Writer/Director of God Will Find Me (2026). Former standup. Takes on AI, tech, human nature. NYC. https://xitter.cf/t.co/MZdP929Y8A
New York, NY
Joined July 2009
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Bennett Hoffman retweeted
holy crap look at the size of this guy's house
“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident. “Why would I pay property tax?”
Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question and revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century.
politico.com/news/magazine/2…
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
Regular reminder that The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is set during WWII when Turkish Delight would have been impossible to acquire in England because A) it requires too much sugar to feasibly make during rationing and B) no one is importing foreign sweets during the war.
It's not candied cocaine or anything, it just happens to be something Edmund likes and can no longer get.
Which makes the point of him trading his siblings for sweets (albeit ones enchanted by a witch) more salient, because sin and evil are banal like that.
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
Data brokers are now buying up SaaS data sets for anywhere from $100K to $2M
SaaS are struggling now and some extra money to fill the gap by declining revenues is nice
That data is then re-sold to AI training companies and AI frontier labs for the exact purpose of integrating whatever that SaaS did into the AI frontier lab's app
Pretty obvious to see where this is going
Chiming in on @levelsio's discussion about SaaS dying.
A major reason increasingly more businesses will create their own software instead of paying for SaaS is that they don't want to become someone else's unpaid data source.
As Greg points out, dying SaaS companies are immensely valuable data troves for AI companies. Great for them, but not great for their customers.
As time goes by, "data value awareness" is going to rise I think, and more people and business will begin to see the data they produce as an asset worth something.
There is an M&A company that had suggested that @taptanium's legacy app codebases (a form of training data) could be worth ~$45k per app, just because they predate the AI revolution and contain highly complex, handwritten and correct concurrency logic that is like digital gold for AI.
The value of data is widely underrated. When I was driving a Model 3 back then in Germany, my car was collecting valuable data for Tesla, which they used to develop FSD, a technology potentially worth trillions. Owners didn't get paid for that data ofc, and were actually asked to pay up in order to benefit from it fully. None of my Tesla friends thought about it and just paid, on top of delivering tons of data for it. They had no data value awareness.
Some time ago Taptanium was using Appfigures to see sales, revenue, downloads and rankings in a cleaner dashboard. It was cool, but I realized I was feeding the beast with my data, which such companies also use to build App Store intelligence tools so other competitors could more easily find out what's worth cloning or attacking.
So data value awareness is going to be really important, especially now that AI agents can leverage the slightest traces of cues in ways that can work for you, or against you.
What kind of data do you own that might be valuable for AI training or that is strategically important to keep to yourself? And are you letting others suck it all up for free or for pennies, or is there a way you can protect it or sell it at its fair market value?
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
Japan just started unleashing packs of Unitree robot Akita dogs to chase off bears
> last year was Japan's worst bear year on record. 13 people killed!
> northern Japan got so overwhelmed they even had to call in the military
> so to combat the problem, they've dressed up Unitree Go2 robot dogs as Akitas (the breed Japan's old Matagi bear hunters took into the mountains)
> the Akita robot dogs patrol the strip of land between town and forest on their own
> AI cameras and infrared sensors in their chests pick up the locations of the bears
> when one finds a bear it chases after it, barks, growls and blasts it with bear spray
> then it radios the rest of the pack so they can gang up on the bear together lmao
> they also ping the town so locals know to stay inside
> this comes after a company in Hokkaido already sold 380+ robot wolves that do the same job on farms!
this is the kind of job i'm very happy to see robots take over
「秋田犬ロボ」でクマ被害防止 秋田県立大学が披露
nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOCC1…
人間との緩衝地帯でクマを発見するとほえたりうなったりし、クマよけスプレーを噴射。近くにいる別のロボットを呼び、群れで威嚇する機能も搭載します。
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
you may not like it but we are now seeing the effects of lockdowns on kids
an entire generation stunted.
the real existential risk is if AGI doesn’t come before these kids enter the workforce.
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
After 30 hours of playing a strategy video game (StarCraft II), adults showed a ~3-year drop in EEG-estimated brain age
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
my hottest take about this is that you do in fact actually need to open all of the chakras and focusing on the heart above the others is unbalancing and is a symptom of people wanting spirituality to be "nice"
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
the five people on the trolley tracks? they are there *on purpose*, just to get you to pull the switch to run over the other guy. they are the ones who tied that other guy down in the first place. this isn't the first time they've pulled this. dozens of victims over the years
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
Vibe coding, DIY hardware, and 3D printing will lead to a renaissance in arcade-style gaming.
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
I said it, didn't I?
I predicted this exact thing, and I explained why.
I said that AI art is slop not because the art is bad, but because it lacks a detailed mental model of the audience and what they want.
And I said that AI art would cease to slop the moment it was controllable enough to faithfully implement a human's artistic vision.
Well, here we are.
This is AI as the paintbrush, not the artist.
This is the future of stories. Power. Precision. Insight. The hybrid of machine and man.
Some people say we're going to democratize Hollywood. But they are wrong. We are going to liberate it.
Because democracy is when you need the permission of a million suburban soccer moms to build a power plant.
Liberty is when you can just do things.
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
when an EA dies his friends gather around him and immediately after his organs are extracted they pounce on the corpse and mount it one after another in a dionysian frenzy
in this rational maximization of utility they have surpassed their teacher
Bennett Hoffman retweeted
This is WILD. I legit thought it was a skit/high school video project.
It is 100% real.
This is Jaime West (Democratic Party) - she’s running for election for Fayette County Council, District 4 in Indiana.
I had to make sure she did not have a neurological disorder that could account for the slurred speech and insane rambling.
She doesn’t.
And even if she did have a diagnosed neurological disorder, “we have guns too!” after talking about firing all Republicans would ordinarily be disqualifying.
“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” -Plato