who spend their whole working day fighting to pare back resource usage, or the guy who leaves his laptop idle about 18 hours per day on average?
It's notable that nVidia, for instance, has continued to put significant emphasis on AI compact desktops and laptops. And while no doubt that's partly in the service of better developer relations and good PR in general, it's probably also nVidia eyeing the exit, and preparing for a future transition from selling shovels to the army to selling shovels at Walmart. But of course the future isn't clear and obvious. If the hardware makers, maybe the RAM guys in particular, turn out to have underbuilt future capacity starting in the present then we could be stuck in constrained supply for quite a long time. (Futher) government action could affect things etc. etc. And if the frontier labs soon find new ways to use still larger amounts of memory, GPU capacity etc. that isn't butting up against diminishing returns then they'll likely remain kings for some time, though that does not seem probable now.
You will be unsurprised to learn though that I largely haven't used AI to program it.
The main ways I do are documentation/research questions, obviously autocomplete when writing code (which I do, still exclusively in an editor), and some ancillary scripts and tools.