Perplexity

 

https://x.com/GeniusGTX/status/2097158510018760754?s=20

GeniusThinking

@GeniusGTX

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A man at a San Francisco barbershop told Aravind Srinivas he had just lost three hours shopping for a washing machine.

On a recent podcast, the Perplexity CEO gave 8 reasons that is the problem he is solving:

1. Billionaires never lose those hours

Srinivas points out that wealthy people already have this solved, because assistants and staff handle it for them.

Everyone else books their own appointments, hunts for doctors their insurance covers, and compares flights themselves.

2. A second brain, not a memory store

He calls Comet a second brain and immediately rejects what people assume that means.

Not a dump of saved data, but something that thinks alongside you and takes the work your first brain finds dull.

3. Curiosity is not the boring part

Preparing to interview someone means reading every past episode, sorting transcripts and drafting fresh questions.

Srinivas says the asking is the enjoyable half. The tab opening and the sorting is what should be handed over.

4. Three things people actually did

- Had Comet file a FedEx complaint for him

- Ran a Facebook ad campaign for a small business

- Identified spam senders and unsubscribed from them

5. Software built for everyone fits nobody

Most software you use was never designed around you, and no developer will build a feature for a single user.

His argument is that an agent sits between the general product and the version that actually suits you.

6. The sleeping flight rebooking

One example he gives is Comet noticing your flight got cheaper overnight, cancelling and rebooking while you sleep.

He is straight about it not existing yet. Running on a server with your laptop shut is what they are building.

7. Removing time, not saving it

He frames the goal as removing hours you never enjoyed rather than making you more productive with them.

He is untroubled if the time goes to browsing or family, because people do their best work when they are not worn down.

8. There is no operating system for life

An operating system runs processes and manages memory, and Srinivas says your life needs exactly that.

Windows and Mac run your applications, but the orchestration between them is still entirely on you.

His framing is that this is not giving up agency.

It is handing over the annoying parts so the interesting ones get your attention.

Worth noting the interview is about a year old, and the background features were promised by the end of that year.

TL;DR

1. Wealthy people already have this problem solved

2. A second brain thinks, it does not just store

3. Asking questions is fun, gathering context is not

4. People use it for support calls, ads and spam

5. Generic software never fits one specific person

6. Overnight flight rebooking is a plan, not a feature

7. The goal is removing time you never enjoyed

8. Nothing orchestrates your life across applications

I appreciate you making it to the end.

If you found this useful, interesting or insightful, give me a follow to stay updated with sharp analysis of what is actually happening in tech and AI.

I'll be sharing more content like this every day.

http://worldwatcher.live

 

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

THIS WEBSITE LETS YOU RANDOMLY TELEPORT INTO LIVE CAMERAS AROUND THE WORLD. it's called World Watcher → http://worldwatcher.live open the tab and the whole planet becomes a live camera roll. you can filter by: > airport > beach > business > nature > port > railway > religion > sports > urban > sound click any pin. or hit Explore and let the site throw you somewhere. one second you are watching waves on a beach. then a train platform. then some mountain town where a few cars pass every minute and life is just continuing without you. Google Maps shows you where places are. World Watcher shows you what they look like right now. built by an anonymous dev who goes by quinito on Hacker News. made it because every other livecam map made you open a new page just to watch. open map. hit Explore. land somewhere on Earth.

Open source software

 

Ihtesham Ali

@ihteshamali

Instead of paying for Canva Pro, use Penpot Instead of paying for Klaviyo, use Listmonk Instead of paying for Semrush, use OpenSEO Instead of paying for ChatGPT Pro, use Ollama Instead of paying for Notion, use AppFlowy Instead of paying for Zapier, use n8n Instead of paying for Loom, use Cap Instead of paying for Zoom, use Jitsi Instead of paying for Slack, use Mattermost Instead of paying for 1Password, use Vaultwarden Instead of paying for Dropbox, use Syncthing Instead of paying for Google Photos, use Immich Instead of paying for Calendly, use Cal. com Instead of paying for Airtable, use NocoDB Instead of paying for Typeform, use Formbricks Instead of paying for Google Analytics, use Umami Instead of paying for Grammarly, use LanguageTool Instead of paying for Postman, use Bruno Instead of paying for Jira, use Plane Instead of paying for Trello, use Planka Instead of paying for Intercom, use Chatwoot Instead of paying for DocuSign, use DocuSeal Instead of paying for Heroku, use Coolify Instead of paying for Firebase, use Supabase Instead of paying for Photoshop, use GIMP Instead of paying for Premiere Pro, use Kdenlive Instead of paying for Shopify, use Medusa Instead of paying for Webflow, use Webstudio Instead of paying for Salesforce, use Twenty Instead of paying for Retool, use Appsmith Instead of paying for Tableau, use Metabase Instead of paying for Datadog, use SigNoz Instead of paying for Auth0, use Keycloak Instead of paying for Evernote, use Joplin Instead of paying for Bitly, use Shlink Every name on the right is free and open source.

