Snippets – Week of Feb 3, 2025

There's a lot of AI stuff in this one, but also a wee bit of tree skiing + hiking + bitching about how much Apple sucks at parental controls

📸 = Saturday 7am from the summit of Mount Snow, VT. I hiked up 2x last weekend (once on bluebird day w/ amazing sunrise, and once with 10” fresh show underfoot and first tracks down)

Hey again! I think I mentioned last time my goal for Project Substack Resurrection™ is 2x month (and more specifically, I said 3x before I finish Notebook #112 which is in my pocket right now… and only has 11 pages left!), so let’s gooooooo.

Sidenote: I make mini OKRs for myself with each notebook –– one of them in this notebook is “substack 3x”)

UPDATES ON WHAT I’M WORKING ON

Hopscotch Labs / BeeBot –“Marauders Map for AirPods, emcee'd by an AI DJ whenever you're wearing headphones”. We pushed our beta (TestFlight) out to another ~100 people the other day so it’s been fun to see signups/usage (want in?). When you put your headphones in, the first thing you hear is “BeeBot Activated! 36 other people online!” (which means 36 people have recently put their headphone in… and this number is up from “10, 11, 12 people online” a few days ago). There’s a lot of fun themes we are exploring with this project, but two that are in my head right now are:

• Theme #1: Apps you don’t have to use — there’s no feed to scroll, or posts to like. You just put your headphones in and walk around and “stuff happens”. This is a continuation of some of the work we did with FSQ/Swarm checkins (“it should take you <5 seconds to take you phone, open app, check-in, put phone away… and then stuff happens”). I despise the idea of measuring success by “minutes spent in app”. If anything, success IMHO is “can people experience the benefits of the product without having to consume/touch the screen”

• Theme #2: "What happens when people have always-on headphones?” This is a little weird, and maybe a little dystopian (??) but I am curious about exploring what’s possible when, say, you have one AirPods in, all day long (even if you’re not listening to anything!). This is a bit of the “audio as poor-mans Augmented Reality” stuff we talked about in the Marsbot days, but with the added foresight that, for example, Meta Glasses are basically “always-on headphones” (aka: Bluetooth speakers you may wear all day long). People who forget to take their Airpods out (or who leave them in *even if they’re not listening to anything* as a way of signaling “leave me alone”), well, those are always-on headphones too. I can’t help but to think the world/culture is kind of moving in this direction, and I like the idea of playing in this space.

• FYI — just realized today marks 100 days since we closed our Seed Round. (Nov 4)

Stockade FC – Still working on finalizing our 2025 schedule. I co-hosted a “Build & Grow” session about “getting sponsorships” (zoom call, ~40 attendees), which is a thing that we’re starting to do with this new league we started. I mean, what’s the point of being in a league with 50-100 other teams, if you’re not all working together to help each other get bigger and better? This is one of the primary “cultural” things we’re working to build into The League for Clubs, and it was fun to kick it off.

Street FC — Just passed 11k total games played (!!)

Foursquare – There’s always something that punts FSQ back into my headspace. (aka: no closure). Here’s what it was this week: (1000 stories to tell, though probably best to wait till the whole story wraps up to tell them — aka: closure!))

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

Last week I went to two different “how AI is changing the world” things, run by two different venture teams (USV & Betaworks), with totally different vibes… basically “AI for the enterprise” vs. “AI as artificial life”. Here’s a bunch of random quotes from my notebook: (I didn’t attribute these to people as I didn’t really have the opportunity to ask for permission… hope that’s okay to anyone reading who was quoted!)

• “I see a future where tiny teams empowered by AI can take on giants and win” — says a guy who spun up a team/crew of AI lawyer-agents (specifically “multi-agent systems w/ non-linear prompt chaining with smart-chunking", his words) to fight a legal battle against a big corp. I am not super technical here, but to see under the hood where some of these systems looked like 6-8 instances of ChatGPT running in parallel, each of which had a role/goal/backstory/chain of command, and they’re all chatting with each other like little AI employees… that really kind of blew my mind in how much it was less about “writing code” and more about “writing instructions in natural language to *teach* a team of bots how to act/behave like a team of humans including managing each other / reporting to each other”)

• “You’ll start to see tech margins on service businesses” [as teams of humans are replaced by teams of agents/bots] - okay, yeah, I get it.

