Agreed. Unless it's a really frequently used UI, my company defaults to showing all options to all users regardless of permissions. It's better to see "Manage users" in the settings menu which takes you to a page explaining that you don't have permission as opposed to seeing nothing and wondering why it's not there even though the help article says it should be there.
No, putting an explanation on the help article that this feature is only available to admins doesn't work. No one reads anything.
I think that's the point though. The AI companies can't compete without hiring very talented employees and raising lots of money from investors. Neither the employees nor investors would participate if there weren't the potential for making mountains of money. So these AI companies fundamentally can't be non-profits or true B-corps (I realize that's a vague term, but the it certainly means not doing whatever it takes to make as much money as possible), and they shouldn't pretend they are.
To me, it feels like saying "you can't be a public benefit corporation unless all the labor involved in delivering that public benefit is cheap".
Which just doesn't seem like it should be true?
Sure, some "public benefit" missions could scale sideways and employ a lot of cheap labor, not suffering from a salary cap at all. But other missions would require rare high end high performance high salary specialists who are in demand - and thus expensive. You can't rely on being able to source enough altruists that will put up with being paid half their market worth for the sake of the mission.
>But other missions would require rare high end high performance high salary specialists who are in demand - and thus expensive. You can't rely on being able to source enough altruists that will put up with being paid half their market worth for the sake of the mission.'
That's exactly what a non-profit should be able to rely on. And not just "half their market worth", but even many times less.
Else we can just say "we can't really have non-profits, because everybody is a greedy pig who doesn't care about public benefit enough to make a sacrifice of profits - but still a perfectly livable salary" - and be done with it.
The real danger is "We make mountains of money, but everyone dies, including us."
The top of the top researchers think this is a real possibility - people like Geoffrey Hinton - so it's not an extremist negative-for-the-sake-of-it POV.
It's going to be poetic if the Free Markets Are Optimal and Greed-is-Rational Cult actually suicides the species, as a final definitive proof that their ideology is wrong-headed, harmful, and a tragic failure of human intelligence.
But here we are. The universe doesn't care. It's up to us. If we're not smart enough to make smart choices, then we get to live - or die - with the consequences.
When we used Stripe, we opted out of all their fraud prevention stuff to save money (not sure if that's still an option). As a b2b SaaS where payment happens after a free trial (not at signup), we're just not a target for fraud, so it was totally fine.
I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it.
Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.
My small SaaS app has been DDoSed a handful of times, always accompanied by an email asking for a ransom in the form of bitcoin.
The first time we switched to Cloudflare which saved us. Even with Cloudflare, the DDoS attempts are still damaging (the site goes down, we use Cloudflare to block the endpoints they're targeting, they change endpoints, etc.) but manageable. Without Cloudflare or something like it, I think it's possible that we'd be out of business.
This is the main thing that's been bugging me about the AI discussion. People seem to forget that capitalism is competitive, and if everyone gains the same advantage, then it's not an advantage. If the cost of labor goes down, it means companies will either need to lower their prices or increase their investment in other areas (e.g. hiring even more people now that they're cheaper).
Unless you're a monopoly, I don't see how AI will lead to these massive cost savings everyone is hoping for.
> Unless you're a monopoly, I don't see how AI will lead to these massive cost savings everyone is hoping for
"If the cost of labor goes down" and "companies...lower their prices," that means cost savings for every one of their customers. If they "increase their investment in other areas," that means lower costs of capital for all of their investments.
You're arguing that the gains from AI don't look likely to be concentrated. That's good! It's not an argument that AI won't be economically revoluationary (and value adding).
As someone who switched from Dropbox Paper to Notion...
There's no question that Paper is a better pure writing experience. If you're viewing Notion as just a note-taking app and nothing else, I think you're misunderstanding what it's for.