Vibe manufacturing

 

GREG ISENBERG

@gregisenberg

I've seen 100+ people post GPT-6 Astra demos where it builds 3D games, and those are cool, but that's honestly not the part I can't stop thinking about. Millions of people can turn an idea into a printable object, a CAD file, a Blender model, or a circuit board, without having to become a full time 3D designer first. So how many thousands of $1M+ businesses come out of that? Well, you'd pick a niche that constantly needs small custom parts. A few examples: 1. Gyms with broken equipment pieces 2. Restaurants missing some weird proprietary clip 3. Cyclists who want custom mounts 4. Small manufacturers stuck doing the same hand work every day with a jig they wish existed 5. Dentists and clinics needing custom jigs, guides, or tool holders You put up a simple page where someone uploads a photo, adds measurements, and describes the part. Astra can do the first CAD pass, you sanity check the dimensions and material, and a print farm ships it. Of course, you need the idea/niche/distribution first, but you're in business. You just became a manufacturer, and it's kinda like your factory is a chat window. (I'll add more of these manufacturing ideas to http://ideabrowser.com) TLDR; In 2024, Lovable/Bolt/Replit/v0 etc turned anyone into a vibe coder. The effects of that are still playing out but we're seeing basically anyone create websites/apps. In 2026, OpenAI turned anyone into a vibe manufacturer, this shift just started. Really big deal and underdiscussed.

Physics tutorials page

 ciechanow.ski.

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

This guy quietly built the best physics textbook on the internet, and he gives it away for free. His name is Bartosz Ciechanowski. He is an ex-iOS engineer who writes interactive articles about physics, math, and engineering as a weekend hobby. The site is called http://ciechanow.ski. Open the article on the Mechanical Watch. Drag the watch to spin it. Pull a slider and the case peels away so you can look inside. Wind the mainspring by hand. Slow down time and watch the escapement click, the balance wheel breathe, the date wheel turn. Nothing is a video. Everything is a live 3D simulation running in your browser tab. He has done this for: → The Moon and its tides → GPS satellites → Gears and mechanical watches → The internal combustion engine → Bicycles and how they stay upright → Cameras, lenses, and light → Sound waves → Airfoils and how planes fly Every article is thousands of words long with dozens of hand-coded interactive diagrams. He writes them alone in his spare time. He publishes only a few per year. In his own words, he wants to keep the content accessible to everyone without ads or paywalls. No publisher. No university. No company behind him. One person is quietly shipping better science education than most universities charge tens of thousands a year for.

Both halves of AI

 

Dustin

@r0ck3t23

Elon Musk wants both halves of AI because the chips decide which models are possible and the models decide which chips get built next. Musk: “We got to win here, on the AI hardware and the AI software.” Chip design sets the ceiling on what can be trained. What gets trained sets the spec for the next generation of chips. Owning both closes that loop. Owning one means waiting on somebody else to close it for you. Musk: “That maybe is the most important message. I think that is actually the most important message I wanted to convey today, is that we must win, on AI.” That puts AI above every other program he runs. And he runs the ones most people would put first. Musk: “Because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots.” That is a claim about proportion, and proportion is what predictions miss. Aviation built airlines and left farming alone. The internet rebuilt commerce and barely touched construction. Intelligence and physical labor are inputs to everything people do. Improving both at once raises every ceiling. Whoever gets there first sets the defaults. What counts as safe, what it optimizes for, who it serves, what it refuses to do. Those decisions get made early by whoever shows up with something working, and everyone after inherits them. The nations that built the last industrial revolution wrote rules the rest of the world still runs on. They arrived while the shape was still soft. Musk is building the chips, the models and the robots at the same time. He is putting the thesis into hardware. The shape is setting right now. It sets fast and it sets once. The loop runs one level up. The tools decide what people are capable of, and what people are capable of decides which tools come next. Almost everyone who has ever lived arrived after the shape had set. We are here while it is still being poured.