I know a twelve year old kid who is proactively using LLMs to build websites for lawn-mowing businesses, calling them up, asking them if they want it for $200, and closing deals in seconds.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but he does all the work up-front before even contacting them, using logos and info from Facebook or Google. He's cleared several thousand dollars so far.
I get that the owners aren't going to be the proactive ones who have the awareness, time, or vision for doing this, all your points are valid. However, AI has definitely changed the calculus here--I'm glad I'm not a web dev anymore.
Once he creates the website, does he also host it and handle the billing for his clients? Is he using a website builder like Square space or hosting on AWS?
The hurdle is more than just building the site, a lot of really small non-technical businesses don't want the trouble of handling the billing and maintenance of the site.
It might just be static site hosting for businesses that want a real website, and not just a Facebook page. Static site hosting is so simple, I believe a 12 year old could do it.
I recently stood up a personal and a business site using Claude + Astro + GitHub + Cloudflare Pages, and apart from the Claude subscription, it’s all free.
Definitely not skills that are going to be in the typical restaurant owner’s wheelhouse (not hard to learn, just not likely to care) so you’d need to figure out how to host per-business to avoid hosting everything under one account and running over the free tier. But there’s very little management or payment necessary until you get quite a bit of traffic, which is probably not likely for your average suburban sandwich shop.
So, he's non-technical. He hasn't written a line of code. I don't know the details of how he hosts or deploys the sites, but I'd likely guarantee that he asked whatever AI he uses and it just walked him through the process of getting one hosted, then he has replicated that.
I mean, for a 12 year old, $200 and not having to do any more work in the future might be a good deal, and for a business, a $200 one-time probably seems like a steal. I agree that there might be long-term issues for them if they don't know how to maintain them, but what are they going to do, sue the 12 year old?
Music / mp3 blogs were one of the heights of the free and open internet. RSS, Hype Machine [0] (an aggregator), blog rolls, back links, etc, all allowed for both discovery and taste-making in an organic way that still let individuality shine through. New artists could gain visibility just by emailing a couple MP3’s. One could find a subset of blogs that matched one’s general taste and discover new artists every week.
Today’s world of algorithms and an endless sea of new music really pales in comparison. It’s completely soulless.
HypeMachine was a core memory of my adolescence. I reminisce on the way the site encouraged music discovery through the aggregation of all the little niche blogs, among those pigeons and planes. Memories of Sitting in my room with old headphones while sorting by most recent. Unfortunately nothing has ever replaced it for me and unfortunately it has faded slowly as Spotify and SoundCloud gained more prominence. I agree, music discovery has become soulless…
This is really cool! I really liked the architecture explanation.
Once you get solid rankings for the different LLMs, I think a huge feature of a system like this would be to allow LLMs to pilot user decks to evaluate changes to the deck.
I'm guessing the costs of that would be pretty big, but if decent piloting is ever enabled by the cheaper models, it could be a huge change to how users evaluate their deck construction.
Especially for formats like Commander where cooperation and coordination amongst players can't be evaluated through pure simulation, and the singleton nature makes specific card changes very difficult to evaluate as testing requires many, many games.
For anyone wanting a quick breakdown of the current situation: the Sig Sauer P320 is a striker-fired handgun, which means the firing pin is spring loaded and retained by a sear. Other handguns are hammer-fired, where the trigger (or slide actuation) cocks the hammer. Other popular striker-fired guns include the Glock and Smith and Wesson M&P series. Frequently, striker-fired pistols come without safeties, but optionally add them.
The P320 was popular as it was designed as a modular system, allowing a single FCU (firing control unit, basically a trigger and striker assembly) to be independent and swappable with other parts of the handgun: grip, slide, barrel, etc. This allows for a single platform to serve multiple needs: concealed carry, compact, full-size, or even competition models, as well as be transferrable across calibers. The magazine design also allowed for more rounds to be carried in compact configurations.
The P320 was selected by the US Army [0] as the official replacement for the Beretta M9 as a service-issued sidearm, officially designated the M17 or M18 (in 9mm).
In 2020 SIG SAUER initiated a "voluntary upgrade program" [1] that swapped various components of the trigger to prevent unintended discharge (UD) events that could occur when the pistol dropped in certain orientations. These changes became standard for the M17 and all P320 manufactured after.
Recently, there have been very high-profile cases and investigations around UD events, the most recent being by an event in the Air Force that led to the death of an airman. In that case the Air Force put a suspension on the firearm during the investigation but eventually arrested the airman responsible, as they determined he had lied about the events [2].
Regardless of the specific failure modes of the weapon, there is a stigma around it, resulting in various law enforcement agencies switching from it or ranges banning the firearm. This has been popularized by incidents caught on video and somewhat viral videos of testing the firearm in a variety of scenarios.
All in all, the P320 is one of the most mass-produced firearms in the world, and I would not be surprised to see Sig Sauer continue to fight in the court of public opinion to defend the reputation of the firearm, in what I would deem a losing strategy.
I understand your speculation on the amount of variance, but I haven't seen any data to support it.
Sig's "recall" was a drop-safety issue, where in certain orientations the weight of the trigger could generate enough momentum to allow an unintentional discharge.
There's plenty of data on the variances of P320 parts being much larger than specified by Sig, and it has been presented in a few court cases. Root causing this issue to tolerances hasn't been done, though.
I think one of the best demonstrations of this, with detail on the amount of travel required for most striker-fired handguns is this video [0]. Lots of detail and relatively methodical.
