Dang, that hurt to read. I'm starting up a new news-ish site like the old TheServerSide.com, at https://bytecode.news, and I'm faced with the question of "how do I generate traffic in the face of AI and all the people willing to market, market, astroturf, market, market?" I'm not that kind of personality, I don't want to do tiktok or whatever the kids do, I'd far rather accept organic and slow growth over meteoric and unsustainable and undeserved success, even if "organic and slow growth" means failure in the end.
I'm not going to optimize content for SEO - been on the other side of that, and I think it creates content that's bland and ineffective. Humans gonna human, machines gonna machine, and I'm not paying for ads. If humans want the site to succeed, it'll succeed. Otherwise, it won't. Such is life.
I don't think i'm "choosing to fail," I'm choosing to accept the outcome given an effort to prevent it. Sometimes you try and it doesn't work out; I'm not committing the mortgage to the site or the effort, and I'd like it to pan out because I think its progenitor had a raison d'etre, and I was part of it when it was good and I think there's room for it now.
And if the moment's gone, well... that's the way it goes. That's not the same as "choosing to fail."
Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)
> But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clients
The complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development.
Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together.
This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure.
The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.
This is not true though. My two favorite bands from the past year were poorly-attended shows that I stumbled into. You can still seek out good underground, obscure artists - you just have to look for them.
Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.
The whole psyop thing is only an issue if you use "popularity" and mass appeal (people following in instagram, etc) as a signal for finding stuff.
The alternative is to listen to less filtered/signalless stuff (which isn't hard - bandcamp new releases lists (or my bandhiking app) or even their trending charts which seem to be unpopular enough that it's not entirely controlled by marketing (lots of unlistenable stuff makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.
Something I did a few years ago was buy a thing on eBay of 300 random CDs for like $10.
Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon.
I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually liking.
Found a favorite band through a similar technique: pile of CDs given from a friend who worked at a music store and no one wanted them.
You have to be willing to sift through junk. Which I think is hard for many to accept. However, the algorithms are often giving you junk anyway. Kind of no way around it.
Yeah, most of the CDs there were pretty unremarkable; a lot of them were unsurprisingly stuff that was extremely popular (since those have the most CDs available). A lot of the stuff that wasn't extremely popular was pretty bad.
Still, in that 300, there was about ~30 albums that I hadn't hear of that I ended up really liking.
Took awhile to sift through them all, which is why I haven't done it again, but it was a fun experiment all the same.
Years ago, this line formed in my head, and has stuck around - it has been long enough that I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if I came up with it myself, but I think it's relevant here:
"There are only two ways to find good new music - listen to a lot of bad new music, or outsource your listening choices to someone else - and the second doesn't protect you against the first."
Outsourcing your listening choices can look like lots of different things: that friend who goes to lots of concerts and always has an amazing new band they've heard recently, radio DJs, algorithmic suggestions like Pandora or Spotify, the Billboard Top 100, your local bar's live band choices, the Grammy Awards, going to clubs where DJs play new music, etc - but ultimately they come down to the same thing, letting someone else decide what you listen to.
And while my pithy version mentions "bad new music", included in there is anything which is not "good new music", including lots of mediocre or inoffensive stuff which doesn't rise to the level of being "good".
I first thought about it in the context of music, as I was looking for new songs to choreograph to, but it's true of discovering any new products where the quality is a matter of taste or subjective assessment.
- Want to find new food you like? You either eat lots of weird foods, or you find someone (a friend, a food blogger, the NYT food reviews, your mum, anyone) to recommend you try something they've discovered.
- Want to read a good new book? Either pick up random books, most of which will be trash, until you find something you like, or find someone to filter down the books (a small bookshop which carefully curates its titles, a library's recommended reading list, the best sellers lists, Oprah's book club, etc).
- New TV shows? Watch many bad shows until you find a good one, or wait for recommendations or awards nights.
- Restaurants, clothing designers, shopping malls, Youtube channels, content creators, movies, directors, websites, etc - the story is the same.
The only places where this does not apply, is in contexts which have objective measures which can be used as filters: if you want a new monitor, you can go to any store and filter or sort the options they have by objective measures like "display size", "resolution", "response time", "weight", "connectivity" etc, and find new products which meet the criteria. This is still dependent on someone to go and collate the information about all the products, but you are not forced to try lots of incorrectly-sized monitors to find one which optimises your preferences. Similar for microcontrollers, CPUs, car trailers, light bulbs, etc.
But even things with objective measures often have subjective qualities which have to be assessed - you can filter laptops on weight, RAM, clock speed, and storage, but how it feels to hold, whether the keys have a nice feel, whether the machine overheats too quickly - so you're often back to the original observation on these matters too.
