Consent Engineer

understanding attempter, c-title consumer marketer

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

@pavelsvitek_ @Microsoft ive also received a shit ton of these over the last few weeks. constant barrage.

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

@hoeflator "The mind commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind commands itself, and is resisted."

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

@justalexoki repressed dreams and desires

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

i miss fucking around in comfyui. amazing community of people building incredibly cool stuff. saddeningly underfunded too. some really bright minds battling for a few thousand bucks in funding for training. probably because that funding is for making better anime titties

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

the kind of shit i've been on recently

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

I have acquired nicotine candy.

I am in grave danger.

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

@somewheresy Yeah. Though, I've started paying so much more for data and inference that I don't think my costs have dropped that much lol. But, I get SO MUCH done.

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

Once upon a time I owned two retail stores in a random German city. They were doing great. Out of all the businesses I owned at the time, they were bringing in a lot of cash.

Then COVID hit. It hurt! But it wasn't that bad: we weathered it off. Any successful business should be able to weather off a crisis. And we did! When things started opening back up, I remember feeling a deep sense of relief.

But then the war began, and with that the sanctions. Costs exploded, and with that the prices of everything people had to buy did too. People stopped shopping for anything unnecessary.

It's not talked about that much, but seemingly half of the long standing local retail stores in my city closed. Including mine.

Except for.. I couldn't close my retail stores. My rent contract was signed for 2 more years: no way out. Bankruptcy wasn't an option because my corporate structure was bad and had a lot of other business under it too.

The contract also forced me to keep the opening hours the same. That meant keeping staff. The business became wildly unprofitable, but had to stay open for years, burning money.

I've solved many problems in my time as a founder. Really hard ones too. But I couldn't solve this one. Everything I tried, including pivoting the retail stores, failed dramatically and ended up burning more money. So I gave up on them and cut my losses.

I distinctly remember talking to this sweet old lady who had been running a small local music equipment store since time immemorium. She told me she had never seen something like this before in the decades she had ran her little store.
All of a sudden, there were just no customers. She had to close it down and retire. I'll never forget her expression during our conversation. Especially her eyes. The image in my mind is heartbreaking.

That expression has turned into a symbol of the failure I personally faced during that time.

All this to say, I've failed more times than I can count. And I've learned so much. And each failure has taught me something I'll carry forward to my decision making in the future. As long as I keep going, learning and failing, there's no other future than the one where I win.

[Consent Engineer @consentengineer]

@xereeto @VioletFlame23 I don't commonly see this line of thinking at all. Most seem to think AI is not very interesting or useful. Their experiences using it are similar to Google, which is to retrieve information, using weak models. And, they're waiting for the hype to die down/apathetic altogether.