I would love some sunglasses for running that show some basic metrics (similar to my Apple Watch) for my workout, equivalent to the FORM Smart Swim 1 [0]. However, I would mostly prefer this to be a dumb screen, with all the smarts off loaded to a watch or phone. I'm not sure why companies keep insisting on building such smart glasses as independent products.
Musgrave Pencil Co [0], in Shelbyville, TN is one of the only other ones in the country I'm aware of.
The biggest challenge for a lot of these is that they essentially require full-time machinists to keep the old machinery running, as the manufacturers typically have gone out of business decades ago. Tremont Nail Co [1] is another one I'm aware of, because they manufacture nails with old processes (cutting instead of wire).
Which really tells the story of US manufacturing decline. When all supporting functions of an industry no longer exist, or have migrated to other countries, or have been surpassed by new technology, why should we romanticize and pine for an era that has been passed by? Why shouldn't we have a vision for a new era and double down on the things we are best at?
>Which really tells the story of US manufacturing decline. When all supporting functions of an industry no longer exist, or have migrated to other countries, or have been surpassed by new technology, why should we romanticize and pine for an era that has been passed by? Why shouldn't we have a vision for a new era and double down on the things we are best at?
That is true, and most people do not romanticize working in a factory as their day job. However it is a good idea I think to keep some small amount of it onshore so the knowledge is not totally lost, in case whatever country who is doing the manufacturing decides to use that as leverage over your country.
> why should we romanticize and pine for an era that has been passed by? Why shouldn't we have a vision for a new era and double down on the things we are best at?
Because if something bad happens, be it a war, trade war with tarrifs or a pandemic, or just a stuck ship somewhere blocking transport, you're left without everything that you were once able to make, but can't make anymore.
but going back to processes that are essentially "artisan" at this point, instead of re-shoring efficient automated manufacturing is the problem. Doubling down on making high volume pencils in an inefficient way is a fools errand when, if the stated goal is to manufacture all pencils domestically used through domestic firms is going to require an entire domestic supply chain on top of entirely new manufacturing processes and machinery.
Trying to scale old systems is not going to solve the issue of not being able to make the things we want to own, if that is even a good or feasible goal in the first place.
I think that's a bit of a straw man, onshoring doesn't demand that it re-implements 1910-style production.
Maybe a new-tech pencil factory would only require 10 staff to run it 24/7. That's fine. Onshoring doesn't equate to full employment, but it does result in skills, knowledge and revenue remaining within a local OODA loop instead of being exported along with the actual production.
Advanced economies are not so much living ahead in time as living at the top of a deeper production chain. The lower rungs on the production ladder do not cease to exist, though sometimes one of them is replaced by another, they just move around. And the biggest reason they are moved is to exploit different laws. One does not need to romanticize the past to want the work done under stricter laws at higher cost and with better pay and working conditions.
Most of MtG’s secondary market value is protected by how difficult it is (or how costly it is) for cheap printers to match Cartamundi’s (and other global printers) offset printing processes. The number of counterfeit tests (green dot, black layer, Deckmaster, etc) that are simple and useful for basic users to determine counterfeits all trace back to the printing processes WotC uses.
I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail
It relies heavily on the security and trustworthiness of the printer as well though, same as any kind of company where their product's value far outweighs its production cost (like cash money); I can imagine that before the big boom, employees would be able to take some cards / boxes / sheets home if they wanted to.
I worked on an application used in a paper factory that produced paper for banknotes. The entire point of the application was to make sure every single sheet of the paper was accounted for. There were unique barcodes printed on it as soon as it was dry enough to do so, and tracked throughout the production process.
Fun fact: confirming the proper disposal of damaged sheets required special privileges, and the name for the user role was "destroyer". So someone could rightfully claim their job title was "destroyer".
yeah, there is a lot of control of printing artifacts that are required. Some of those do make it out, either through QC issues [0] or through WotC itself gifting test print cards and full sheets to employees or as prizes. However, the ability to generate truly authentic MtG cards requires two things: million dollar Heidelberg offset printing machines and the original offset printing files for the card backs (which have not changed since release as far as I'm aware).
I'm guessing there is a lot of negativity towards the Vision Pro here, lots of it deserved. However, the immersive video aspect is the one thing Vision Pro delivers that I think is truly unique and new. I'm not sure that is enough to support a $3500 hardware product, but I encourage anyone to try the demo and utilize the immersive video. It was an otherworldly experience for me, and news like this is very exciting as it will allow more content to be available.
"Immersive video" is literally just high-resolution, wide-fov, 3d passthrough videos. As usual, Apple is selling a common feature of e.g. the Quest 3 under a different name and for a much higher price. You can get the same experience without having to shell out several grand.
Your comment is incorrect in many ways. Based on your comment, I don’t believe you’ve actually tried it?
Firstly, it is not passthrough video.
Secondly, you cannot currently have the same experience on the quest. You can have lower quality versions of it, but immersive video is 8k per eye at 90fps.
There has literally never been cameras available to consumers to capture that till this specific camera. Unless you did professional custom camera rigs.
As someone who owns both a Quest and a Vision Pro, and has worked in stereo for a large portion of my career, the two experiences are not remotely comparable when it comes to video today. The quest excels in other areas, but this is one where Meta have very weak coverage on.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but he does all the work up-front before even contacting them, using logos and info from Facebook or Google. He's cleared several thousand dollars so far.
I get that the owners aren't going to be the proactive ones who have the awareness, time, or vision for doing this, all your points are valid. However, AI has definitely changed the calculus here--I'm glad I'm not a web dev anymore.
reply