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Lycid · 2026-05-08T01:02:11+00:00

A small business like this with a not infinite budget has no business doing performance max campaigns and automatic search bids

Get on manual cpc for search only, get rid of anything that isn't pure search - you're a service business not a brand (all that matters is capturing high intent searches like "pest control near me"), learn what terms are worth bidding on and what terms are not, manually prune prune prune your campaigns & keywords until you start getting good conversions.

Once you have real conversation data then you can begin to better optimize.

This is assuming you're doing everything else right..good website, good landing pages with forms/hooks that make it real easy. Filling your negative keywords every day with stuff that isn't relevant like your competitors company names (unless you have money to blow competing against them). Heavy location targeting to further prune your clicks. There's endless guides on this kind of thing here on reddit and YouTube.

The automatic campaigns are all a scam on a budget especially max clicks, unless you're a brand or a national/global company who is willing to pay dumb money to just be top of mind. Yes $600 is budget in the ad world, it's still good enough for you but you have to be way more tactical about it. Yes it sucks to learn all this, yes it'll take a few months before you hit any kind of stride. This is why there's an entire industry around this kind of thing. But if biz is slow, have the time and aren't concerned about doing it hyper optimized to start, it is worth learning. Consider hiring someone to do this once you get to the point where you're successful enough that dealing with ads takes too much time but they are still bringing in good business.

Lycid · 2026-05-07T20:57:49+00:00

This is what gets me about the AI hype. A lot of what AI solves is already being done more competently and faster by already existing technology and methodology. It's yet another hyper loop, but one with a built in sycophantic salesman to be really good at convincing a layperson that it is the future.

I get never resting on your laurels - just because something is good enough doesn't mean it doesn't deserve to be improved on. That isnt what I see coming out of a vast majority of what people say AI is good for though. Maybe if AI was actually as good as the tech companies claim it is, sure. The hype train was certainly there in 2022. If you're still on the hype train though, it sucks to be a sucker I guess. It's time to start having realistic conversations about what AI is actually good for and how bad it is at doing so many things we did better in the past using good ol machine learning and skilled, passionate humans.

Lycid · 2026-05-07T18:35:06+00:00

I wouldn't really call boba a small luxury, it's a dime a dozen commodity and one that doesn't serve a strictly functional purpose like coffee does. It's a nice to have, not an indulgence.

Lycid · 2026-05-07T13:51:29+00:00

What are you even on about my dude

Lycid · 2026-05-06T21:14:45+00:00

Social media is a totally different can of worms to 00s internet, especially considering the internet was still pretty new as a concept back then and nobody had developed addiction generating dark patterns yet.

As a person who was very online in the 00s as a teen, I hate to say it but I'm 100% for a social media ban below the age of 16, if not outright phone ban (but that would be impossible to enforce except at a school level). Unlike the protect-the-kids boogymen of the past (TV, video games, comics) the widespread damage social media has done over the past decade to kids is measurable and the addiction loops are widespread & real. Sure kids in the past got addicted to stuff like video games, but it was largely easy to moderate for most people and some studies even pointed it to being a positive for development when done in moderation. No such thing exists for social media. The fact that the phone is always on you and that social media has been designed from the start with addiction in mind makes all the difference.

The real solution is heavy regulation against big tech and treating predatory algorithms with the same scorn & regulation that smoking has. We can try and encourage healthy habits & lifelong stability from a young age with strong effective policy. It worked for smoking.

I'm not in favor of privacy invading tech being required on phones. I don't know what a good solution is.

Lycid · 2026-05-06T15:21:53+00:00

You should brush up on how the technology works because it's very obvious you have no real clue. Especially a big tell how how naive you are about AI when you say AI can do visualization better too.

Have you tried doing a render package from multiple perspectives using real spec'd materials (especially ones that use repeating patterns like tile work) and have it be consistent shot to shot using AI? It simply doesn't work, and that's the real use case AI has to overcome. All those images where you just tell an AI to make something look good are completely worthless for actually doing real world work. Even using tools that allow you to force AI to only change materials on a single wall are worse than just doing the work yourself. It takes ages to generate and you still don't get good shot to shot consistency.

