Latent Mirror — entrepreneurship

What if it actually works out?

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Synopsis

In Lee’s telling, he pitches a hero with a spider power: a teenager, with personal problems. His publisher tells him it is the worst idea he has ever heard, and gives three reasons, all of them category rules. People hate spiders. Teenagers can only be sidekicks. Superheroes do not have personal problems. Each objection names the thing that later made the character distinctive.

Lee puts the story in the last issue of a title that was already being cancelled, “just to get it out of my system”. The sales come back and the publisher asks for a series. The channel’s moral is not to let some idiot talk you out of an idea you believe in. Lee’s own hedge sits underneath it and is easy to miss: not every wild notion you come up with is going to be genius.

Where I land

I liked the “don’t let an idiot talk you out of it”. I loved Stan Lee: what an inspiration. Kind of random to have saved this one, I suppose, but alas.

The part that lands harder is who the idiot was. More often than not, in my own projects, it was me. Countless projects have died before they were ever shown to another person.

Lee had a publisher, a distribution network and an audience already attached to the failing title. That is a real advantage and it is worth naming. However, it also shows where my failure mode sits relative to his: his came after a gatekeeper said no, and mine came before anyone was asked. I was too afraid to put myself out there, within the firing line of criticism. It is probably the fear of criticism, if I’m being honest, more than any preference for working alone.

As such, the useful lesson here is structural rather than motivational. Amazing Fantasy #15 was a slot where failure cost nothing. Finding that slot is the transferable part; “ignore the doubters” is not.

Connections

The Agent Internet — Two Videos, One Premise

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Synopsis

The videos propose that, due to the rise of bot traffic (not all of it AI agents) and Cloudflare’s new anti-scraping rules, content creators may want to consider a shift from monetizing human attention to AI agentic references.

Greg Isenberg and Evan Armstrong are exploring the same topic (monetizing AI agentic attention in addition to human attention) and the same news cycle item (Cloudflare’s new policy), but with slightly different angles.

Where I land

I think it’s a valid argument. As the internet reshuffles, how do you follow where the money is?

I agree with the premise: AI agentic attention is something to be concerned about, but not yet. Wait until the ecosystem is more mature. I don’t think it’ll make tons of money overnight. Also, lots of free ways to access information still exist. Who knows how long that’ll be the case.

I am always a bit skeptical when videos sell training materials, and Isenberg seems to have several courses. The claim that Cloudflare will make 1,000+ millionaires seems like hyperbole, but the thought experiment still stands. Armstrong seems a bit more on point.

And is the case of bots > humans overblown? Does it matter? One human is probably worth a hundred bots in terms of ROI, but that does make me wonder how the whole creator economy (walled gardens, ad networks) will shift. Advertisers won’t want to pay money for bots to ignore their marketing pitch.

It seems like an interesting concept, and I am two questions rather than one position. How could I leverage this as a business opportunity? Or at the very least, how do I make what I publish accessible to agents?

The second question is the one I am actually acting on. This site emits /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt and a Markdown version of every post, which is a cheap bet on machine readers mattering. Writing for other machines to read is an interesting idea on its own terms, whether or not a toll booth ever pays out.

The pull of riches and fame is ever-so-present, and I digress. I would call this a thought experiment rather than a plan.

Connections

Meta Offers 95% Discount for Muse Spark AI

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Synopsis

Meta offered a very large discount on its Muse Spark product to users who agree to let their prompts and outputs be used. The video’s reading is that this is not a cheaper price. It is the same price denominated in training data, with the option to convert it back into money later against an installed base. There is a second thread about shadow IT, i.e. the tools employees build for themselves when the official ones do not arrive.

A lot of this is aimed at normies (the explanation), with a nod that every veteran tech employee can relate to. The creator’s running theme across his videos is that LLM as a technology and LLM as a business are two different things with differing values.

Where I land

Shadow IT is real, and I have the scar tissue. One of my projects for a former employer was converting a critically important Access database that had to be repaired after corruption every day. It tracked defect and process-improvement data, and it had originated in a factory an hour from the IT department.

That distance is the part I keep coming back to. Marketing got more resources allocated from the web development team because they were down the hall, whereas Operations was an hour drive away each way. Proximity has an impact on support. Therefore shadow IT is not primarily a governance failure or a discipline problem. It is what distance does to resource allocation. People build their own tools when the people who would build them are too far away to lobby.

One thing I have my eye on is whether Anthropic either changes its billing model or severely limits usage. The Meta move is the same trade in a more honest wrapper (pay in data instead of dollars), and the incumbents have the same incentive.

Latent Mirror — entrepreneurship

What if it actually works out?

Synopsis

Where I land

Connections

Links

The Agent Internet — Two Videos, One Premise

Synopsis

Where I land

Connections

Links

Meta Offers 95% Discount for Muse Spark AI

Synopsis

Where I land

Connections

Links