Well, yeah, it's all subjective - and actually quite tenuous - so you won't know good and bad until you actually make the call on it. Maybe you've had the experience even of coming around on some music you previously thought was bad.
Or like: one time I listened to a bunch of new music I had dug up and wasn't sure there was anything I liked. Two days later, I had a song in my head. Turned out to be one of the ones I had listened to. But I had to listen to everything all over again to find it! ദി(ㅠ﹏ㅠ) Glad I did - there were other gems in there.
> “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.
Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake!
It's worse if you read the context[0]:
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?
Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.
It's such an insane amount of waste that there are rooms filled with cell phones just to churn out spam. The same job should be doable by a single server. I imagine that it's only required because platforms are fingerprinting the phones to check for spammers but obviously those systems have gone from being simply useless to becoming harmful since it's now generating massive amounts of e-waste.
This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.
You can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
I had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning.
I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.
I’ve had similar experiences. After watching it for a decade I think it’s a mostly over-active pattern recognition combined with a flood of incoming information. I believe I’m careful with the information I consume, but compared with 25 years ago it’s literally orders of magnitude more.
IOW, maybe, it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet (brain with pattern recognition) and live in a blizzard of haystacks (online today).
I'm sad my second thought about this (after dismissing it as a coincidence) was that it could be used for marketing - "I randomly thought about this book/show/movie whatever, and hey what do you know? The sequel is coming out!". Basically another variation on 'organic' advertising in comments that's been around for a while.
Of course I highly doubt that's what actually happening here, but the idea is unpleasant. I hate advertising, I don't want it messing with real interactions with other humans. I'm not sure how to express the idea, it's like its so pervasive I'm thinking about it when its not even present.
Well, one thing I've discovered with the advent of AI music is that there are lots of things I like that are not particularly notable. I can listen to the 100th "1996 ESCAPE FROM DATA CITY + Unreal Tournament Mix" and enjoy it. I can't say that I've "discovered" an artist who then went on to become big. Back in the day, on amie.st there were quite a lot of cheap singles that I really enjoyed too but I can't find those artists again.
So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects.
Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it.
If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.
I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit"
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.
don't fall into the Gell-Mann Amnesia trap. Any media that has advertisements is already not in your interest. If a media has to weigh losing an advertiser or telling the truth, very few would choose truth. Scruples don't put food on the table, believe me, i know.
This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to keep you watching those commercials. On the internet, everything is trying to filter you into conversions or purchases, or steal your identity and cut out the middleman.
PBS and NPR like to say they're advertiser free but they aren't, they just call it "underwriting", and it entails the same wariness over bucking the advertiser's wishes. sorry, underwriters wishes.
edit to add a solution
the solution is value for value. You publish, if people like your stuff, you tell them to contribute time, talent, or treasure to your product, be it a youtube channel, a podcast, or even an e-zine (remember those...)
the commonest argument against these ideas is that, if some capitalist makes the most amazing thing ever invented, how will people ever find out?
if it truly is life altering, and most people or everyone needs it, that's why we have a government. note i said needs it. No one needs to know about the latest transformers movie coming out in 6 months. there are websites dedicated to calendars for events and the like, you can just subscribe there if you care about transformers.
the very idea that most people just walk around all day going "i wonder what i should eat... I'm lovin' it!" because they heard a mcdonalds commercial is... ludicrous.
for myself, literally the only advertising that works on me is word of mouth. and not like, influencers or celebrities, but my friends, co-workers and associates, my neighbors, my in laws; people i trust.
edit: don't get me wrong here, i am sure that there are lots of research papers, studies - longitudinal or otherwise - about "returns on marketing investment." Pepsi and Coca Cola spend $4,000,000,000 each on advertising (2024), is that netting them more than 4 billion each in new sales? Recurring sales? I don't get it, it just feels like they're taking unhealthy addicts' money and setting it on fire to wow other addicts.
> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
This comment is interesting because you took a narrative that was being pushed and marketed (Cursor was close to Opus) and accepted it as the ground truth.
The dominant narrative I saw around that, at least in my bubbles, was disappointment when they actually tried it and discovered it was not, in fact, close to Opus.
Those were both narratives going around, but one was clearly winning in terms of volume, and that's what I'm speaking to here. The dismissal towards the open source models has always smelled more like marketing campaigns to me than the actual sentiments of any hackers I know. We all want the open source options to close the gap, but the labs are definitely staying ahead.
My own experience was relatively similar, good, but with a notable gap that went beyond cherrypicked benchmarks.
A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest.
> A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.
The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't.
I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it.
There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven't sold their soul to marketing. Or at least are clear when they say things that are marketing.
But it is ever harder to find those voices, especially if you're new to an industry.
I, too, rely on your web of trust, please don't ever break my heart Jeff!