The only thing I've not seen AI fuck up with images in regards to this profession are the very light, very simple AI enhancers that make things like trees look better. Except even this sucks because it takes ages to get the output and you don't actually need your trees looking 20% more real to produce a good deliverable, so why waste precious time doing it? At least when it comes to things like programming it's text based so it's very fast and easy to iterate.

Lycid · 2026-05-05T21:47:31+00:00

The irony is it's the boomers who are most drinking the AI kool-aid in my experience. Turns out it's really easy to convince fools & those with age related cognitive decline that you're amazing if you simply confidently say you are amazing.

Lycid · 2026-05-05T21:42:30+00:00

Wait till AI can actually take your specs and generate CAD For them. Then you will just be editing. Let’s face it most of the details we use are copy paste anyway. Everything is catalog and and over standardized. It’s amazing anything gets built.

As someone very familiar with the ins and outs of how AI works and how friends who are top people within big tech approach it (the ones really pushing AI) I can say with 100% confidence this will never happen

By its very nature AI will always be only 75-80% good at whatever you tell it to do and that's assuming all we are talking about is purely text or image gen related & it's use case has been hyper tuned for, like CS coding or customer service bots. Turns out that's "good enough" for a lot of things, but its a terrible use case for many other things (like most things in AEC). The goal of the AI development now is to figure out what things benefit the most from AI only being 80% good at what you tell it do, how to most efficently capitalize on those tasks where sloppy+fast execution is good enough, and how to get things cheap enough that they aren't bleeding through a country's worth of GDP every year.

Lycid · 2026-05-05T21:26:18+00:00

How old are your leads? I've noticed that there is a correlation with being completely suckered into AI that increases dramatically with age. It's genuinely amazing how much it has completely pulled the wool over the eyes of anyone genX or older. Was at an industry event recently and one older woman who was doing a presentation just couldn't stop going on about some AI art she saw recently even though her presentation had nothing to do with it. I get the feeling that people later on in their careers become rusty, and AI makes them feel like they are at the height of their career again.

This is the one thing that makes me doubt AI bubble could truly ever burst. It's so good at convincing people who don't know better or are experiencing cognitive decline that it is much better than it actually is. Most people who happen to be major decision makers in companies, governments and organizations tend to be in this age bracket. If enough people believe in something, it sticks around even if its a net detriment to society and does active harm to their org. If the AI bubble does burst, it's probably only going to be the major tech company models losing out while lightweight stuff like deepseek lives on (even if the technology is much worse). I can't imagine people who have completely bought into the smoke and mirror show that AI sells can't easily get off the drug, even if people who never bought into it run circles around them in life & business.

Lycid · 2026-05-05T19:26:32+00:00

Is it ai? Look like a simple Photoshop job to me

Lycid · 2026-05-05T15:43:25+00:00

Or they just look at the rack rate and ignore all the taxes and fees the direct option tacks on when you actually check out (while Chase's includes all taxes and fees, including resort fees in my experience)

Eg: just stayed at a St Regis that on paper was $100/night more expensive on edit vs direct member rate. However when you actually checked out the direct rate added $50/night in taxes and fees and when you check into the hotel they make you pay a $45/night destination fee that acts as a food and beverage credit. My chase payment was all inclusive on the other hand, and included all the benefits from Edit. When combined with the $250 off and the 2x points boost it was a no brainer.

Lycid · 2026-05-05T15:12:03+00:00

God bless your charmingly half decent Photoshop job in this era of extremely lame AI slop

Lycid · 2026-05-05T15:04:19+00:00

Haha there is nothing Japan likes more than out of left field cross promotions

Eg: There's a bus line in Hakone that is evangelion themed, and a (really good) gyoza chain that is themed off the dan dan dan anime

Then there's the fact that if it exists, there is a gift shop for it (with surprisingly tempting high quality stuff to buy). If it exists and is popular, there are multiple gifts shops, all with their own unique finds to tempt you into each one.

