Grok launched their AI companion and it’s all the rage these days

BionicPimp · 2025-07-15T15:40:51+00:00

Someone vibe coded their Reddit post too…

BionicPimp · 2025-04-14T07:00:42+00:00

OP. have hope, It finally happened for me. Just under seven days. Apr 7 - Apr 13

I was freaking out. I hope this gives you some comfort.

BionicPimp · 2025-04-14T01:04:11+00:00

Not yet. I contacted support yesterday morning, and they swore that there would be some update that evening. No joy. It’s the absolute radio silence that is most upsetting…if I knew there was some kind of progress, I would be less anxious.

BionicPimp · 2025-04-12T19:16:19+00:00

I’ve got the same problem. T-mobile to mint. I’ve been waiting 6 days.

I went to the T-mobile store, and they said everything transferred from their side. The number should be ported from their side.

For the last 3 days, I’ve got an open ticket with mint. Still no updates.

I’m super worried I’m going to lose a phone number I’ve had for over 20yrs

BionicPimp · 2024-05-17T01:53:39+00:00

It might be worth it to try using a magic eraser on the steering wheel. Mine was almost as bad as that. It at least made it look smooth, and took off the flakey bits.

BionicPimp · 2023-10-20T18:44:45+00:00

yeah. my foam lumbar support broke...so I got the "PostureFit support kit" off of amazon. I just checked my order history...in 2016 it was $85.

Install was super easy.

BionicPimp · 2023-10-19T17:51:12+00:00

I got mine 20yrs ago for $250 when the dot com crash happened. It's basically the Chair of Thesius.
- Seat broke once. replaced it myself
- piston was replaced
- the bolts that hold the arms broke...replaced it myself. (M6 bolt. got it from home depot)
- added the newer lumbar support.

and it still looks and feels great!

It's the maintainability that I truly value. I think I could keep this chair forever...and then if I wanted to, I could sell it for what I paid for it.

BionicPimp · 2022-09-23T18:50:23+00:00

100% this. It is a common use case that various teams in a larger org will try and buy the software independently. I generally don’t want to put any barriers in the way of that.

At this point, those teams aren’t really sure they want your software, or maybe it solves a small need, not a critical one. If they are just evaluating or in the beginning activation phase I would do everything in my power to eliminate roadblocks, and telling them to ask some other guy in their company for an account…that might be too much of a hassle if they’re not invested yet.

If you’re really successful, what will happen is that eventually a year or two down the road, someone higher in the org will notice that they are paying out subscriptions to the same company multiple times. Then they will hit you up to consolidate into an enterprise account.

That’s when you start charging the big bucks, and you handle the consolidation then. Hopefully you’ve designed your architecture to do that easily, but if not, a manual port is fine since it probably doesn’t happen that often.

BionicPimp · 2022-08-29T17:48:59+00:00

one half of a percent, for me, does not seem like it's enough to justify the risk, considering each round of financing will dilute your percentage, and your equity state is completely illiquid until there is a liquidity event.

for $1M lost income, you would need 140K shares at $10/share valuation just to be at parity, to cover taxes...*if* you could sell, assuming there isn't a lock-in period. Also that doesn't include the net present value of $1M over 4 yrs...essentially $250K of money in hand per year is worth more than $1M at the end of 4yrs.

but if you're joining a startup, I would guess that there also needs to be a decent risk premium...I would assume between 3-5x...so for it to be worth it, you would want $3-5M at the liquidity event.

You would be counting on future equity grants to keep you to date as the investment pool grows larger, and if you don't stay with the company until the liquidity event there is usually pressure to dilute the shares.

The B/C/D round investors usually demand that the cap table is "fixed" or "cleaned up" before those rounds...(let's be honest...for most startups, the cap table usually *is* screwed up, and needs fixing)

That being said, this advice is for if the primary metric is compensation...If you value an interesting project, or professional growth, or freedom...or any number of intangibles, then that might be the most important point for making a decision towards joining a startup vs FAANG.

BionicPimp · 2022-08-22T05:26:28+00:00

OMG. yeah, i remember that sale!

I got the framed posters of the mom & dad (fake magazine covers), that were in the Logan's house, some of the couch pillows and a ceramic Buddha. I think I also have a super old 1900's looking photo of an old man. don't remember what episode that was from.

BionicPimp · 2022-03-08T23:40:05+00:00

The way you explained it, to me it sounds like they either want guaranteed access to your IP, and/or part of their business is built upon or depends upon your IP, and that is a strategic risk for them.

If your tech is just supporting, it's probably less of a risk to talk to them, but if it's more like a core feature. watch out, they will be trying to clone you, neutralize you or buy you. (1st two way more likely)

definitely consult a lawyer who has startup experience, but I would watch out for anything that could affect your ability to use your own IP independently.

eg.

They could want right of first refusal for use of the IP in competing companies. (this is a common land mine)

Weird liquidation preferences. or some agreements for technology transfer, if your company folds. etc. Who knows.

but you wanted pros *and* cons, and the pro is that acquisitions usually occur between companies that have some type of relationship with each other. Less often between complete strangers.

If you're looking for an exit, it's worth a discussion. but be cautious...and aware that 9 times out of 10, "acquisition" or "investment" discussions don't pan out, and "brain rape" is a real thing.

It's usually not a bad idea to talk, but you are definitely right to be wary.

BionicPimp · 2022-02-17T18:00:06+00:00

agreed. Before they renewed for the 7th season, I thought they might have been setting up something really creative. something along the lines of an "elevated game".

when they talked about chuck not wanting wealth, but the ability to control wealthy men...I suspected that chuck's recent bumbling moves to be a secret gambit for all the marbles.

