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Occasional Observations

tylerhilker.com
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April 16, 2025

Just dominant enough

Meta's deck from the FTC proceedings is interesting because of how simple it is. It's made for a non-tech audience focused on a single story with major movements and just a couple data points to digest at a time. Because the audience (presumably) uses Facebook, the business of Meta feels familiar. So the deck needs to inform the audience of a certain reality without losing — or angering — them altogether. (Just as interesting is what they don't say, of course — that's strategy.) The slides on...

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February 24, 2025

Shoes, Spiders, & Cities

For no particular reason, here are three mental models that I often use in thinking through a situation. ShoesWhen you’re looking for a shoe online, there are a number of attributes you could start from: color, size, style, usage, ratings, materials, retailer, typical buyer, price, availability, and so on. On a website, this is called faceted navigation; a facet is a side of something, so faceted navigation allows you to browse options according to the “side” of an object. So when I’m trying ...

February 11, 2025

Implications of AI-enabled software

Bearing a whole bunch of assumptions, these are some implications I've been collecting & exploring. There's more to add for sure — holler if you've got any — and I intend to add some commentary at some point. We'll see. Independent tinkerers↑ Ease of a low-tech savvy individual making their own tools ↓ Cost of a low-tech savvy individual making various tools they need to do their job ↑ People making what they, and only they, need to do a job in a way that’s uniquely suited to themJump startin...

September 24, 2024

An Intelligence Age

This is probably an important piece of writing, we just don't exactly know why yet. Not because he’s necessarily right about everything, but because he’s running one of the most consequential companies of our time. In some way or another, we'll have to deal with his perspective. First of all, publishing what amounts to a blog post on a subdomain rather than a folder is pretty interesting. That's suggests a certain level of importance; it's not one post among many, but a standalone piece in a ...

September 4, 2024

Where does work happen?

This thread from Jonathan Courtney of AJ&Smart was an interesting spark I hadn't considered before: Slack's tagline is literally "Where w...

August 9, 2024

Intel didn't see the potential of OpenAI

Intel is taking some heat for not investing in OpenAI in 2017. It's easy to look back on that from 2024 and prompt ChatGPT to write a sca...

August 8, 2024

Google Who?

A bit ago, I noticed that my kids have never said, "google it". They say, "search it up" and then use whatever built-in search tool is on...

June 13, 2024

Hobbies as Journeys

Author David Bland — who is excellent at crossing the business-culture meme divide, btw — shared this video with the caption, "This would make an ama...

#strategy#journey mapping
June 11, 2024

AI Can't Fix Your Organizational Overhead

According to this PwC report, "roughly 40% of the time spent on [emails, meetings and administrative processes] is inefficient."Sorry, but that's pro...

June 4, 2024

The Hazard of User Focus

Users & customers are just as likely to distract or lead you astray as they are to lead you to the promised land. This doesn't mean you don't listen...

May 30, 2024

Kinds of work

The more work I do, the more I understand the kinds of work I like to do and am good at. Thus, the more likely I am to opt in or out of certain kinds...

May 2, 2024

Observation: distribution multiplies distribution

There are two sides to this observation: the product and the user.For a product, the more people your product serves, the less it serves each of them...

May 2, 2024

Getting started

The truth is, I need to write more. It's been a thick desire (and personal-professional commitment) for some time, but I've not yet found the discipl...

May 2, 2024

Hello world

jk just find me on farcaster

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February 1, 2024

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