Nick (nt)

always keep coming back to the analogy of product building being so much like sculpting or painting. the first strokes are broad and confident. a lot of material gets applied and moved around very quickly. you might slap together 5-6 features in just hours and build this really huge thing out of nothing. but then the real work starts. you meticulously shape and form what you've created and refine the little details. subtle, barely noticeable changes. a lot of thought before each tiny improvement to a small part of the whole piece. the last 10% often takes 95%+ of the time. none of your users or competitors are even aware of what you're changing at this point. but it's what keeps all of your users coming back.

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I'm building an app for language nerds and polyglots. I'm using it to learn Mandarin Chinese - it's helping me distill the insights from dozens of research papers on learning into a single, highly effective routine. I'm opening up access to a handful of alpha testers who are learning Chinese, German or Russian. Reply/DM if you're interested.

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the trick to making voice agents fast is pipelining everything: first pipeline: audio packets -> speech to text -> turn-taking model second: LLM -> text to speech -> encoding -> output here's a render of my current latency. bear in mind, I'm running this locally from a wooden hut in the mountains in Turkey - it should be significantly faster once I host it!

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Here's a mental map 👇 except it's not a map of some idea in your mind, it's a map of your mind and how well it remembered something. i'm using this to predict individual patterns of forgetting during learning in order to optimise how fast I can learn Mandarin.

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