Rantings

AI and the value of taste

Anyone can now generate content (text, audio, images, video) with a single prompt. The cost of creation is collapsing to near zero. We live in amazing times.

It also produces what people have started calling slop: an overwhelming volume of content, much of it interchangeable. When supply becomes infinite, attention becomes scarce. Two thoughts follow from this.

First, the era of personalized content is finally here.
When generation is cheap, we don’t just filter existing content, we generate it. Instead of an algorithm deciding what you might like from a global pool, your feed can be created specifically for you, reflecting your interests, context, and intent. This is a meaningful shift: from recommendation to creation.

Second, as the cost of generation goes to zero, the value of taste goes to infinity.
When anyone can make something, what matters is knowing what should be made. Taste becomes the constraint. Just as there is one Picasso among thousands of painters, there will be people who can consistently direct AI toward work that resonates. They may not produce the content themselves, but they shape it—through judgment, curation, and intent.

In a world flooded with output, taste is the differentiator.

Overheard : On constant increase in expectations

Sam Altman’s June 10, 2025 post on achieving singularity captured something I’ve been thinking about lately. There’s a particular passage that perfectly describes how we’re constantly ratcheting up our expectations:

Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; or from being amazed that it can make live-saving medical diagnoses to wondering when it can develop the cures; or from being amazed it can create a small computer program to wondering when it can create an entire new company. This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.

This hits at something fundamental about human psychology. We have this remarkable ability to normalize the extraordinary, almost immediately.

I see this everywhere now. My kids casually ask AI to help with homework in ways that would have seemed like science fiction just three years ago. We’ve gone from “can AI write coherent sentences?” to “why can’t it write a perfect screenplay?” in what feels like months.

The progression Altman describes—paragraph to novel, diagnosis to cure, program to company—isn’t just about AI capabilities scaling up. It’s about how our mental models adjust. Each breakthrough becomes the new baseline, not the ceiling.

What struck me most is his phrase: “wonders become routine, and then table stakes.” That’s exactly it. The wonder doesn’t disappear because the technology got worse—it disappears because we got used to it. And then we need something even more impressive to feel that same sense of possibility.

Why ADP?

ADP is a $70B+ (by market cap as of August 2019) company and yet cannot get a simple redirect correct. If someone that is asked to use it’s employee performance management system types in tms.adp.com (like most people would do), they get this nice friendly error

If by some magical and mystical reason, they type in https://tms.adp.com, they get this login page

I find it mind boggling that such a mature company cannot figure out

  1. Customer experience
  2. 301/302 http redirects
  3. HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)

End Rant and sorry to all my friends that work at ADP 🙂

How not to design a website

Etrade is one of the largest stock trading service providers in the US. One would think they want to make it easy for their customers to trade. Guess not :). I recently logged in to check on my account and place an order. Capital One recently sold their stock trading portfolio to Etrade (why???), so I didn’t get a chance to get oriented with the etrade interface…

So I logged in and was presented a good overview of the account.

Good so far.. I want to place a trade. what do I click?.. let me try the detailed account view

Hmm.. no luck.. How about the orders menu? That sounds like a place where one can place a trade

Nope.. that doesn’t even remotely look like a place I can place an order..

I am amazed at how companies get away with this..

Parenthood means..

  • Not hesitating for a moment to put your nose near someone’ arse to check if they pooped
  • Thinking it is cute when someone pees in your bed
  • Taking food that someone else spits out and finishing it off without hesitating for a second

Some of the joys I got to experience in the last two years raising our Son :).

And yes.. a whole lot of new found respect for my parents.

Never assume.

When troubleshooting performance issues..never take anything for granted..yes, even if something was not touched or restarted, chances are something touching it has been and might have affected it.

This goes esp for the network (IP and fiber) which don’t change as often as the rest of the environment.

G+ or Blog

I started using Google Plus from last November and I should say that, even though I am a big proponent of keeping control over your digital avatar, it has been very easy to make (give) quick updates on Google plus than on this blog. Plus my friends and family don’t have to specially come to this site to get updates. They get the G+ updates as part of their regular email and/or when they log into their G+ stream. It is less work on everyones part.

That is one of the reasons, I believe G+ will be one of the first real contenders to Facebook. Even though Facebook boasts of more than 800 million users, it is still a “seperate” site that folks have to log into unlike Google plus, which is fast becoming part of the regular Google experience. Esp with the tweaks that Google made last week with incorporating G+ data into the search results, the line between  a Google search and using Google Plus gets blurrier.

So the question (for me) is not if it is Facebook or G+.. but if it is the blog or G+..

 

I have been tagged..

As a site linking to site which is linking to site that serves malware. And I thought it was worth a post, because that site is twit.tv according to google 🙂 . 

I believe the warning is due to the fact that I linked to some video provided by twit on this post (https://kudithipudi.org/2011/11/04/overheard-comment-about-start-upentrepreneurship) .

I pinged Leo on Google + about it and hopefully he will have his team take care of it. Wait.. let me say that again.. I pinged Leo!!! . Isn’t technology amazing. With the click of a button, I was able to send a personal message to one of the most famous tech personalities.