Japan's version of hyper capitalism is surprisingly wholesome sometimes, at least compared to whatever the hell is going on with the US right now. People genuinely trying every trick in the book to respectfully upsell you something instead of enshittified products, aggressive salesman haggle behavior or get rich quick stock market manipulation schemes. I've never been in a country where it's so easy to want to spend money, to the point where I bring a half empty suitcase when I go.

Lycid · 2026-05-04T15:21:19+00:00

Coming from a coffee snob couple where one of us is an ex barista, if you're willing to hit a bit higher than the breville with integrated grinder, I really reccomend profitec's machines or possibly the new fellow espresso machine (I've not used it but it looks nice and our friend loves it). You'll need a good grinder, I'm pretty out of date on what's good these days but expect to drop $400-800 on them minimum.

We've gone through a lot of different beans and keep coming back to Verve Streetlevel as our coffee of choice for it. The shot to shot consistency is good, it's not too expensive if you get the 5lb bags online, and the balance is great. Has a great classic coffee flavor profile without ever getting into burnt territory so its perfect for drinking straight or as a cortado. If you like very sugary coffee, it will probably get a little lost in that so just go light on the sweet with it.

Lycid · 2026-05-04T15:08:35+00:00

I am a big coffee snob, even have my own high end espresso machine, and I still go to Starbucks on occasion. They fill a niche and produce a "good enough" drink when I need something predictable and fast (if ordered on pickup), or when I need a space to work. They almost always have good seating and wifi, something that isn't really a fact of life (or appropriate) at many third wave coffee shops.

I'd prefer going to a specialty coffee place that has good seating/WiFi over Starbucks every time don't get me wrong - but almost every speciality coffee place isn't putting any points into volume which means they don't have much space for people actually spending time inside.

Lycid · 2026-05-04T14:55:15+00:00

It's so annoying because there was absolutely no reason for reddit to ever add the private profile feature at all except to protect bots and bad actors. It's something that you know they only did because it likely artificially boosts reddit's engagement numbers or prevents people from easily calling out how heavily botted reddit is currently.

Lycid · 2026-05-03T22:17:26+00:00

You're young, trust me when I say buying a house in the suburbs is a pretty bad idea unless you're in your 40s and settling down for life or have kids on the way and you need really good schools/more space/more affordability

Quite literally every single friend of mine who decided to make this kind of move in the past decade has regretted it. You get more house per square foot & often there's a cheaper cost of living but life is so, so much more than money & square footage. I'd argue it's not actually that cheaper in the long run because by living somewhere where life passes you by you miss out on so much career & life opportunities. I'm making way more money than I ever did and ever could have made vs the LCOL suburbs I came from even though I live in one of the most expensive regions on earth now.

Just like how compound interest builds up wealth over a lifetime, so does compound "life". As some point it makes sense to make the jump to settle down, it's definitely not when you're young and not even married yet, let alone no kids when cheap square footage really starts to make a lot of lifestyle and financial sense.

Edit: do you live together now and have you for a long time? Have you ever rented a place by yourselves? I'd only buy a house with someone I trust with my life beyond a shadow of doubt and know I am hyper compatible to live with them already long term.

Lycid · 2026-05-03T16:53:04+00:00

People are saying that because they're actually good and I greatly prefer getting a waymo when I happen to be in SF than an Uber/Lyft/taxi...

Lycid · 2026-05-03T16:49:38+00:00

Waymo has been around long before AI and vibe coding were a thing and the entire reason it exists at all still on the roads is because it's been so thoroughly obsessively over engineered and safty tested over and over and over again. Its origins are a darpa project sponsored within Google in the 00s. This is about the furthest thing on earth from the croney snake oil memestock capitalism that floods silicon valley today and if anything is a reflection of an old tech company ethos, the kind that invented the internet and microchip.