For starters, it's way easier to organize stuff in Notion than Paper. This is less a feature of Notion, and more of a terrible limitation of Paper. Paper was stuck with the "files within folders" model. Just the fact that Notion lets you control what shows up in the navigation sidebar was a huge time saver for me. And being able to create pages within pages within pages (which is very different from having sibling documents inside a folder) made it much more flexible for organizing everything.
But the real power of Notion is when you start to treat it as a database builder rather than a note-taking tool. Yes, it's useful for taking notes, but those notes are about something, and with tools like Paper, Obsidian, etc., the thing is always living somewhere else.
With Notion, I was able to make a database of projects and another database of tasks which linked to those projects. Each developer on my team has a custom dashboard showing just the tasks that are assigned to them and currently in-progress. I have a totally different view showing all the projects going on right now. And then each of those tasks have a pretty good (I admit it's not great) note-taking feature. The notes are living within the actual object you're taking notes about, which is totally different from Paper.
I even use Notion for personal stuff. I have a Notion form that my wife and I use to enter things we need to buy next time we're at the store. And there's a view showing the things we need to buy from each separate store with checkboxes next to each one so it's easy to remove them when we're done. There's a separate database listing the movies we want to watch, with a view for all the ones we previously watched, and when. I have a database of cocktail recipes along with ingredient lists (so I can easily filter by ingredient), formulas to calculate different volumes based on how many drinks you're making, a rating system, etc.
Basically, if you look at Notion as a bucket of unstructured notes with a markdown editor, I agree, it's nothing special. But that's not what it really is.
I think there are two common definitions of startup, and neither require VCs to be involved.
One (seen elsewhere in these comments) is any small business. I personally don't like that definition because there is a pretty big difference between a local coffee shop and the thing we all mean when we say "startup".
The other one which is more common here is a company that is currently small, but the business model involves getting much much larger. There's a blurry line between a small business and a startup with this definition, but it seems to be a "you know it when you see it" type of thing.
Companies like Mailchimp and Atlassian (in their early days) clearly qualified as startups even though they hadn't raised VC. You might say they're outliers, but so are the VC-backed companies that reach that level of success. If a small company is growing quickly and on pace to become a multi-billion dollar company, it seems weird to say they're not a startup just because they didn't raise money from the right people.
I agree that LLMs turn short prompts into long code blocks, but I don't agree that it's fluff in the same way that email pleasantries are fluff.
The short prompt leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The code itself leaves zero room for interpretation (assuming the behavior of the coding language is well understood). I don't agree that AI will allow us to start relying on code that isn't fully defined just because it might allow our emails to remove fluff that didn't contribute to the meaning at all.
The other versions of recaptcha show the annoying captchas, but v3 just monitors various signals and gives a score indicating the likelihood that it's a bot.
We use this to reduce spam in some parts of our app, and I think there's an opportunity to make a better version, but it'd be tough for it to be better enough that people would pay for it since Google's solution is decent and free.
Many people who want to work from the office are mostly interested in doing so because they want to be around their coworkers. If their coworkers are remote, they won't get what they want. Similarly, remote people might not be happy at a company that allows remote work but primarily has an in-person culture.
Letting everyone do what they want is not a path towards everyone being happy. I think a better approach is for companies (or at least teams) to land somewhere on the spectrum from full in-person to full remote, and then employees can work at the place that fits them best.
I understand that point of view but I don't agree with it. I work remotely because my coworkers are in different countries. But some of them come to local offices because they like it. This is a great setup for everybody and noone is complaining.
I know anecdata doesn't count but I observed the same in various companies: yes, those who prefer to work from the office miss their colleagues, but are surrounded by like-minded people and that works better for everyone.
As long as the company is large enough for there to be a critical mass of people in a bunch of locales, I think this works great. I work for a company with < 100 people spread across like 10 time zones, and I wish it made sense for us to have some office space in my city where I could work with people sometimes, but it doesn't because there are only three of us and we don't work on the same things.
No, putting an explanation on the help article that this feature is only available to admins doesn't work. No one reads anything.