It makes sense they'd be harder to find, I imagine there are more opportunities to make money by selling your soul than by offering honest review, and people with large investments have large incentives to dilute signal in their favor.
It's sad that so many platforms let it happen, but it makes sense when the users aren't the ones paying the bills. I'm immensely grateful for those that resist though, and if I were a religious person I would nominate them for sainthood or reincarnation or at least a plaque on a nice park bench somewhere.
It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
It's almost a bit like AI speak. The shills will all have very similar sounding content. They'll all hit on the same (ad copy) points. They might mix in a few negative tidbits, but generally speaking you'll catch them all praising the same wizbang features.
Mkbhd is my favorite baseline shill. He practically just reads the product sheet. You know if he says it, it was probably given to him by the person paying for the review and, indeed, you can find the points he brings up echoed in other people's reviews.
On the flip side, I generally trust Gamers Nexus to not shill. Primarily because their lack of playing ball has actually hurt their access.
I've enjoyed your videos as well. They don't come off as a shill particularly because there's a number of products where the negative points you've put out have been strong enough to actually discourage a purchase. They haven't been weak "The colors could pop more".
> It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
Brandolini’s law strikes again: you really have to pay attention to catch a shill. 99% of the time when you’re not paying attention and intentionally shopping for a particular product is when they get you.
Yeah, really does not help that the internet seems to be built from the ground up to reward shilling.
Click on a shill video in youtube and you'll have 20 identical videos on the same topic.
But also, advertisers are smart and you have to assume they know you are on the lookout for a shill. I have to assume the why shilling works will continue to evolve as the way to detect shilling evolves.
I expect we'll end up with something like this in the future [1].
I agree, but I also think the point about "Is [your opinion] based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience" is really important. Relying on other bloggers is still delegating your thinking to others. Having your own objective measures and your own direct experience is useful, and sometimes it might contradict the prevailing wisdom.
I like how that article claims PR firms don't lie and then proceeds to discuss how their best PR campaign was effectively a lie.
> We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
It sounds like they did good-faith estimate that there were 5000 stores out there and really believed they had 20% of the market? I wouldn't call that a lie as such.
To add to what the other poster said, it's a logical leap to go from 5000 stores to 20% share based on having 1000 users. What does the number of stores have to do with the number of users?
It doesn't make any sense and that's because it's a lie.
They made up a number, and then quoted that number to other people (presumably with the intent to benefit themselves) without disclosing that they'd made up the number in the first place. That seems to jump right past 'lie' into 'fraud' or worse.
I have this growing belief that what's wrong with America is that we've tossed a great deal of virtue (both personal and public) into the woodchipper, using a lot of euphemisms like "marketing" or "puffery". And the rot is not in any way confined to marketing - it's just that marketing is a very obvious example of it. The rot has made its way into education, relationships, entertainment, governance, infrastructure, what used to be called 'news', and on and on.
We collectively gaslight ourselves to avoid dealing with the reality that we're constantly defecating in our own minds, contaminating ourselves with patterns of thought and action that are antithetical to our own continued well-being as individuals and collectives. To borrow a word from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we are poisoning the noosphere.
The "poisoning the noosphere" is a very good description.
There is someone called Peter Ralston; on YouTube there's a few videos of him and in one bit from an interview he starts on honesty. "Honesty", he says, "is a skill most people don't appreciate". I was really impressed by that "is a skill" qualification. Never thought about it this way. But yes, it is a skill. First you learn it and then it changes you.
Yeah but the "good faith" math had a big margin of error, and if I estimate 5k-20k shops and pick the lower number that just happens to make my company look great, that kind of changes things.
related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been?
But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)
I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
> I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...
I haven't used Cursor much lately, but with Opus/Codex I can program with very few bugs without having to look at any code at all, over months of working on the same codebase. I don't think any other model can do that, no?
edit2: maybe it's because i spend a lot of time being clear with small and surgical asks after doing purely thought exploring prompts to confirm and home in on approaches. At the point I hit build or do Agent mode, Composer is mostly always spot on.
with Opus (haven't tried) maybe people are doing large-scale multi phase and single shot prompts that trigger a swarm of sub agents?
> I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic.
Came here to say this - I have always been extremely cautious and assumed most things online were just marketing tactics. But I never realize how far and how strategic some of these campaigns are.
I’ve recently started really getting my hands dirty with marketing for an app I’m building and the things I’ve learned in the past year have made me questions many of my views on things. At some point you realize that it’s all marketing or some form of effort to exert influence.
A good book somewhat related to this is Attention Merchants
> What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing?
I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.
In my eyes:
* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.
* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.
* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.
All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.
If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)
>I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns.
"The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.
Yea... I'm mixed because it feels like something too creative and weird for this sort of marketing, but it's perhaps as weird how they're all over Youtube suddenly.