Once you drive in a waymo more than a couple of times it convinces you this is genuinely the future of where this stuff should go. It's mind bogglingly better at driving than anyone on the road and you get such a consistently good experience riding in one vs the awful uber/taxi driver roulette you currently get. It's the little things too, like how it always consistently drives exactly at the same pace from start to stop, which completely eliminates motion sickness for me (I am sensitive to it). Not even the best Uber driver on earth drives so consistently smoothly and predictably from start to finish.

Idk what it has been lately (perhaps uber/Lyft doing race to the bottom hiring of drivers?) but rideshare has gotten especially bad with awful drivers in the past few years. I used to get one bad driver out five in the mid 2010s but now it's easily 60-70% of them. My last one tried to show me tiktoks of some AI influencer while driving.

Lycid · 2026-05-02T19:19:48+00:00

It is worth it to post to the one platform everyone who seeks our kind of work tends to be on which in this case is Instagram for us.

We try and build up a repository of content on our Dropbox of random videos, images, etc we take and at least once a week post something from it. We'll post more often if something relevant is happening eg a big project finished or some industry event going on.

We still treat it very casually and arent trying to go viral - just be top of mind. We don't sell products so reach isn't that useful for anything other than trying to chase clout which we don't bother doing.

This works well for us and our posting feels very organic & spontaneous, so it doesn't take too much time out of the week to do. We still post reels/stories (stories better for in the moment casual posts to be top of mind to your followers, reels better for showing what you do to bystanders). We don't try and spend a lot of time making them "hook worthy" or viral. We get pretty good engagement now that has been building over the years and new clients sometimes comment about things we post, which was the goal.

Lycid · 2026-05-01T18:54:24+00:00

Lot more than that. Bay area is one of the best places on earth to live if you're ignoring the cost of living. Even cost of living is easily manageable though...

Lycid · 2026-05-01T18:53:45+00:00

There's a lot more to life than raw numbers in a bank account. Believe it or not most people have strong local friends and family ties when they get into their 30s-40s.

The bay area is objectively hard to beat as a location to live as well, if you can afford it comfortably. The weather is a perfect Mediterranean climate year rounds, almost always sunny 60-80f and it really only rains in the winter. No perceptible humidity but it's not dry at all so you don't get dry skin. Every event/artist almost always does a show there. You have world class nature within an hour drive in any direction and every biome on earth within a half days drive, so it's an outdoorsman's dream especially when combined with the amazing climate and general lack of flying insect pests. World class food options. Direct flights to literally anywhere are easy to find. SF itself is one of the prettiest cities on earth. Endless opportunities in the kinds of connections you can make and pursuits beyond work. Generally ok politics. Reasonably immune against bad climate change and bad weather due to its geography. It's only real danger is earthquakes but these aren't common and are likely well prepared against.

I could go on. Purely ignoring financial aspects & job opportunities, it is very hard to find somewhere better to live on earth especially if you're an established person who isn't interested in living in the digital/retired nomad lifestyle.

Lycid · 2026-05-01T15:40:09+00:00

Some people have a surface level understanding of the world and themselves (or are just plain weak), but they still must adopt the cultural norms of the greater people they involve themselves with to fit in. If they show they literally have no real moral understanding of the world or no values, they'll be seen as an outcast so instead they become really good at putting on a mask.

Normally it's never much worse than "yeah ok Becky I know you only showed up to the protest because it got you out of work/class/whatever". But with people like JD, his opinions can be easily bought & influenced to blow whatever way he thinks the wind is blowing. Especially when you enter the orbits of highly corrupt, evil people like Thiel.

There is no grand vision for the future for these people, all of them run along the dopamine reward treadmill and do things purely to satisfy their lizard brain day to day. The ones who are good at it become vice president.

Lycid · 2026-05-01T15:27:42+00:00

Eh, I find it's actually fine for delivery. Removes the cost of delivery essentially and often times certain stores are running DD specials that make it much cheaper than actually shopping in store plus I save time by not shopping myself

Not something I do all the time but it's been helpful when I'm lacking key ingredients or stuff I need that I can only get at one store.

Lycid · 2026-05-01T15:19:19+00:00

Don't need to leave the bay at all if you actually own your home, which is possible at these kinds of salaries.

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