I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit"
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.
don't fall into the Gell-Mann Amnesia trap. Any media that has advertisements is already not in your interest. If a media has to weigh losing an advertiser or telling the truth, very few would choose truth. Scruples don't put food on the table, believe me, i know.
This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to keep you watching those commercials. On the internet, everything is trying to filter you into conversions or purchases, or steal your identity and cut out the middleman.
PBS and NPR like to say they're advertiser free but they aren't, they just call it "underwriting", and it entails the same wariness over bucking the advertiser's wishes. sorry, underwriters wishes.
edit to add a solution
the solution is value for value. You publish, if people like your stuff, you tell them to contribute time, talent, or treasure to your product, be it a youtube channel, a podcast, or even an e-zine (remember those...)
the commonest argument against these ideas is that, if some capitalist makes the most amazing thing ever invented, how will people ever find out?
if it truly is life altering, and most people or everyone needs it, that's why we have a government. note i said needs it. No one needs to know about the latest transformers movie coming out in 6 months. there are websites dedicated to calendars for events and the like, you can just subscribe there if you care about transformers.
the very idea that most people just walk around all day going "i wonder what i should eat... I'm lovin' it!" because they heard a mcdonalds commercial is... ludicrous.
for myself, literally the only advertising that works on me is word of mouth. and not like, influencers or celebrities, but my friends, co-workers and associates, my neighbors, my in laws; people i trust.
edit: don't get me wrong here, i am sure that there are lots of research papers, studies - longitudinal or otherwise - about "returns on marketing investment." Pepsi and Coca Cola spend $4,000,000,000 each on advertising (2024), is that netting them more than 4 billion each in new sales? Recurring sales? I don't get it, it just feels like they're taking unhealthy addicts' money and setting it on fire to wow other addicts.
A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest.
> A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.
The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't.
I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it.
There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven't sold their soul to marketing. Or at least are clear when they say things that are marketing.
But it is ever harder to find those voices, especially if you're new to an industry.
It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
It's almost a bit like AI speak. The shills will all have very similar sounding content. They'll all hit on the same (ad copy) points. They might mix in a few negative tidbits, but generally speaking you'll catch them all praising the same wizbang features.
Mkbhd is my favorite baseline shill. He practically just reads the product sheet. You know if he says it, it was probably given to him by the person paying for the review and, indeed, you can find the points he brings up echoed in other people's reviews.
On the flip side, I generally trust Gamers Nexus to not shill. Primarily because their lack of playing ball has actually hurt their access.
I've enjoyed your videos as well. They don't come off as a shill particularly because there's a number of products where the negative points you've put out have been strong enough to actually discourage a purchase. They haven't been weak "The colors could pop more".
> It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
Brandolini’s law strikes again: you really have to pay attention to catch a shill. 99% of the time when you’re not paying attention and intentionally shopping for a particular product is when they get you.
Yeah, really does not help that the internet seems to be built from the ground up to reward shilling.
Click on a shill video in youtube and you'll have 20 identical videos on the same topic.
But also, advertisers are smart and you have to assume they know you are on the lookout for a shill. I have to assume the why shilling works will continue to evolve as the way to detect shilling evolves.
I expect we'll end up with something like this in the future [1].
I, too, rely on your web of trust, please don't ever break my heart Jeff!
It makes sense they'd be harder to find, I imagine there are more opportunities to make money by selling your soul than by offering honest review, and people with large investments have large incentives to dilute signal in their favor.
It's sad that so many platforms let it happen, but it makes sense when the users aren't the ones paying the bills. I'm immensely grateful for those that resist though, and if I were a religious person I would nominate them for sainthood or reincarnation or at least a plaque on a nice park bench somewhere.
I agree, but I also think the point about "Is [your opinion] based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience" is really important. Relying on other bloggers is still delegating your thinking to others. Having your own objective measures and your own direct experience is useful, and sometimes it might contradict the prevailing wisdom.
> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
This comment is interesting because you took a narrative that was being pushed and marketed (Cursor was close to Opus) and accepted it as the ground truth.
