February 2024

2024-02-07

🎽 Judging PMF

"The customer always ends up pulling—ripping(!)—it out of your hands when you hit a real pain point."
reminds me of The Mom Test

"deep down, nobody is doing it for themselves"
reminds me of the idea of the baby's cry, how it instinctually makes you feel what they are feeling

the recommendation at the end to support charities to bridge the gap and improve child mortality -- this doesn't sit quite right with me, and it's something we used to talk about in college when I worked with EWB.
The success of the EU counterexample in the article wasn't built with charity.
I instinctually want to see something more foundational, and a patchwork of charities is unsatisfying (both in the US and abroad)
Do these external charities supplant systems that should be built as local private or public institutions?
Well many charities, though they are proxy govt services, are probably run by locals anyway, certainly they're staffed by locals.
And maybe you just need a stable, healthy, more equitable base of society to even begin making any deeper, self-determined progress.
And the best charities would be built for commitment, longevity and impact.
The top GiveWell charities are actually not about digging wells or creating new hospital systems anyway -- right now they are about providing malaria meds and nets, and providing vitamin supplements. These seem to plug in to existing local programs and "infrastructure"
GiveWell publishes a whole section on "Our Mistakes" which is so cool.

🤖 Phind-70B

played around with this model and writing a simple app to do image processing, it worked very well for iteration and debugging
I had tried GPT3 for a simple app in the past, but I got discouraged because I felt it led me astray for hours.. this was much more promising!

🕰️ Ivan Miranda's marble clock series