• “Our team is moving too fast for a human designer. Why would I wait a week to get designs back from a freelancer, when AI can do something ‘good enough'‘ in 3 minutes?” - again, I get it.

• “We’re about to go from ‘prompts’ being mainstream [aka: everyone knows what ChatGPT is] to ‘agents’ being mainstream” - … agents being the “non-linear prompt chaining with smart-chunking" that can do and do stuff / take action on your behalf (book flights, make reservations, etc). You can start to see this mainstream’ification with OpenAI’s Operator.

• “LLMs have already sucked up all the publicly available written text and transcribed text (video/movies/music) … all that’s left is the data in your head!” – I heard someone say this maybe 10 months ago (in the context of building apps that can talk to you in an effort to extract the data / thoughts / memories that are trapped in your tiny little human brain)…

  • … and then I heard someone say another version of this …. “LLMs have already sucked up all the publicly all available written text and transcribed text (video/movies/music) … all that’s left is the data in your private stashes!” — aka: my noteboook! And all the other places I stash half baked ideas (Google Docs, NotePad, Evernote, Note.app etc).

• “The ‘AI space’ is like early Twitter… if you’re ‘in it’, you feel it. But if you’re outside of it, its hard to ‘get it’.” – I can empathize with this, esp as an early Twitter user + superfan who spent a lot of time in the early days explaining to people why I thought it was interesting/important.

• “Um, I understand these things to be human…” - there was a conversation about bot/agents/AI being on Twitter/Threads/Bluesky and masquerading as humans. Some of them may be totally autonomous, some of them may be taking cues from humans (“talk about this, but not that”). The point being it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell what’s what (even for the people “in” the AI space!) and we’re kind of at this point (already!) where it may be impossible to actually know for sure.

• Here was a great exchange:

  • Person 1: “Is digital life artificial life?”
    Person 2: … who are YOU to say it’s artificial?”
    Person 3: “… how dare you even call it a LIFE!”

    … this was not an antagonistic conversation (rather, smart people playfully debating) but it kind of underlines just how WEIRD shit is about to get, and in ways that I don’t think we fully understand (… in the same way that none of us who were using Twitter in 2009 really understood what Twitter was going to turn into 5, 10, 15 years later. <— I like this analogy btw. )

    • Also see: “Xenocogs” – Primordial forms of digital / artificial life. In SAT terms: “single-cell organisms : organic life :: xenocogs : digital life:” (??)

• “Maybe the definition of ‘alive’ is whether you’d be sad when it died?” – possible to poke holes in this, but was fun conversation

• “My whole life is group chat.” - I feel seen! Honestly, how much of my time spent on phone is in some kind of group chat. Texts, WhatsApp, IG DM, Slack, etc.

… whoa just re-read this and there is a lot of super-nerd stuff in here. Let’s end with:

SNIPPETS WEEK OF FEB 3, 2025

Going to punt on this again, since most of the good stuff was in the AI Showdown above. BUT, can’t wait till *next time* when I can tell you about this “New Topologists” thing I went to last night where the instructions were to meet on a subway platform in Brooklyn “below the numbers, above the letters” (ha!)

PERSONAL STUFF / PARENTING

• Two days in Vermont this weekend and I hiked both mornings (5:30am wake up, hiking in snowshoes by 6am, back at house by 7:15am). Saturday was a total bluebird day up the east-facing slope during sunrise. Sunday was a trek up in 10” of fresh snow and then first-ish tracks down (2-3 people got to the top before me!).

  • Speaking of themes I am into right now… “spirituality without religion”. And not to be to all Denny Hippy but this “hike up ride down” is exactly that. The hikes up are mostly silence, the ride down is stunning… it’s emotionally moving (and it’s been like that each time!). I am trying to get Chelsa / my brother / my sister / Via (!) / anyone (!!) to do this hike with me so I have someone to share it with in the moment. (that’s not as sad as it sounds, btw!)