I actually don't think Getting Killed the album is well mixed, what turned me on to Geese was their From The Basement performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIol9hig2G4 the music and the mixing are incredible. I've followed From The Basement for a while, ever since their collaboration with Radiohead. So maybe this was a psyop, but the music is genuinely really good.
But Geese is a good band. I just listened to 3D country to verify this. Yep, they’re still good. If it is a psyop, the psyop was only successful because they were a good band in the first place.
I would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regulated out of existence.
> Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it?
Yes, exactly this. It is extremely difficult to get attention these days, no matter how good your offering.
I had never heard of Geese until all the stories about how Geese bought their popularity. Now I feel I should give them a listen to know what all the fuss is about!
The fact that I never heard of this indie rock band until two days ago, when I came across three separate instances of it on forums, including on a tech website, is itself a psyop and you cannot convince me otherwise. Because why the hell would TechCrunch of all places write about it, and why the hell would it make the Hacker News front page.
But seriously, more than psyop, it’s the stupid recommendation algorithms pushing the same thing to people. It’s quite apparent when browsing music on Youtube and finding new discoveries. Everybody in your same niche is pushed the same new bands, rather than the algo pushing different bands to different people, as one would expect.
The reason that I completely missed Geese until the psyop reached HN is probably because it was pushed by TikTok which I don’t interact with, so I was insulated from it until the word-of-mouth phase of the viral spread.
Never thought I'd be reading this on TechCrunch but fully resonates and it's an interesting article.
Also, I understand why some people think we live in a simulation. It can be explained to some extent; we're glued to our phones/devices and those devices choose what information we see.
We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. This dual reality (deep reality vs the surface reality we see) creates the feeling of being in a simulation; we have a feeling that there's another reality beyond our simulation. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is (until you reach a certain point?).
We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether and those things appear to not exist. Value creators are often terrible at marketing. It's hard to sell to people who are inside the simulation when you are outside of it because you don't speak the same language.
The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form.
To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts.
Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in otherwise perfectly satisfying explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.
Oh no!!! Tell me it ain't so! Someone--like a PR firm--is gaming the system to get attention for their client? No, surely not. Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
> Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.
But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
Well I for one appreciate TC for giving us and the masses a heads up of new spins on old astroturf methods. You simply cannot trust the algorithm to be organic. Find trusted people or specific trusted reviewers of things. Everything else you hear could be paid for.
I'd love for this kind of scam to be regulated, at least. "Not a real fan - paid endorsement".
They're violating ad labeling laws and the FTC should come down hard on them. While Republicans pretend to be against defunding of police that's only the police for poor people, commercial and rich people police have suffered all kinds of defunding and kneecapping at their hands. We need an aggressive war on slop or democracy is not going to make it.
Dang, that hurt to read. I'm starting up a new news-ish site like the old TheServerSide.com, at https://bytecode.news, and I'm faced with the question of "how do I generate traffic in the face of AI and all the people willing to market, market, astroturf, market, market?" I'm not that kind of personality, I don't want to do tiktok or whatever the kids do, I'd far rather accept organic and slow growth over meteoric and unsustainable and undeserved success, even if "organic and slow growth" means failure in the end.
SEO, Reddit and Paid ads probably
I'm not going to optimize content for SEO - been on the other side of that, and I think it creates content that's bland and ineffective. Humans gonna human, machines gonna machine, and I'm not paying for ads. If humans want the site to succeed, it'll succeed. Otherwise, it won't. Such is life.
Choosing to fail means you shouldn't begin the project in the first place.
Correspondingly, if you are beginning the project, you should not make choices that will result in failure.
I don't think i'm "choosing to fail," I'm choosing to accept the outcome given an effort to prevent it. Sometimes you try and it doesn't work out; I'm not committing the mortgage to the site or the effort, and I'd like it to pan out because I think its progenitor had a raison d'etre, and I was part of it when it was good and I think there's room for it now.
And if the moment's gone, well... that's the way it goes. That's not the same as "choosing to fail."
Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)
A 'psyop' psyop!
> But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clients
The complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development.
Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together.
This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure.
The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.
This is not true though. My two favorite bands from the past year were poorly-attended shows that I stumbled into. You can still seek out good underground, obscure artists - you just have to look for them.
Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.
The whole psyop thing is only an issue if you use "popularity" and mass appeal (people following in instagram, etc) as a signal for finding stuff.
The alternative is to listen to less filtered/signalless stuff (which isn't hard - bandcamp new releases lists (or my bandhiking app) or even their trending charts which seem to be unpopular enough that it's not entirely controlled by marketing (lots of unlistenable stuff makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.
Some of it will suck.
OP is part of a facile, superficial milieu. You know—the common clay of the new world.
Yeah. It has literally never been easier to find good niche music, and that's been true for over a decade.
