As long as you have a full-time job, you can afford to work only with people you enjoy working with, set your rates flexibly, and hold sessions just for the joy of it. As soon as your income depends on it, a lot changes: marketing, client acquisition, administrative work, financial pressure and emotional strain.
It can become difficult to set clear boundareis and truly unplug after work.
Another point: As your experience grows, so does your responsibility. People come to rely more and more on your advice. Especially when issues go beyond career matters and touch on personal or mental health aspects, it’s important to know your own limits. And, if necessary, refer clients to other professionals.
For my alternative rock band and our groupies (there were only a few of them), I programmed an online community aimed at punks, just for fun. I was in my early 20s at the time. The platform later grew to 100,000 members and provided me with a good monthly income.
That was a coincidence. Or rather, I was naive and started the project without a business model. But what I realized later was that, without even knowing it, I had connected two things: a technological trend (social networks) and a target audience with a specific need.
When starting your own projects, it makes sense to focus heavily on your target audience.I often check out global trends or the opinions of futurists and try to develop ideas from them. But I always try to avoid creating a one-size-fits-all solution. I’d rather have a small but loyal target audience than a large but disloyal one.
Right now, I'm working on https://github.com/janrakete/healthcore-bulp.io. For now, it's aimed at a small target audience (tech enthusiasts who have to care for people, such as their parents). But I have no idea if it will be a success.
My advice: Keep at it, keep trying. Eventually, you’ll have enough code and experience under your belt that you’ll be able to whip up a solution in no time when the next trend comes along.
First of all, thank you for the positive advice and for sharing your story. Good luck with your project too. It looks really interesting, and I hope it succeeds.
I use Remarkable 2. It's not exactly an e-reader, but more of a notebook and sketchbook with a paper-like surface. It is, however, quite expensive. It's definitely too much money just for reading.
I think it’s generally a good idea to use a standalone, local solution. I also like the approach of combining multiple models with different focuses under a single interface. On the other hand, I usually use very specialized models (for programming, for example) and rarely end up generating music or a video on the side. So I can’t think of a reason to use the system right now.
That's a great q and point. I built it to get at a broad approach to tying multimodal capability together in one place as I'm personally building products on top of it that stitch chat, image, video together and wanted to enable others to do the same. For just coding/chat/specialized models I'd say ollama or lm studio is still the better bet generally, but for some of the models I care about I'm trying to optimize pretty deeply and make fine-tuning really simple. Plus I'm often supporting and bouncing between Mac and Cuda boxes so wanted something where the same codebase ran on both.
Well, that's a good idea. Do you plan to add more languages? And what's your business model? If everyone puts together their own personalized feed, you'll have to generate a separate podcast for each person. That could get expensive.
No plans for other languages at the moment. Right now my business model is to lose a bunch of money. The $5 plan might get close to breaking even. If it gets too expensive and I don't want to make a business I'll open source it all with instructions to install for those interested.
It would be even better if your tool could predict every bet correctly. If everyone could win every bet, then the problem of gambling addicts and the companies that take advantage of them would be quickly solved.
Funny enough, this was sort of my north star when developing it. I know it's an impossible dream or expectation (predicting sports is extremely hard), but it's very true that this tool is really only as useful as it is correct.
My first iteration of the baseball model took this to an extreme. I broke down every single step from the pitcher deciding which pitch to throw to the pitcher deciding where to throw it to the pitcher throwing it at a certain speed in a certain spot, and on and on. It was something like 17 sequential PyTorch models. My directive to myself was to not care how much compute it would take to run, just get it to the most right version it could possibly go.
Turns out just predicting the end result of each pitch is far more accurate than sequential modeling. I still to this day have a hard time believing it. But the results are pretty stark when I compare the two methods.
Anyway, I really appreciate the kind words and for taking the time to check it out.
It’s not a bad idea in itself, but as others have already said, it can be handled more securely using a local file. Especially now, with all the discussion about sovereignty and local hosting, a service like this is rather counterproductive.
But perhaps this could be used to build a local solution with a little more added value. It might be interesting to use the context to determine which AI solves the problem best or most cost-effectively.
It can become difficult to set clear boundareis and truly unplug after work.
Another point: As your experience grows, so does your responsibility. People come to rely more and more on your advice. Especially when issues go beyond career matters and touch on personal or mental health aspects, it’s important to know your own limits. And, if necessary, refer clients to other professionals.