23 chunks · 20 episodes
..., at great expense. They have to do it for a market, and come up with something lowest common denominator that everyone in that market would want. Then when users use it, their data accumulates on the service provider's turf, almost by happenstance. But n...
...tude. It used to be extremely expensive to create text, so we settled for a few lowest common denominator outputs. But LLMs are calculators for words. They can easily create mip-mapped text.
Messaging is a killer app for humans. And yet everyone uses the lowest common denominator messaging apps. When WhatsApp adds a feature, it's so rare and noteworthy that it's on the front page of the NYtimes!
A product has to serve the lowest common denominator of its user base. As the user base gets larger, that lowest common denominator naturally gets worse. This is the fundamental reason why the Tyranny o...
...ss them that the maximum users would use. That's inherently, and literally, the lowest common denominator. If software is expensive and has to be shared by many users to make it viable, you must get lowest common denominator software.
...e thing that everyone agrees is an acceptable idea. ""number go up" is just the lowest common denominator of what you can get dozens of different people to agree to." If it's run by the logic of a spreadsheet, then the only things that can show up are the...
...nation is bad. It's both extremely expensive and also leads to bland consensus. Lowest common denominator, at great expense. Collaboration is great: upside generation, emergent results better than what could have been done individually. But it's also extr...
...e to be the generic, socially-acceptable-in-most-situations version of you--the lowest common denominator of you. That is the most average, boring version of you. We have fewer and fewer channels for truly private ideas in modern society, and that will hu...
A data science approach is an industrial process. It assumes generic, industrial scale insight, not situated or personal. Before you had to do that to scale. But now LLMs give you qualitative insights at quantitative scale. In the past you had to reduce the data down to its common denominator to do
...big tent then it becomes diluted. To appeal to more people it moves towards the lowest common denominator. If it's too welcoming it auto-extinguishes by diluting itself. If the movement has too many purity tests then it auto-extinguishes by not reaching s...
... complexity, to appeal to those marginal users. Sanding down and aiming for the lowest common denominator is by definition bland.
...nd then building a thing they all would like… which necessitates aiming for the lowest common denominator. Once it becomes mass produced, it loses its soul. It feels less like human-scale creation for individual humans, but machined, efficient creation fo...
Best practices only exist in domains that are somewhat mature.[ahg] You need a diversity of successful things to compare to figure out the resilient common denominator that works in most situations. If you only have one example, you don't know which properties led to success. Maybe it's all of the l
... user: to grow scale, these providers need to make their products more and more lowest common denominator, dumbing them down. Imagine a feature that would revolutionize the lives of a certain niche of people, e.g. TTRPG players. Let's imagine the feature ...
...s to the mean. If you want to grow your audience, you have to get closer to the lowest common denominator. This is inescapable. An alternate way to express Ivan's Tyranny of the Marginal User.
If a given type of toxic situation has reoccurred in many different situations you've been in, the common denominator is you! Perhaps you are causing it in some indirect and non-obvious way? It is only through real self reflection that growth can happen.
...endar. A calendar that is good enough for everything and great for nothing. The lowest common denominator calendar. This is the defining character of an app-first approach. What if you could have a calendar display perfectly suited to the particular type ...
...require you to give all your data.. and you also don't get very much in return. Lowest common denominator, one-sizes-fits-none software. If you amass a huge audience, the software has to be dumbed down to minimally satisfy everyone. The tyranny of the mar...
As the market for an experience gets larger, it must increasingly focus on the lowest common denominator: the thing that is at least minimally viable for the largest set of people. As more use cases are absorbed into aggregators, they are less and less a...
...f one. You need to find a collection of users that form a market and design the lowest common denominator for that market. But what if making software was so cheap that it could have a software market of 1? Software whose construction is too cheap to mete...