The dominant narrative I saw around that, at least in my bubbles, was disappointment when they actually tried it and discovered it was not, in fact, close to Opus.
Those were both narratives going around, but one was clearly winning in terms of volume, and that's what I'm speaking to here. The dismissal towards the open source models has always smelled more like marketing campaigns to me than the actual sentiments of any hackers I know. We all want the open source options to close the gap, but the labs are definitely staying ahead.
My own experience was relatively similar, good, but with a notable gap that went beyond cherrypicked benchmarks.
"82 percent of middle school students couldn't tell the difference between sponsored articles and real news stories.
Out of the Stanford college students that were tested, more than 80 percent couldn't identify biased content from independent news sources supported by groups like lobbying firms as being less reliable than a mainstream news source." https://universe.byu.edu/2018/02/09/studies-show-lack-media-...
I like how that article claims PR firms don't lie and then proceeds to discuss how their best PR campaign was effectively a lie.
> We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
It sounds like they did good-faith estimate that there were 5000 stores out there and really believed they had 20% of the market? I wouldn't call that a lie as such.
They made up a number, and then quoted that number to other people (presumably with the intent to benefit themselves) without disclosing that they'd made up the number in the first place. That seems to jump right past 'lie' into 'fraud' or worse.
I have this growing belief that what's wrong with America is that we've tossed a great deal of virtue (both personal and public) into the woodchipper, using a lot of euphemisms like "marketing" or "puffery". And the rot is not in any way confined to marketing - it's just that marketing is a very obvious example of it. The rot has made its way into education, relationships, entertainment, governance, infrastructure, what used to be called 'news', and on and on.
We collectively gaslight ourselves to avoid dealing with the reality that we're constantly defecating in our own minds, contaminating ourselves with patterns of thought and action that are antithetical to our own continued well-being as individuals and collectives. To borrow a word from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we are poisoning the noosphere.
You don't have a growing belief, you have an accurate observation.
This comes up often when bad actors promote the meme "everything is securities fraud". In reality, all cases that they're talking about are instances of _blatant lying_, but they attempt to normalize this even further than it already has been. Effectively saying "it's impossible to run a company and not lie at every possible opportunity!".
The "poisoning the noosphere" is a very good description.
There is someone called Peter Ralston; on YouTube there's a few videos of him and in one bit from an interview he starts on honesty. "Honesty", he says, "is a skill most people don't appreciate". I was really impressed by that "is a skill" qualification. Never thought about it this way. But yes, it is a skill. First you learn it and then it changes you.
To add to what the other poster said, it's a logical leap to go from 5000 stores to 20% share based on having 1000 users. What does the number of stores have to do with the number of users?
It doesn't make any sense and that's because it's a lie.
Yeah but the "good faith" math had a big margin of error, and if I estimate 5k-20k shops and pick the lower number that just happens to make my company look great, that kind of changes things.
>I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns.
"The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.
related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been?
But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)
I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
> I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...
I haven't used Cursor much lately, but with Opus/Codex I can program with very few bugs without having to look at any code at all, over months of working on the same codebase. I don't think any other model can do that, no?
edit2: maybe it's because i spend a lot of time being clear with small and surgical asks after doing purely thought exploring prompts to confirm and home in on approaches. At the point I hit build or do Agent mode, Composer is mostly always spot on.
with Opus (haven't tried) maybe people are doing large-scale multi phase and single shot prompts that trigger a swarm of sub agents?
All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.
If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)
> I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic.
Came here to say this - I have always been extremely cautious and assumed most things online were just marketing tactics. But I never realize how far and how strategic some of these campaigns are.
I’ve recently started really getting my hands dirty with marketing for an app I’m building and the things I’ve learned in the past year have made me questions many of my views on things. At some point you realize that it’s all marketing or some form of effort to exert influence.
A good book somewhat related to this is Attention Merchants
> What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing?
I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.
In my eyes:
* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.
* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.
* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.