Citizen developers were already there doing Excel. I have seen basically full fledged applications in Excel since I was in high school which was 25 years ago already.
Not fun part is that the longer you stay at your home comfort zone the bigger social anxiety grows.
Other annoying parts are if you fight off anxiety and do go out you most likely will run into minor inconvenience like some Karen honking on you or making a fuss in front of you when you’re waiting in line. Minor inconvenience like that refuels social anxiety.
This is a known sales trick, called door-in-the face. First you introduce your victim to an outrageous claim, and then follow with a more modest and more reasonable sounding claim.
In truth neither claims are reasonable, but because of the door in the face, the victim is more susceptible the the latter claim. Without the more outrageous claim it is unlikely the victim would have believed the latter claim.
In reality, both "AGI" and "100x miracle" AND the "10x miracle" are all outrageous claims, and I call bullshit on all of them.
I am more concerned by bait and switch that is comming, people will get used to convenience for $100 a year or $100 a month and after 10 years they do price 5x and what are people going to do?
Downside is a lot of those that argue, try out some stuff in ChatGPT or other chat interface without digging a bit further. Expecting "general AI" and asking general questions where LLMs are most prone for hallucinations. Other part is cheap out setups using same subscription for multiple people who get history polluted.
They don't have time to check more stuff as they are busy with their life.
People who did check the stuff don't have time in life to prove to the ones that argue "in exactly whatever the person arguing would find useful way".
Personally like a year ago I was the person who tried out some ChatGPT and didn't have time to dabble, because all the hype was off putting and of course I was finding more important and interesting things to do in my life besides chatting with some silly bot that I can trick easily with trick questions or consider it not useful because it hallucinated something I wanted in a script.
I did take a plunge for really a deep dive into AI around April last year and I saw for my own eyes ... and only that convinced me. Using API where I built my own agent loop, getting details from images, pdf files, iterating on the code, getting unstructured "human" input into structured output I can handle in my programs.
*Data classification is easy for LLM. Data transformation is a bit harder but still great. Creating new data is hard so like answering questions where it has to generate stuff from thin air it will hallucinate like a mad man.*
Data classification like "is it a cat, answer with yes or no" it will be hard for latest models to start hallucinating.
You can still have “chat interface” but if you use it for specialized applications you can do better than that.
If I can do some actions with a press of a button that runs code or even some LLM interaction without me having to type that’s so much better.
Feedback interface with plain text is awful, would be much better if there is anything that I have to repeat or fix on my end standing out - or any problem that LLM is looping over quickly discoverable.
From what I quickly checked you can modify your own home there is an exclusion for doing electrical work on your property - seems like main panel would be somehow excluded from what qualifies as "yours".
That exemption is from the state code and applies to "work not specifically regulated by a municipal ordinance that is performed in or on a dwelling by a person who owns and resides in the dwelling".
To get a journeyman electrician license in Texas, you need to have 8000 hours of documented on-the-job experience working under a licensed electrician[1].
So you'd need to find an electrician who will let for you work them on the weekends, and if you work 8 hours every Saturday and every Sunday, then it will take you 500 weekends.
A residential wireman license only requires 4000 hours[2], but I'm not sure if that kind of license would be good enough for the inspection.
Isn't there an exclusion or lower entry requirement if you have a technical education like engineering degree? Like if not electrical engineering because I guess that would be obvious there should be lower entry bar - but for all others at least somewhat related...
I guess if you want to dabble with installing battery packs with inverters, that's not your typical bachelor of arts who is trying to do so.
Where I am at (rural CO), as long as it can be inspected and meets code, the county is fine- you don't need a blessing. Septic is different (that's a $175 certificate, though). But for electrical all you have to do is meet codes, which isn't really super hard.
This right here - I have been investigating getting my own contractor license for DIY work on a property I own that must be permitted but city will only issue permits to licensed contractors. Took a practice test for the exam on a whim and nearly passed it without studying. Anybody seriously considering DIY'ing the install of something like this probably could get a license without a lot of work.
Usually you can see it when someone nags about “call us” pricing that is targeted at enterprise. People that nag about it are most likely not the customers someone wants to cater to.
When I was a software developer, I mostly griped about this when I wanted to experiment to see if I would even ask my larger enterprise if they would be interested in looking into it. I always felt like companies were killing a useful marketing stream from the enterprise's own employees. I think Tailscale has really nailed it, though. They give away the store to casual users, but make it so that a business will want to talk to sales to get all the features they need with better pricing per user. Small businesses can survive quite well on the free plan.
I'm sure everyone "wants to" land a many million dollar deal with a big company that has mild demands, but that doesn't mean those naggers are bad customers. Bad customers have much more annoying and unreasonable demands than a pricing sheet.
Definitely there exist customers one must fire, but the flip side is, some of them might have genuine complaints.
... an extremely popular marketing tool ... sending an equally excessive amount of data above what they were paying for. They were far less adamant about the product, and on some days I didn't even want them as a customer. If there was a minor blip in the service, they were the first to complain. Reminder, [Sentry] was still a side project at the time so I had a day-job. That meant it was often stressful for Chris and I to deal w/ customer support, and way more stressful dealing with outages.
We had one customer who loved the product, and one who didn't. Both of these customers had such extreme volumes of data that it had a tangible infrastructure cost associated with hosting them. We knew the best thing to do was to find a way to be able to charge them more money for the amount of data they sent. So we set off to build that and then followed up with each customer.
To our surprise, the customer that loved the product didn't want to pay more. The customer who was constantly complaining immediately jumped on the opportunity. What's the lesson to take away from this?
... when I was a teenager I worked at Burger King, and there was an anecdote I will never forget: for every customer that complains, there are nine more with a similar experience. I've cemented this in my philosophy around development, to the point where I now believe over rotating on negative feedback is actually just biasing towards the customers who truly see the value in what you're offering. The customer that was complaining really valued our product, whereas the customer that was happy was simply content.
I don’t think anyone lands contracts with “mild demands”.
Most of the time you want to cut off ‘non customers’ as soon as possible and don’t leave ‘big fish’ without having direct contact person who can explain stuff. People just clicking around on their own will make assumptions that need to be addressed in a way no one wastes time.
> Most of the time you want to cut off ‘non customers’ as soon as possible
If you mean this literally, one of the best ways to turn non-customers into customers is to give them a way to pay you. Which means telling them the price. If you're implying something else by ‘non customers’ then I'm missing the implication.
> and don’t leave ‘big fish’ without having direct contact person who can explain stuff
You can give a contact person and have a list of prices.
> People just clicking around on their own will make assumptions that need to be addressed in a way no one wastes time.
Making everyone call you to negotiate is going to waste time.
Citizen developers were already there doing Excel. I have seen basically full fledged applications in Excel since I was in high school which was 25 years ago already.
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