Weekly Drop
I started self-hosting because I was cheap. I stayed because it rewired how I evaluate every piece of software I use. This isn't a tutorial on setting up Docker containers or a pitch for running your own mail server. It's about what happens to your decision-making
Weekly Drop
The tool is Claude. And before this reads like a love letter, let me explain why it bothers me — because the reasons it bothers me are more useful than the reasons I keep using it. How I Got Here I didn't start with Claude. I started with GPT-3.
Weekly Drop
A friend asked me last week what AI tools they should start with. Not a developer friend — a person who runs a small business, does their own marketing, handles their own operations, and has heard enough about AI to know they should be using something but not enough to know
Weekly Drop
I think a lot about demos. It's a professional hazard — I evaluate AI tools for a living, and every tool arrives wearing its best demo like a first-date outfit. I've built a framework for seeing through them. I know the tricks: cherry-picked examples, clean environments, tasks
Weekly Drop
Every "AI workflow" article I read follows the same pattern. Someone lists 15 tools, explains how each one feeds into the next, and presents a beautiful diagram of interconnected services that make their life seamlessly productive. It reads like a fantasy. It is a fantasy. Nobody actually uses
Weekly Drop
Someone asks a question in a community — any community, about any tool, for any use case. "What should I use for X?" And the first reply, every single time, is "just use ChatGPT." Doesn't matter if X is code generation, image creation, data analysis,
Weekly Drop
I used Zapier for two years before switching. It worked fine. Workflows ran, triggers fired, things connected to other things. There was no dramatic failure, no pricing betrayal, no moment where Zapier broke and I stormed off. I left because I gradually realized I was renting a house I could
Weekly Drop
I'm going to name the tool in a moment, but first I want to be precise about what "disappointed" means here. I don't mean the tool that worked the worst. I don't mean the tool that was the biggest scam, or the
Video Gen
You're picking one AI video tool to commit to. Maybe two. Not all three — nobody has the budget or the patience for that. The internet will happily show you the single best cherry-picked output from each platform and call it a comparison. This is not that. I ran
Video Gen
HailuoAI is the front door to Minimax's video generation model. If the previous article in this series covered the engine, this one covers the car — the web-based interface where most people will actually interact with Minimax's technology. The distinction matters because HailuoAI's simplicity is
Video Gen
Minimax is the Chinese AI company you probably haven't heard of that's producing video output you've probably seen without knowing it. While the AI video conversation revolves around Runway, Kling, and Sora, Minimax has been quietly shipping a model that does something the headliners
Video Gen
Google Veo is what happens when a research lab ships a video generation model without fully deciding who it's for. The underlying technology — developed by DeepMind — produces footage that, at its best, rivals or exceeds anything from Runway or Kling. The problem is everything surrounding the technology: access,