garrickvanburen's comments

The most hyped use cases for AI/LLM make me wonder, "why are we doing this activity to begin with? We could just not."

If I recall correctly, the impetus for Christiansen to even look into this was to answer the question: “why are there so many milkshakes sold in the morning via drive thru?”

That’s a different question than, “how do we make our breakfast menu more popular?”

Now, perhaps the latter question begat the former, but either way it is not a product innovation story, it’s a customer/market research story articulating the shape of customer demand (which I fully support).

If there was a second part of the story - like, McD started marketing milkshakes in their breakfast menu and sales shot up ##% or they developed a breakfast flavor milkshake and sales shot up - then we’d have the product innovation story.

I'm a big fan of JobsToBeDone, but partially because of this milkshake example, it took me years to grok.

As I see it, the milkshake example isn't about innovation, it's about actually having human-to-human conversations with customers and appreciating customers define their own competitive set, so perhaps closer to Gibson's "the street has its own use for things."

Outside of those two points, I'm not sure what repeatable lessons exist in the milkshake story for innovation, and because of that, it's probably doing more harm than help to JTBD as a concept.

I would say Apple's original exclusivity deal w/ AT&T shows they're comfortable letting a 3rd party control some of the user experience if that's the only way they can get to market.

It’s likely the land would be far more valuable as something else.

Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines.

Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.

On the news of Netflix acquiring Warner Bros, I’m reminded of how good Netflix has been at innovating their business model.

Over the past 27 years, their business model has changed multiple times and each evolution appears to be in direct response to the bottleneck of growth, from maintaining inventory of DVD to acquiring global streaming rights.

Year / Business Model / Bottleneck to Growth

1998 / Sell DVDs over the internet / Need to continually replenish DVD inventory,

1999-2006 / Rent DVDs over the internet / USPS delivery & return times

2007 / Stream movies over the internet / Acquiring US streaming rights to a massive library of movies

2009 / Start producing movies (Netflix Originals) / Number of subscribers watching Netflix Originals

2010-2012 / Global expansion; Canada, South America, Europe / Maintaining rights globally

2025 / Acquire Warner Bros Discovery

I prefer Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect or Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy

“AI is amazing about the thing I know nothing about…but it’s absolute garbage at the stuff I’m expert in.”

https://garrickvanburen.com/an-increasingly-worse-response/

My rant on token-based pricing is primarily based on the difficulty in consistently forecasting spend.....and also that the ongoing value of a token is controlled by the vendor...."the house always wins"

https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

Fortitude is amazing. Cinematography, soundtrack, creepiness all top notch.

"social media" is forums, IRC, blogs, etc, but through the lens of advertisers.

One of my favorite phones. Despite a bizarre hiccup preventing sd cards from being recognized if the camera lens sensor broke.

After briefly looking into it, my assumption is intermittent fasting works great for people that are eating throughout the entirety of the day.

Or Kubb! It has a high silliness factor

That’s my question: what are the political stars now aligned?

What inspired working to reverse this now?

I'm all for it, just curious as the law has existed for 8 years and been in effect for 3. Seemingly little interest from anyone in the tech world to put lobbying behind reversing it until this point.

What changed?

I've got a slightly different philosophy.

A calendar is for storing commitments, and a specific date/time is part of that commitment.

I consider a 'to do list' a 'to schedule list', they are potential commitments.

From my perspective, a thing is either a commitment (on the calendar) or not (essentially in a backlog).

personal projects are fantastic and don't require making anyone happy except yourself.

if however your goal is to make other people happy (which I'd argue is no longer a personal project)...the iterative "work" described above is the fastest, straightest path.

this is the problem Google search originally had.

They successfully solved it with an advertising....and they also had the ability to cache results.

I don’t see the problem.

I’m not sure how LLMs output is indistinguishable from Wikipedia or World Book.

Maybe? and if the question is “did the student actually write this?” (which is different than “do they understand it?” there are lots of different ways to assess if a given student understands the material…that don’t involve submitting typed text but still involve communicating clearly.

If we allow LLMs- like we allow calculators, just how poor LLMs are will become far more obvious.

I’m always hesitant to drag books written in a different era through today’s sensibilities.

For all the complaints of these books today (and I’ve complained about Lean Startup as recently as Dec 2024) these were written in a different time and likely written about tactics obsolete at the time of publication.

Let’s allow them to be artifacts of their time.