Alex's notes

From a recent survey paper about associative thinking, the authors found that more creative people generate a broader set of associations compared to less creative people and tend to perceive distant associations as closer together.

One explanation for how creativity works is by a process called associative thinking.

A recent study measuring the effect of including the term “artificial intelligence” in the description of products and services decreases overall purchase intent.

The essay Advantages of incompetent management by Yossi Kreinin, discusses how competent management isn’t always best and we overlook the desirable effects of incompetent management.

I use a docker container to build a fairly large hugo static website and vite to build some javascript.

In Double your productivity without more work or stress, the author makes the argument that the way to increase overall velocity is to decrease the amount of low-velocity periods of work.

The annual percentage changes of the stock market go up and down more than the actual businesses in it.

We can’t go back in time so the only thing that can provide value is in the present and future.

The longer something takes to deliver value, the less valuable it is.

Today there is an abundance of everything.

Some anecdotes as I readjust to life on the east coast.

The product or service in which, value goes to users first and then, upon capturing a mass audience of users, provides values to suppliers.

An AI agent is an intent-based abstraction that combines LLMs to plan and take action in order produce a desired goal.

Several startups are touting AI employees that you can hire to perform a specific function.

A common question in product management that always seems to come up is some flavor of: should product managers be technical?

Notes on the video 13 Years of Brutally Honest Business Advice.

Writing is like taking an idea and turning it into a rigid object.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the contribution to US GDP in Q1 2024 of professional services industries was more than double that of information industries (which includes softare publishing).

Using org-mode and org-roam can make a rudimentary CRM system for logging interactions with people, companies, or any other contact.

Software abstractions save us time doing work by not having to write programs from lower level building blocks.

A problem that crops up often in web design is centering.

Working asynchronously is an important reason why remote teams work.

Using a UI is a form of deductive reasoning that takes effort.

Low bitrate audio codecs are primarily used for downscaling audio for slower internet connection speeds and supporting older devices.

I recently shared some observations about trying to use generative AI tools at work and shared the experience on LinkedIn.

I hear it often enough that it seems like a commonly held belief that anxiety somehow improves performance at work and gives one an edge.

Here are the most useful metrics I’ve found for running a startup.

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As it stands today, LLM applications have noticeable latency but much of the latency is output-size bound rather than input-size bound.

Use the following prompt to return an org-ql s-expression based on the user’s input.

Most of my tasks and projects are organized using org-mode.

A recent study from Stanford found that LLM’s (GPT-4) and RAG-based AI tools (Lexis+ AI, Westlaw AI-Assisted Research, Ask Practical Law AI) hallucinate answers 16% to 40% of the time in benchmarking queries.

The way to make everything in your codebase twice as complicated is to make data nullable.

While I don’t write code every day, I find it incredibly convenient.

Sometimes using Emacs you want to know what variables are being set in the current buffer.

I recently needed to change the behavior of a library (org-download) based on the tags of the current buffer.

Many vector databases can find the top k most similar results to a query but are unable to sort by other document metadata.

Alfred does not have a mobile application that can make snippets available from your desktop to your phone.

One of the difficult parts of applying AI to existing processes and products is that people aren’t calibrated on what generative AI can and can’t do.

Writing a specification with sufficient detail to know exactly what software one should build is as much work as writing the code itself.

When asked to draw a random number between 1 and 10 and any color, most people choose the number seven and the color blue.

I want to be able to use generative AI in spreadsheets to solve unique problems.

When selling a B2B SaaS product to a wide range of company sizes (e.

Selling something is already difficult enough but when you have to sell the problem first, it’s even hRder.

A lot of startups have a business model which roughly equates to: put a dollar in, get two dollars out.

Global crises happening all at once re-inforce one another making the effects larger than any individual crisis alone.

In an episode of Boy Meets World, Shawn is in a competition of who can wait longest on a billboard suspended high up in the air in order to win tickets to the Super Bowl.

The other day I noticed a tweet from Justin Duke which outlined a plan to get his company’s codebase ready for Devin—a programming focused generative AI product.

Net magic number is a measurement of go-to-market (GTM) efficiency for SaaS businesses.

Most managers, at best, are a form of benign neglect.