Don't confuse the people playing the marketing game to try to win big with the whole world out there.
Something I did a few years ago was buy a thing on eBay of 300 random CDs for like $10.
Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon.
I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually liking.
Found a favorite band through a similar technique: pile of CDs given from a friend who worked at a music store and no one wanted them.
You have to be willing to sift through junk. Which I think is hard for many to accept. However, the algorithms are often giving you junk anyway. Kind of no way around it.
Yeah, most of the CDs there were pretty unremarkable; a lot of them were unsurprisingly stuff that was extremely popular (since those have the most CDs available). A lot of the stuff that wasn't extremely popular was pretty bad.
Still, in that 300, there was about ~30 albums that I hadn't hear of that I ended up really liking.
Took awhile to sift through them all, which is why I haven't done it again, but it was a fun experiment all the same.
Years ago, this line formed in my head, and has stuck around - it has been long enough that I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if I came up with it myself, but I think it's relevant here:
"There are only two ways to find good new music - listen to a lot of bad new music, or outsource your listening choices to someone else - and the second doesn't protect you against the first."
Outsourcing your listening choices can look like lots of different things: that friend who goes to lots of concerts and always has an amazing new band they've heard recently, radio DJs, algorithmic suggestions like Pandora or Spotify, the Billboard Top 100, your local bar's live band choices, the Grammy Awards, going to clubs where DJs play new music, etc - but ultimately they come down to the same thing, letting someone else decide what you listen to.
And while my pithy version mentions "bad new music", included in there is anything which is not "good new music", including lots of mediocre or inoffensive stuff which doesn't rise to the level of being "good".
I first thought about it in the context of music, as I was looking for new songs to choreograph to, but it's true of discovering any new products where the quality is a matter of taste or subjective assessment.
- Want to find new food you like? You either eat lots of weird foods, or you find someone (a friend, a food blogger, the NYT food reviews, your mum, anyone) to recommend you try something they've discovered.
- Want to read a good new book? Either pick up random books, most of which will be trash, until you find something you like, or find someone to filter down the books (a small bookshop which carefully curates its titles, a library's recommended reading list, the best sellers lists, Oprah's book club, etc).
- New TV shows? Watch many bad shows until you find a good one, or wait for recommendations or awards nights.
- Restaurants, clothing designers, shopping malls, Youtube channels, content creators, movies, directors, websites, etc - the story is the same.
The only places where this does not apply, is in contexts which have objective measures which can be used as filters: if you want a new monitor, you can go to any store and filter or sort the options they have by objective measures like "display size", "resolution", "response time", "weight", "connectivity" etc, and find new products which meet the criteria. This is still dependent on someone to go and collate the information about all the products, but you are not forced to try lots of incorrectly-sized monitors to find one which optimises your preferences. Similar for microcontrollers, CPUs, car trailers, light bulbs, etc.
But even things with objective measures often have subjective qualities which have to be assessed - you can filter laptops on weight, RAM, clock speed, and storage, but how it feels to hold, whether the keys have a nice feel, whether the machine overheats too quickly - so you're often back to the original observation on these matters too.
Well, yeah, it's all subjective - and actually quite tenuous - so you won't know good and bad until you actually make the call on it. Maybe you've had the experience even of coming around on some music you previously thought was bad.
Or like: one time I listened to a bunch of new music I had dug up and wasn't sure there was anything I liked. Two days later, I had a song in my head. Turned out to be one of the ones I had listened to. But I had to listen to everything all over again to find it! ദി(ㅠ﹏ㅠ) Glad I did - there were other gems in there.
Anyway, great quote.
> “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.
Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake!
It's worse if you read the context[0]:
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?
Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.
[0] https://www.billboard.com/pro/digital-marketers-secret-tacti...
It's such an insane amount of waste that there are rooms filled with cell phones just to churn out spam. The same job should be doable by a single server. I imagine that it's only required because platforms are fingerprinting the phones to check for spammers but obviously those systems have gone from being simply useless to becoming harmful since it's now generating massive amounts of e-waste.
This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.
You can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
I had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning.
I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.
I’ve had similar experiences. After watching it for a decade I think it’s a mostly over-active pattern recognition combined with a flood of incoming information. I believe I’m careful with the information I consume, but compared with 25 years ago it’s literally orders of magnitude more.
IOW, maybe, it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet (brain with pattern recognition) and live in a blizzard of haystacks (online today).
It seems infinitely more likely to me that this is simple coincidence than something nefarious.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree; but the odds of that coincidence are extremely long.
I'm sad my second thought about this (after dismissing it as a coincidence) was that it could be used for marketing - "I randomly thought about this book/show/movie whatever, and hey what do you know? The sequel is coming out!". Basically another variation on 'organic' advertising in comments that's been around for a while.
