I spent the past 6 months rebuilding a medium-size company’s CRM.
They were on Salesforce for a decade, and now they’ll own their data based on the work of a single engineer.
For Salesforce, the moat is increasingly the inertia that comes from big-company contracts and the perceived safety of buying Salesforce.
Society is experiencing the first wave of the true Cambrian explosion of software and there’s never been a better time to be an indie maker. Never. This is like the iOS App Store moment, but multiplied by 100 and expected to last 10x longer.
I wrote an article[0] on Tiny Neighborhoods (aka “Cohousing”) that starts with:
> “I often wonder if the standard approach to housing is the best we can do. About 70% of Americans live in a suburb, which means that this design pattern affects our lives – where we shop, how we eat, who we know – more than any other part of modern life.”
We have been so uncritical of the set of ideas that make suburbia—single family homes, one car per adult, large private yards—even though these play a big role in how people act.
Some people want to address loneliness by making incremental changes. But if the statistics are right and nearly everyone is somewhat lonely, we should expect that the required adjustments feel “drastic” compared to the current norm.
People would be less lonely if they could live in a community of 15-20 families with (1) shared space and (2) shared expectations for working together on their shared space.
I posted on another subthread but I think this is largely an excuse. If you live in a typical suburb you have 15-20 families on your street. You can easily walk next door and chat or just say hello when you see someone outside. It takes initiative, which is the key thing that's missing. You either hide in your house or you get out and be sociable.
> You can easily walk next door and chat or just say hello when you see someone outside.
I have no problem with socialization and I have an unusually-active social life for a thirty-eight year old married man with three kids, so I clearly don't lack initiative.
With that being said, all of my neighbors are either elderly, shut-ins, or just don't want to be bothered; even the ones with kids.
My wife & I helped organize a Block Party last year and I'm fairly certain it resulted in 0 new friendships for any of the attendees.
What's the solution here? Friendships need to have mutual interest, no?
I think it's a circular problem. Like, my kids don't go outside much because there are no other kids outside to play with.
There's no question that there are 15-20 families within 300 yards of my house. But that group of people absolutely does not have a sense of shared anything but the road.
And the fact is that this is true of the supermajority of suburban streets in the United States.
I don't disagree but 30 years ago the people in those kinds of neighborhoods did get out and talk to each other, did organize cookouts and other gatherings, and in general were sociable neighbors. The people changed.
The greed of wall street and the powers that be bubbles down. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with property values and insurance and strict HOA regs. The purpose of housing in the USA has nothing to do with families or people, it is an investment for growing wealth, and nothing more. If you treat a house like a home, you are negatively affecting your property value and net worth (and your neighbors.)
the noise and unseemliness of cookouts and other gatherings negatively affects property value. That's the sort of thing you see in scary bad neighborhoods on TV. Just drive 45 minutes to the strip mall 6 miles away and gather at one of the corporate chain establishments.
I live in a completely different city, a post-soviet one, with dense streets, 9-storey apartment buildings. But still it's hard to socialize. It's the same both in the center, and on the fringe with large micro-districts, where the density is the same, but people are less in haste, and there are less strangers. Same way, people are avoidant.
Like in subway you pretend that others don't exist, and it's hard to get closer with people. It can take months or years to start saying hello to a kiosk salesman you recognize. It's hard to get past by hello with the house neighbors. If you make steps forward, people are unease. Sometimes others are too quick with their steps, you get unease.
The most compelling theory I know is that you need to meet people occasionally, without intention, to deepen the relationships. If all your communication with someone is intentional, I guess, this feels awkward for both sides. I can confirm this from experience: living in a 80K town, I'd walk down the main street to the little shopping mall with a local supermarket for groceries, and would meet people I knew, or friends, and sometimes we'd go walking by the streets, with groceries bag in my hand :) or we planned to meet in 15 minutes. Or go to each other's home. This is hard to replicate in a big city, where even if you see a friend, he/she is usually in a hurry.
Near apartment blocks, there's no porch or garden or park, and even where there is one, I don't see locals sitting there regularly. People are very cautious, even suspicious of benches, because if there's a busy street nearby, once in a year there'll be a group of noisy young people sitting late at night, or one drunkard in a year, and everyone will get pissed off and want the bench removed. (If they allow to install it at all.)
Looking at some places, I theorized that maybe there should be a place where you could sit and let's say play board games _near_ those who come in and out. And of course, it should be indoors, because winters are long and cold. But But I'm not sure of a communal place indoors either. It could become a magnet for homeless, it can be a magnet for just the slacker drinking old men, and repel the rest of people. I've seen too many communities become place repulsive for "normies". Maintenance is a big question too.
No. Absolutely not. The government owes its people a certain duty of care to say “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
LLM’s are good for advice 95% of the time, and soon that’ll be 99%. But it is not the job of OpenAI or any LLM creator to determine the rules of what good healthcare looks like.
It is the job of the government.
We have certification rules in place for a reason. And until we can figure out how to independently certify these quasi-counselor robots to some degree of safety, it’s absolutely out of the question to release this on the populace.
We may as well say “actually, counseling degrees are meaningless. Anyone can charge as a therapist. And if they verifiably recommend a path of self-harm, they should not be held responsible.”
I want this same analysis with more nuance about what negativity means. He mentions in the post that “technical criticism” counts as negativity.
There’s just a world of difference between “I don’t like React because I don’t want to write HTML in my JavaScript” and “React sux a$$”
Both are negative statements, but it doesn’t make sense to group them together.
Like…is this comment itself a “negative” comment? Maybe. But I want the author to improve and I think most people here do too…and that’s where HN really shines.
Yes, probably the core limitation of my analysis (see earlier comment). My classifiers are treating "I don't like React because I don't want to write HTML in my JavaScript" the same as "React sux a$$" and that's clearly wrong. The models I'm using were built for general sentiment analysis, not technical discourse. On a meta level, your comment itself is a perfect example - it's "negative" in that it criticizes my methodology, but it's exactly the kind of feedback that I was hoping for, so thanks!
I spent the past 6 months rebuilding a medium-size company’s CRM.
They were on Salesforce for a decade, and now they’ll own their data based on the work of a single engineer.
For Salesforce, the moat is increasingly the inertia that comes from big-company contracts and the perceived safety of buying Salesforce.
Society is experiencing the first wave of the true Cambrian explosion of software and there’s never been a better time to be an indie maker. Never. This is like the iOS App Store moment, but multiplied by 100 and expected to last 10x longer.
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