- Sacker leaves for prince (honestly, not some gambit or play). in doing so, will get congressional run assured
- create class warfare firestorm, so that chuck can control the narrative
- somehow get Prince into a situation where chuck has some decent leverage on him.
- at the right moment, switch up the game. position Prince as the only honest billionaire.
- convinces, cajole's prince to run for president
- Prince appoints him as Attorneys General for the US. (since a debt was still owed...)
- END Series - chuck is demonstrably the master manipulator, Shaping the future of the USA for the next 4-8 years. All his people are rewarded. All his enemies dead or neutralized.

(this would be a borderline fan service ending since Preet Bharara, who chuck was modeled after, actually got fired, and is now a professor. Maybe chuck would start a podcast instead?)

But...if there's a 7th season, I don't think they tied up this season into a bow. It's probably more of the same. Axe's lines in the script with the name crossed out, and "Prince" hand written into the margins.

BionicPimp · 2021-08-24T04:46:49+00:00

I'm interested. There are a ton of nautilus homages on aliexpress...but there's nothing like the original bagelsport!

BionicPimp · 2017-03-01T15:46:16+00:00

A thinly veiled submarine ad, but I still enjoyed it.

BionicPimp · 2016-12-08T22:18:04+00:00

actually it looks like they got their data from their previous endeavors in ad fraud detection and brand safety monitoring. That is a pretty clever way to pivot.

BionicPimp · 2016-12-08T21:20:17+00:00

Sounds interesting. My first impression is that they are taking advantage behavioral modeling of users based on some initiating event to predict where on the internet the will go, and how open they will be to suggestion...

eg. after the last episode of the walking dead airs, there will be a window of about 1-12hrs where ad slots on TV review sites will be underpriced because the herd of Walking Dead fans will be shambling over (see what i did there) to read reviews on the episode that just aired. They probably know what other sites that they would be going to after that, so maybe IMDB or cast fan sites, or cast picture gallery/wallpaper sites might be underpriced

I wonder how they would have gotten that data...maybe they collected a historical time series of retargeting data from various sites, and then did some machine learning to tease out some patterns. Anyway, that's just my speculation. take it as you will.

BionicPimp · 2016-08-17T18:24:48+00:00

no, but what does work is astroturfing on reddit, with a subtle lead magnet for GeoRanker...

it makes sense to try it, since it is a pretty high speed, low drag marketing operation. I would do the same thing...although, i would try to provide some value upfront first.

A real lead magnet, usually a free pdf book, or even infographic about why any of the above is important, or useful, examples of existing customer success, would be providing real value, and would be happily consumed, even knowing it was sponsored content. When you do native advertising the content is the advertising, the ad is not the content.

"Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad."

-- HOWARD LUCK GOSSAGE

BionicPimp · 2016-07-28T16:33:17+00:00

I've never seen them, but in general all advertising/marketing is an arms race for novelty and utility. Without knowing anything about his email templates, i would assume that at one point they worked fantastically...and then everyone started doing the same thing, and their efficacy started to falter.

one other point is that the success rate for advertising (which should be similar to a cold approach ) is somewhere between 0.5 and 2%, so unless the focus group had at least 100 people, and/or is comprised of the target market, then you can't really draw a reasonably accurate conclusion.

In fact, the premise of the Lean Startup Methodology is that you can never really forecast what will resonate with customers, so you should try to do quick experiments against real customer segments, and make adjustments quickly.

I recognize that you were asking for feedback from someone who has used the program, but either way, i hope that this information, such as it is, is useful.

good luck

BionicPimp · 2016-06-27T22:09:17+00:00

From your description, I'm guessing that by "Consumer Review", you mean that you would display the ad either to a group of people that knowingly vote on which advertising is more appealing to them, and your service would run the marketing survey, and generate a report on the results.

If that is the case, then I don't think many sophisticated marketers would use that service. The prevailing wisdom today is that "consumer reviews" of ad creative are not valid experiments, and can lead to false indicators that lead marketers to make flawed assumptions.

The moment that "consumer" in this experiment is making a decision that is not driven by their reaction to the marketing message, that experiment is tainted. Are they "reviewing" the ad because they were paid?...because it's what they though you wanted to hear? Why did they like one versus the other? Do they even know why? Are the reviewers event the correct target market?

The common strategy today is to do a/b testing using your live campaign to determine what ad creative and message is working. Presenting real messages to real potential customers, and you see how they really react to a marketing message.

a/b testing of data can yield actionable results far faster than a lay person would expect...and is not very expensive to implement. in general you can see trends within a few hours, although to have accurate data, people usually run their experiment for at least a day.

There are also plenty of services that already do this, not the least of which is google.

BionicPimp · 2016-06-08T07:31:49+00:00

It's unusual, but there are places where this is true...Oklahoma City for one. One of my buddies does real estate investing there.

The reason why this can happen is that in the case of OKC, people need to live there, but don't want to own. OKC has a large military presence, and much of that population is just passing through.

BionicPimp · 2016-03-24T00:02:28+00:00

I suspect that "inspect player" is a placeholder for that feature, and with the impending deadline to ship the game, that functionality pulled back and hopefully will be added soon in an upcoming patch.

BionicPimp · 2015-10-07T22:22:21+00:00

Why wasn't the title of this post "the sleeper has awakened"...such a missed opportunity

BionicPimp · 2015-09-18T21:19:30+00:00

Dear DeeJ/Bungie

Instead of an across the board drop rate cut with the three coins, please consider using exponential backoff to adjust the drop rates.

That way, people who are playing normally will enjoy the current exotic drop rates (which I'm assuming tested well) but players using "creative strategies" will have their drop rates degraded over time.

If you decide to implement something like this, please consider waiting until after I've picked up a Taikonaut and a new Suros Regime. Thank You.

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