Of course I highly doubt that's what actually happening here, but the idea is unpleasant. I hate advertising, I don't want it messing with real interactions with other humans. I'm not sure how to express the idea, it's like its so pervasive I'm thinking about it when its not even present.
This idea makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I shouldn't have included the name of the book in my original comment (now too late to edit).
Well, one thing I've discovered with the advent of AI music is that there are lots of things I like that are not particularly notable. I can listen to the 100th "1996 ESCAPE FROM DATA CITY + Unreal Tournament Mix" and enjoy it. I can't say that I've "discovered" an artist who then went on to become big. Back in the day, on amie.st there were quite a lot of cheap singles that I really enjoyed too but I can't find those artists again.
So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects.
Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it.
If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.
I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit"
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.
don't fall into the Gell-Mann Amnesia trap. Any media that has advertisements is already not in your interest. If a media has to weigh losing an advertiser or telling the truth, very few would choose truth. Scruples don't put food on the table, believe me, i know.
This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to keep you watching those commercials. On the internet, everything is trying to filter you into conversions or purchases, or steal your identity and cut out the middleman.
PBS and NPR like to say they're advertiser free but they aren't, they just call it "underwriting", and it entails the same wariness over bucking the advertiser's wishes. sorry, underwriters wishes.
edit to add a solution
the solution is value for value. You publish, if people like your stuff, you tell them to contribute time, talent, or treasure to your product, be it a youtube channel, a podcast, or even an e-zine (remember those...)
Yep, banning advertising would be great here. You can't accept money unless it's for buying your product, and that's it.
Then again, I'm sure some loopholes would be found.
the commonest argument against these ideas is that, if some capitalist makes the most amazing thing ever invented, how will people ever find out?
if it truly is life altering, and most people or everyone needs it, that's why we have a government. note i said needs it. No one needs to know about the latest transformers movie coming out in 6 months. there are websites dedicated to calendars for events and the like, you can just subscribe there if you care about transformers.
the very idea that most people just walk around all day going "i wonder what i should eat... I'm lovin' it!" because they heard a mcdonalds commercial is... ludicrous.
for myself, literally the only advertising that works on me is word of mouth. and not like, influencers or celebrities, but my friends, co-workers and associates, my neighbors, my in laws; people i trust.
edit: don't get me wrong here, i am sure that there are lots of research papers, studies - longitudinal or otherwise - about "returns on marketing investment." Pepsi and Coca Cola spend $4,000,000,000 each on advertising (2024), is that netting them more than 4 billion each in new sales? Recurring sales? I don't get it, it just feels like they're taking unhealthy addicts' money and setting it on fire to wow other addicts.
and don't get me started on native advertising.
> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
This comment is interesting because you took a narrative that was being pushed and marketed (Cursor was close to Opus) and accepted it as the ground truth.
The dominant narrative I saw around that, at least in my bubbles, was disappointment when they actually tried it and discovered it was not, in fact, close to Opus.
Those were both narratives going around, but one was clearly winning in terms of volume, and that's what I'm speaking to here. The dismissal towards the open source models has always smelled more like marketing campaigns to me than the actual sentiments of any hackers I know. We all want the open source options to close the gap, but the labs are definitely staying ahead.
My own experience was relatively similar, good, but with a notable gap that went beyond cherrypicked benchmarks.
A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest.
Also bring back blogrolls.
> A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.
Not all are swayed.
The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't.
I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it.
There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven't sold their soul to marketing. Or at least are clear when they say things that are marketing.
But it is ever harder to find those voices, especially if you're new to an industry.
I, too, rely on your web of trust, please don't ever break my heart Jeff!
It makes sense they'd be harder to find, I imagine there are more opportunities to make money by selling your soul than by offering honest review, and people with large investments have large incentives to dilute signal in their favor.
It's sad that so many platforms let it happen, but it makes sense when the users aren't the ones paying the bills. I'm immensely grateful for those that resist though, and if I were a religious person I would nominate them for sainthood or reincarnation or at least a plaque on a nice park bench somewhere.
It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
It's almost a bit like AI speak. The shills will all have very similar sounding content. They'll all hit on the same (ad copy) points. They might mix in a few negative tidbits, but generally speaking you'll catch them all praising the same wizbang features.
Mkbhd is my favorite baseline shill. He practically just reads the product sheet. You know if he says it, it was probably given to him by the person paying for the review and, indeed, you can find the points he brings up echoed in other people's reviews.
On the flip side, I generally trust Gamers Nexus to not shill. Primarily because their lack of playing ball has actually hurt their access.
I've enjoyed your videos as well. They don't come off as a shill particularly because there's a number of products where the negative points you've put out have been strong enough to actually discourage a purchase. They haven't been weak "The colors could pop more".