• There was a charity auction at the mountain (for the Adaptive Snow program which helps people with physical / emotional / learning differences get to ski. My son gets paired with an Adaptive Coach btw). Anyway, my dad + I bought a GIANT old trail map sign and we’re gonna hang it on the wall (with some sheet metal behind it) and let the kids use magnets to mark up the trail map (aka: best tree spot, Mars’ special jump, spot where someone took a huge digger, etc). Very excited for this project.

• It snowed. A lot. So much that on Sunday I left the skate behind and rode my snowboard for the 2nd time this season. After riding the skate (no bindings!) for 20+ days down the steeps and thru the trees, strapping a board to my feet gave me superpowers. Back in the day (before kids!) when I’d ride my bike around NYC and duck and weave thru NYC traffic, I could tell that “summer traffic riding” made me a better “winter tree skier” (on the bike in city traffic, you get good at judging the width of open spaces at speed). Same thing with the skate – being able to navigate trees skiing on the skate really levels-up your ability to ride trees aggressively on a snowboard. You know that scene in Spiderman where everything sloooooowwwsss dooowwwwnnnn in the school cafeteria, that’s what it felt like jumping back on the snowboard.

• I got a big trip next week (🇨🇦 + 🚁) and feeling good about it. Legs/cardio feel good from the snowskate and snowshow (even tho I haven’t been running since Dec)

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• This stage of “8yo now has my old laptop and has iMessage to she can text her parents, but we’re NOT allowing her to text her friends yet” is hard. It’s being made harder by the fact that she is the oldest of our kids (aka: no phones till 13yo!), yet her friends are sometimes the youngest and the oldest kids in those families already have phones, etc. and so they’re a bit looser about things. It’s creating drama. The flipside: V uses Keynote and Freeform to make slideshows and greeting cards and collages and its rad to see her creating stuff w/ tech.

• Apple’s screen time controls (for iOS, iPads, laptops) are an embarrassment. I had to go to the Genius Bar (!!) 2x to confirm “so you really don’t support this?” The “this” being…

  • There’s no way to say “only allow my kids to download Apple Arcade games” (which don’t have ads), even if you are paying for Apple Arcade! This seems INSANE.

  • The only way to prevent “Ads” in games seems to be to set “Content & Privacy → Store Restrictions” to under 9yo… but if I do that, then she loses the ability to use Spotify. (and Spotify Kids.app does not have song lyrics, and V loves the lyrics)

  • If she wants to use the browser I have to manually approve every page, every URL, every cookie. How is there no AI Kids Browser? Let them browse the internet, throw up a roadblock when there’s weird / inappropriate content for <insert age here>".

  • … I am Johnny Tech Guy and I had to go the Genius Bar 2x (after asking every LLM on the planet to help me solve these problems). If I can’t figure this out, and Claude and Friends™ can’t figure it out, then WTF Apple get your shit together.

CONSUMING

• 🎥 Anora – I love watching movies where I have ZERO idea what the movie is about. Still not sure if it’s supposed to kind of be a comedy?

• 🎥 Emilia Pérez – Loved this. I almost gave up on it 10 mins in (“ugh, I am not in the mood for a Musical”) but glad I stuck with it. The gala scene is amazing (I watched it 2x)

• 📺 Severance — We gave up on it a while ago. The gravitational pull is strong tho (peer pressure). We’ll prob dive back in.

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• This took more than an hour. But mostly because I had to go thru my notebook and unload all the stuff from those 2 AI talks + all the BeeBot product ideas + notes to self, etc. So I’ve been here crossing off notes, sending emails, adding to product docs, drafting this, etc.

• At the USV thing, Matt C. from USV was talking about private-use LLMs (aka: take everything you’ve ever written and being able to query against it). I’m messing with a version of this that has my old Tweets, old FSQ checkins, old Tumblr posts, old FSQ tips, Medium posts, etc… and probably these Substack posts too. So… worthy to create artifacts of what’s in your head I suppose?

• ps: Traveling next week, so don’t expect an email… but I will bang out that 3rd one before the end of notebook #112!

(thx for the pen, Loring Place!)

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ps: feedback appreciate! or just give me a shout if you made it this far!