I totally agree! Interacting with LLMs at work for the past 8 months has really shaped how I communicate with them (and people! in a weird way).
The solution I've found for "un-loading" questions is similar to the one that works for people: build out more context where it's missing. Wax about specifically where the feature will sit and how it'll work, force it to enumerate and research specific libraries and put these explorations into distinct documents. Synthesize and analyze those documents. Fill in any still-extant knowledge gaps. Only then make a judgement call.
As human engineers, we all had to do this at some point in our careers (building up context, memory, points of reference and experience) so we can now mostly rely on instinct. The models don't have the same kind of advantage, so you have to help them simulate that growth in a single context window.
Their snap/low-context judgements are really variable, generalizing, and often poor. But their "concretely-informed" (even when that concrete information is obtained by prompting) judgements are actually impressively-solid. Sometimes I'll ask an inversely-loaded question after loading up all the concrete evidence just to pressure-test their reasoning, and it will usually push back and defend the "right" solution, which is pretty impressive!
Answering questions in the positive is a simple kind of bias that basically all LLMs have. Frankly if you are going to train on human data you will see this bias because its everywhere.
LLMs have another related bias though, which is a bit more subtle and easy to trip up on, which is that if you give options A or B, and then reorder it so it is B or A, the result may change. And I don't mean change randomly the distribution of the outcomes will likely change significantly.
Yes I really wish people saying "X is the best place to live in the world" would add where else they have lived, otherwise their opinion is not very useful to me.
I live in a big continental European city that also has a start-up hub. The companies here are also small, creative, solving problems, but don't necessarily aim for an exit and growth at all costs, many of them want to create a sustainable business solving a need that people have.
I think, to the economist, these are just SMEs and a start-up is about making money, an IPO, an exit, the unicorns. And of course London as one of the largest financial hubs will be a good place to start such a business.
But I've always thought of these "SME"-type start-ups as belonging to the start-up category too; after all they "start up" a company and often have ambitious goals and creative, tech driven approaches to solving problems. This is how I've thought it would work when I was younger, and it is how I still think it'd be good to do today, and how I'd try to build a company if I have a good idea to pursue.
Anyways, the point I want to make re the article is that I think the definition is narrow, leaves out a bunch of interesting companies, and thus skews the picture towards London. There are plenty of innovative places around Europe, it's just a different model of doing start-ups. IMO this overly financially motivated view onto the start-up world is quite a bit less interesting than a the broader (maybe harder to quantify) picture.
I think you're right that the ambitions in Europe are smaller and I'd say more likely healthier for those involved and maybe the world in general. I have spent some time working in a start up hub in Scandinavia and there was the usual talk of innovation, disruption, work hard, etc... but by 4:30 the offices were empty and people had gone home to their families. Work life balance still came first.
Any time you use the word startup you are already ceding ground. Startup as a term solves the problem of the VC: given technology is inherently risky, how do I get good returns? Answer: make sure the winner keeps doubling down. Create a culture around valorizing the few big, big winners and writing off-- financially and mentally-- the losers.
I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following:
A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business.
A friend of mine used:
A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.
From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.
A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.
A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?
Depends on the market size. If the market is 100M, then a 500k profit effectively means your product will be inferior and poorly placed to evolve. If the market is 500k, then by all means go ahead. Startup are designed with explicit purpose of designing a product to capture that market without having to worry about the revenue during the time the product is being made. But of course capture does mean capture quickly because of the first mover advantage.
You say this as if venture capital is lying there on the ground for anyone to pick up. What VC do you know that aren't investing in companies that want to grow very quickly (or in companies that they then force to grow quickly)?
Europe has plenty of cities that are great if your goal is "build something useful, make money, don't sell your soul," and those don’t show up in these charts
That probably applies to many cities of economically advanced (or even less advanced) countries. I think the (Anglo-Saxon) startup narrative for too long has been about growth at all cost, go big or die trying, sell out your company as early as possible to VCs and be essentially employed by them as a founder. Starting a normal innovative, profit-making company and growing it sustainably is just non-news, unfortunately.
I really hate the exponential growth every year, which is physically impossible, instead of a plain "sustainable business solving a need that people have." as you mention.
Naturally as soon as the need is covered, and there are no new people to sell the product to, the exponential growth every year mentality bursts into entshitification, or firing half of the company because the targets weren't reached, but no worries at least the shareholders are happy.
Maybe it is my European mindset that cannot grasp this MBA mindset into creating /destroying jobs as if people didn't matter.
I mean, I do slightly appreciate this (not all businesses need to grow 10X every year to succeed), but the other way of phrasing it is that London produces lots of business that generates lots of money.
I don't think the VC-based start-up system with pure profit in mind and an exit at some point and then who-cares-about-the-product is something I want to see more of.
Neat, stuff that makes it easier to find small, independent content is great!
Others in the comments also linked aggregators.
I think what's missing a bit in the indie web, is a bit of curation. I think, it'd be great if we had something like music labels, or book publishers, that have a certain taste, and publish certain things. Or on spotify, there are these playlists where new music gets listed, but hand curated by someone with a particular taste.
I want something like that. I want something like a digital magazine, sourced from blog posts, about a particular topic. Hand curated! Not with automatic topic extraction or whatever. That would be cool to have.
Great idea though! I got inspired to listen to some stuff by it, even though it wasn't really what I wanted to find.
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