> It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
Brandolini’s law strikes again: you really have to pay attention to catch a shill. 99% of the time when you’re not paying attention and intentionally shopping for a particular product is when they get you.
Yeah, really does not help that the internet seems to be built from the ground up to reward shilling.
Click on a shill video in youtube and you'll have 20 identical videos on the same topic.
But also, advertisers are smart and you have to assume they know you are on the lookout for a shill. I have to assume the why shilling works will continue to evolve as the way to detect shilling evolves.
I expect we'll end up with something like this in the future [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gArU-BAO7Kw
Unless you're RMS
I agree, but I also think the point about "Is [your opinion] based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience" is really important. Relying on other bloggers is still delegating your thinking to others. Having your own objective measures and your own direct experience is useful, and sometimes it might contradict the prevailing wisdom.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I like how that article claims PR firms don't lie and then proceeds to discuss how their best PR campaign was effectively a lie.
> We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
It sounds like they did good-faith estimate that there were 5000 stores out there and really believed they had 20% of the market? I wouldn't call that a lie as such.
To add to what the other poster said, it's a logical leap to go from 5000 stores to 20% share based on having 1000 users. What does the number of stores have to do with the number of users?
It doesn't make any sense and that's because it's a lie.
They made up a number, and then quoted that number to other people (presumably with the intent to benefit themselves) without disclosing that they'd made up the number in the first place. That seems to jump right past 'lie' into 'fraud' or worse.
I have this growing belief that what's wrong with America is that we've tossed a great deal of virtue (both personal and public) into the woodchipper, using a lot of euphemisms like "marketing" or "puffery". And the rot is not in any way confined to marketing - it's just that marketing is a very obvious example of it. The rot has made its way into education, relationships, entertainment, governance, infrastructure, what used to be called 'news', and on and on.
We collectively gaslight ourselves to avoid dealing with the reality that we're constantly defecating in our own minds, contaminating ourselves with patterns of thought and action that are antithetical to our own continued well-being as individuals and collectives. To borrow a word from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we are poisoning the noosphere.
The "poisoning the noosphere" is a very good description.
There is someone called Peter Ralston; on YouTube there's a few videos of him and in one bit from an interview he starts on honesty. "Honesty", he says, "is a skill most people don't appreciate". I was really impressed by that "is a skill" qualification. Never thought about it this way. But yes, it is a skill. First you learn it and then it changes you.
Yeah but the "good faith" math had a big margin of error, and if I estimate 5k-20k shops and pick the lower number that just happens to make my company look great, that kind of changes things.
> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital
And how do we know that? How do we know Cursor is "withing spitting distance of opus" (whatever it means)?
Let me guess:
> that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that
I'm pretty sure this exact concern was the impetus for slashdot's friend:foe system, HN should implement something
this is why oldschool chat > social media
curating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion
This is why influencers are making bank. Everybody still believes randos on the internet might be genuine.
related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been?
But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)
I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
FWIW, cursor (company) has a CLI tool/harness similar to Claude Code called agent.
It’s existed for a long time, is quite good, and it is under-marketed (ironic for this thread).
(Double-ironic disclosure… I work for Cursor. If you have ideas to make agent better hmu)
> I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...
You couldn't even keep your analogy straight. I didn't say the people I know said anything at all about Cursor.
If someone is clear about offering an anecdote, it's dishonest to pretend as if they were making a real and reasoned argument.
I haven't used Cursor much lately, but with Opus/Codex I can program with very few bugs without having to look at any code at all, over months of working on the same codebase. I don't think any other model can do that, no?
In Cursor I look at the code diff for my own satisfaction and understanding. I've been able to auto-accept all changes pretty reliably all last year.
So much so that i've yet to invest in CC. Finally downloaded the desktop app but use it exclusively for chat and cowork.
Cursor's purgatory UX is what'll finally get me to invest in CC and codex. Not model performance.
I do think there's a caveat that it's pretty standard nextjs with rails api.
edit: found your blog post about your experience, i'll read it! https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
edit2: maybe it's because i spend a lot of time being clear with small and surgical asks after doing purely thought exploring prompts to confirm and home in on approaches. At the point I hit build or do Agent mode, Composer is mostly always spot on.
with Opus (haven't tried) maybe people are doing large-scale multi phase and single shot prompts that trigger a swarm of sub agents?
> I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic.
Came here to say this - I have always been extremely cautious and assumed most things online were just marketing tactics. But I never realize how far and how strategic some of these campaigns are.
I’ve recently started really getting my hands dirty with marketing for an app I’m building and the things I’ve learned in the past year have made me questions many of my views on things. At some point you realize that it’s all marketing or some form of effort to exert influence.
A good book somewhat related to this is Attention Merchants
not sure if ad for Attention Merchants
> What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing?
