These look great. The page says "Thousands of designers, developers, and content creators use HugeIcons Pro". Is this accurate? The project seems to have only about 493 downloads a week on NPM, and 194 GitHub stars. I would have expected a lot more given the number of people you claim are using the library.
(Edit: For clarification, the NPM stats refer to the number of times the library was fetched from NPM's servers, not the number of times a developer incorporated it into a project. For popular NPM libraries, this number can be in the many millions of downloads per week. My confusion stems from the fact a library used by thousands of projects will have substantially higher numbers in NPM than what is seen here. It is of course possible that this number counts developers incorporating these icons not through the NPM library.)
This looks cool! Your website really should feature a couple of sample videos, though, since without finding the links in your post here it is hard to tell what the final results look like.
I'm a co-founder at Fixie, a Seattle-based AI startup. We're launching an experiment to showcase what's possible with Fixie's real-time LLM-powered voice platform. You can check it out at https://hisanta.ai - you can have live voice chats with Santa, Mrs. Claus, Rudolph, and other friends (toggle the naughty/nice switch at the top for some other characters!)
We'd love to get your help testing this and get any feedback -- especially from people with kids :-)
This is not just a thin wrapper around LLMs. To get the performance to this level, we've had to do a lot of engineering to wire together ASR, LLMs, and TTS models efficiently, and are doing some clever things to hide latency. Happy to answer any questions about the technology.
The Fixie platform (https://fixie.ai) powers the app and embeds the logic for managing voice sessions with LLM agents, which can be built either through a no-code UI or using our AI.JSX (https://ai-jsx.com) framework for building LLM apps. We support a range of ASR and TTS models under the hood as well.
I’m no fan of the WEI proposal, but the headline here is inaccurate. Rick expressed a belief that criminals were amongst those voicing concern over the proposal, not claiming that all opponents are criminals, as the headline suggests.
That's a distinction without a difference in my mind. Claiming that criminals are against the proposal is "poisoning the well", even if he's not accusing _all critics_ of being criminals.
> my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don't give in to criminals or bullies
The notion that this is poisoning the well is also supported by the general pattern: retreating on an idea that others thought was bad, avoiding literally any discussion of the technical/cultural criticism (despite that it apparently still existed legitimately enough to postpone the proposal for now) and 2/3rd or more of the post spent implying that [all|some|who knows] of the opponents were abusive bullies, and that maybe the idea was actually fine. (Setting the stage to absolutely re-introduce with the new framing "inauthentic traffic" in 6 months.)
Note also, avoiding any discussion of the web open or how it entered into the decision to postpone, supposedly. Though, that also wasn't said, just sort of implied with the half-hearted smiley-faced plea for compromising.
I am not emotionally invested because I see this as inevitable and don't care, I'll go live in the woods soon anyway, but this is just icky to read.
I think what's happening here is that he's just too deep in to google's corporate culture and can't imagine normal people perceiving google as a threat. His first paragraph is basically this,
"Thank you for your comments. We are not going to listen to your comments. We're surprised that not listening to your comments has led to people trying to contact through other means. The only reason I can think of to object to WEI is crime so enough of you are probably criminals that I'm going to mention it in the first paragraph as an accusation."
I have deployed similar-looking devices in places like volcanoes in Ecuador. On each of these boxes we put a prominent message in Spanish and English: "This is sensitive research equipment, please do not touch" with contact information.
OP here. Thanks for the kind words. I certainly didn't feel like this was an easy raise, but then again it's the only time I've done this and my comparison points were other first-time founders who raised 2x what we did with less than we had done. Yes, these are all pretty senior, well-established folks, not kids straight out of college.
The main point of my article was the surprise around the extent of the VC network and the helpful interactions with them. Before going through this process, VC was a black box to me. Now, a lot less so.
A few folks below have pointed out that I must have had an extensive VC network to draw on. Not quite. I knew 3-4 VCs casually from having worked at a couple of other startups. None of them invested in us by the way. It certainly didn't hurt to get their advice. Now, of course, I have a rolodex full of dozens I could potentially call up at some point, which is useful. I can see how founders who have done it before likely find it a lot easier to get the ball (and the checks) rolling.
OctoML | Multiple Positions | Remote, Seattle, or Bay Area | Full-time | https://www.octoml.ai/
OctoML is changing how developers optimize and deploy machine learning models. We are the creators of Apache TVM, a popular open-source compiler that transforms ML models into highly-efficient binary code optimized for the specific hardware and model architecture. We are also building the Octomizer, a cloud service that enables developers to optimize and package their ML models through a modern web app as well as a rich API surface.
Series C, over $130M of funding, company is 100 people and growing to 200-250 next year.
Long-time former Googler here, author of go/l6talk (internal presentation on getting promoted to L6). While there I coached a lot of people on the L5-to-L6 promotion process. It seems a lot of Googlers get disillusioned about getting promoted above L5. Broadly speaking Google's culture is heavily focused on levels and promotions, which is too bad, since many L5's are doing just great and getting paid extremely well.
If it weren't for the fact that Google makes level information public within the company, I doubt there would be quite so much emphasis on getting a promotion. Most people want to get L6 for the recognition and the fact that it elevates you above other engineers in terms of status and influence. When I worked at Apple, levels were private, so you had to treat everyone the same -- a person's influence was not dictated by what level they had on their company profile (there is no company profile at Apple). In my opinion this approach was much better, and significantly lessened the internal competition for promotions.
I bought a Klein Bottle from Cliff Stoll's website after seeing this video. Not only did he immediately pack it up and send it (very carefully packaged!), he sent along photos of the process, some glamor shots of the Klein bottle in his garden, and a (funny) personal note thanking me for the order. His nerdy passion for the Klein bottles is really inspiring.
I was head of the Blimp team at Google and could tell you exactly what happened, although it’s probably not something I can discuss too much publicly. Great project, great team, turned out to be very hard and involved making major changes to Chrome to do what we wanted. And unlike Mighty we were not willing to charge users a ton of money to use it. Fast, cheap, high quality: pick two :-)
(Edit: For clarification, the NPM stats refer to the number of times the library was fetched from NPM's servers, not the number of times a developer incorporated it into a project. For popular NPM libraries, this number can be in the many millions of downloads per week. My confusion stems from the fact a library used by thousands of projects will have substantially higher numbers in NPM than what is seen here. It is of course possible that this number counts developers incorporating these icons not through the NPM library.)