Disagree, a blog that gets tens of thousands of unique visitors could clear huge numbers on KDP. Maybe your niche is too narrow (probably, given your TAM is in the thousands) but this post is about "timeless programming projects" and is going to be extremely broad. The number of hits to the blog is itself an indicator of a very big and very eager potential market.
No, their incentive is to wait and see what books are taking off, then pile on the money when they know it's already a winner. Today, unproven authors are expected to do their own marketing.
For the marketing that has significant costs (e.g., paying for ads, paying for show appearances, paying other influencers to plug, making quality videos for social media, travel for events).
But it costs almost nothing to do ARC readers for reviews and ratings, and it's free to time things for the Kindle store algorithm. You just have to know to do it, when.
And there's some other "free" marketing that publishers should have automated by now, because they can amortize that across many book releases.
I just take a grug brain approach. I do touch CLAUDE.md and then just explain how the code/files/project spec work, like I'm writing a slack message or email to a really smart colleague, and then let it rip, always using biggest model with thinking on. If something consistently goes wrong I add more to CLAUDE.md or even better, have Claude Code just update CLAUDE.md itself with the new issue explained. I'm probably 3 months behind what you could get with absolute SOTA practices but it still works so well that I'm amazed and amused on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser. Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for many SMBs they are completely cornered at the zero-point: spend as much as you can just to stay in the same place financially.
> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue
Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.
I think it is mostly a good thing that LLMs have "WEIRD" values. We are at a very fortuitous point in history, where the modal position in extant written text is classically liberal and believes in respecting human rights. Virtually no other point in history would be that way, and a true modal position among values and moral beliefs held among all 8 billion people currently alive on earth -- much less the modal position among all ~100 billion humans ever -- would, I'd hazard to guess, not be a very nice place to end up.
If you go back 200 years, you'll be smack bang in the middle of the Enlightenment with thinkers like Kant and Jeremy Bentham.
You could argue that if you trained LLMs on only texts from that time period, you would get something even more "classically liberal" or human-rights-respecting
You're foolishly myopic if you think your ideology coincides with the global historical best. Have a little humility and consider that there are concepts you haven't even heard of that might be better.
This is just a general argument against constant prices for everything though. Charging $1/lb for bananas is regressive. Charging $3/gallon for gas is regressive. Charging $10 for a t-shirt is regressive. Etc...
For commodities like that, competition already pushes prices to the zero profit limit. Everyone gets them as cheaply as they can be produced. And for those who can't afford even that we have subsidies.
> This is just a general argument against constant prices for everything though.
Maybe EVERYTHING shouldn't BE "constant prices". Maybe where there are practical alternatives to constant pricing, those should be preferred and used.
> Charging $10 for a t-shirt is regressive.
No. Not unless there is only 1 type of t-shirt in the world available. If I'm poor I can go find cheaper t-shirts either less stylish, poorer quality, from a generic brand, from a discount retailer, second-hand (used), packaged in bulk, etc., or maybe wait around for a sale on the t-shirt.
Besides price signals, what other tools are available to communicate local knowledge through an economy? I can’t think of any that are particularly effective
Require housing in certain places? Now that's what I'd call broken economics. If there is such a need for housing near job centers...why wouldn't that automatically create the incentive to build it? (Hint: It does; the problem is that in most places there are "requirements" that make it nearly impossible to build new housing. Texas is notable in that it lacks the worst extremes of this problem, hence the recent trends in rent in Austin).
I make content and have a following that's ~1/10th the size of what he claims to have in this 2020 post, and I have had, within a rounding error, zero percent of the crazy encounters he had. YMMV. If I were a political influencer or a self-help guru, yes probably that would be different, but audience selection effects are a real factor here.
This article always strikes me as insane because he -- a famous person with a history of serious mental illness and suicidal thoughts which he's discussed publicly -- has a moderately bad encounter with a person on the internet and decide that he now needs to purchase a firearm and carry it with him in public.
The topic/area definitely matters a lot. Certainly politics is a big one that generates a lot of strong opinions and emotions. Some things in open source (see systemd--at least at one time) do as well but the blast radius is probably a lot smaller even for people who are regular speakers and writers in certain tech circles.
As was mentioned in another comment, there have almost certainly been more cases where women have had serious/scary issues than men.
Ironically the very first coursera course was (IIRC) Andrew Ng's machine learning course, which was fantastic, and the deep learning specialization, which was also phenomenal. I can unironically say that Andrew Ng was the best instructor I ever had in grad school (and I didn't go to Stanford...).