I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.
In my eyes:
* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.
* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.
* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.
Remember Quibi?
All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.
If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)
Quibi doesn't seem like a good example. It wasn't marketed as the next big thing. It was a trial balloon that popped.
>I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns.
"The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.
I'll be very sad if I discover that Angine de Poitrine's sudden rise is inorganic.
When reading this I immediately thought of them. Anyone I know who plays an instrument said their socials are flooded with them.
Socials being flooded across the board feels weird, but it's also how network effects are _supposed_ to work.
I just hate the fact that I feel jaded and cynical about this as my default position.
Social media is not driven by network effects though. It’s driven by algorithmic engagement and its operation is opaque.
Yea... I'm mixed because it feels like something too creative and weird for this sort of marketing, but it's perhaps as weird how they're all over Youtube suddenly.
Their look is almost "standard" French weird = art type stuff. I find it a little annoying actually, in general and for the band.
As long as they keep making that music, wearing those costumes and mumbling those interviews, I could care less. I like it.
I only found out about them via word of mouth, but who knows. At least they're good stuff!
how could that crap possibly be organic
I actually don't think Getting Killed the album is well mixed, what turned me on to Geese was their From The Basement performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIol9hig2G4 the music and the mixing are incredible. I've followed From The Basement for a while, ever since their collaboration with Radiohead. So maybe this was a psyop, but the music is genuinely really good.
it's called astroturfing and has been around since the dawn of the internet
See payolla for the radio era equivalent.
But Geese is a good band. I just listened to 3D country to verify this. Yep, they’re still good. If it is a psyop, the psyop was only successful because they were a good band in the first place.
I would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regulated out of existence.
> Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it?
Yes, exactly this. It is extremely difficult to get attention these days, no matter how good your offering.
Being a good band isn't nearly enough to be a famous band.
I had never heard of Geese until all the stories about how Geese bought their popularity. Now I feel I should give them a listen to know what all the fuss is about!
I'm not a huge fan of them in general, but they did a pretty ok cover of Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place" that I heard on Sirius XM.
sitting in a local pub watching a musician I've never heard of play original music and absolutely loving it rn.
Reminds me of the documentary, “merchants of cool” https://youtu.be/0tYRoiJvhJ4
Really made me concerned w/ ad tech.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
The fact that I never heard of this indie rock band until two days ago, when I came across three separate instances of it on forums, including on a tech website, is itself a psyop and you cannot convince me otherwise. Because why the hell would TechCrunch of all places write about it, and why the hell would it make the Hacker News front page.
But seriously, more than psyop, it’s the stupid recommendation algorithms pushing the same thing to people. It’s quite apparent when browsing music on Youtube and finding new discoveries. Everybody in your same niche is pushed the same new bands, rather than the algo pushing different bands to different people, as one would expect.
The reason that I completely missed Geese until the psyop reached HN is probably because it was pushed by TikTok which I don’t interact with, so I was insulated from it until the word-of-mouth phase of the viral spread.
https://archive.ph/Y7lS2
Why can't we have a system where this is baked in?
Never thought I'd be reading this on TechCrunch but fully resonates and it's an interesting article. Also, I understand why some people think we live in a simulation. It can be explained to some extent; we're glued to our phones/devices and those devices choose what information we see.
We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. This dual reality (deep reality vs the surface reality we see) creates the feeling of being in a simulation; we have a feeling that there's another reality beyond our simulation. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is (until you reach a certain point?).
We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether and those things appear to not exist. Value creators are often terrible at marketing. It's hard to sell to people who are inside the simulation when you are outside of it because you don't speak the same language.
The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form.
To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts.
Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in otherwise perfectly satisfying explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.
Ex CEO of Google says X about Y
Oh no!!! Tell me it ain't so! Someone--like a PR firm--is gaming the system to get attention for their client? No, surely not. Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
Almost everything that you haven't heard before on Spotify-generated playlists is payola.
> Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.
But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
See also how Anthropic is playing us like a fiddle while making their models less capable.
I'll see your payola and astroturfing, and raise wining and dining newspapermen.
I wake up There's another psyop I go to sleep I wake up
Well I for one appreciate TC for giving us and the masses a heads up of new spins on old astroturf methods. You simply cannot trust the algorithm to be organic. Find trusted people or specific trusted reviewers of things. Everything else you hear could be paid for.
I'd love for this kind of scam to be regulated, at least. "Not a real fan - paid endorsement".
They're violating ad labeling laws and the FTC should come down hard on them. While Republicans pretend to be against defunding of police that's only the police for poor people, commercial and rich people police have suffered all kinds of defunding and kneecapping at their hands. We need an aggressive war on slop or democracy is not going to make it.
The government is broken. I'm not sure what you are hoping for.
Broken on purpose