So from the time I was about 10 to the time I went off to college, I would spend a lot of my life doing the Drama Club at school as well as some local independent theater. In that time I worked numerous roles from acting and singing in musicals, to being an understudy, to doing sound design, stage management, Foley, set design, I've done a lot of things. My senior year of high school, my friends and I were tasked with putting on a play ourselves and we chose Our Town. We had two directors, a producer, and me as the stage manager (tech role, not character) and we all worked together to cast the show.

We knew most of these people for years, since all of the drama club kids knew each other, so we had a decent idea of where we were going to cast everyone going into it, we just needed to make sure we were right and figure out where to put the newcomers. Everything was going smoothly until the day before we were putting up the cast list, a day after we closed auditions. There was a new student, a freshman, who missed the auditions and asked if there was a way they could still try out. We got one of our friends to come read lines with him and we all instantly came to the same realization: that this guy was perfect to play the lead. From that moment we were kind of struggling to figure out where to put everyone, so we called a few of our friends back and had them read lines with this new guy and things just kind of fell into place.

The next day we posted the cast list with this new freshman as the lead, and a female student cast in the role of "Stage Manager" which wasn't a common choice for this play, it was usually cast as a man. Now, you know how these things go: cast lists come out and people frantically stand outside the stage door to see if they got the role they wanted, and our crazy idea was shared with the rest of the drama club. A ton of people were confused at the fact that we didn't cast the more senior people in the bigger roles, but we knew in our guts that this was the right choice.

By the end of the run of our production, the rest of the drama club came to see our vision and our unusual casting choices were vindicated. Honestly we were nothing but proud of the cast and our production team, it really turned out to be a great show and something I'm still proud of all these years later.

What Does This Have to Do With Anything?

Well, over the past year or so a lot of, well, let's just say "weird" products have come out. While I've certainly given my criticisms of the products, I think that someone confident enough to go through the whole process of making something and sharing it with the world at least deserves to be heard out. Humane, Rabbit, and The Browser Company, are the first few companies that come to mind launching some...interesting products and ideas. Sure, they may have missed the mark, but they had an idea and it was worth hearing them out. You never know when a weird idea is actually great. The Arc browser itself was honestly a weird idea, while I've used browsers with vertical tab bars before, I haven't used one quite like Arc, it was almost a complete rethinking of how browser tabs worked. It was a weird idea and a lot of people didn't like it, but there's a kind of cult following around Arc now, and it's kinda neat to see.

Other things like different AI tools might not have been the greatest ideas, the Humane Pin was expensive, but the idea of having an ambient computer is one that people have been trying to make happen for a while and they did it. We're not at the point where that's a viable product for a lot of people, but you can see the same kind of ideas there that we see in the Meta RayBans. The Rabbit R1 brought the idea of a system that orchestrates various LLMs and other models on top of some deterministic tools as well. While they weren't forthcoming about how their system worked, and a lot of it was woefully insecure, it's the same concept as Apple's Foundation models which are the backbone of Apple Intelligence.

Final Thoughts

If someone has a weird idea: hear them out. You don't have to invest, you don't have to pay them, just listen. See what happens, it could be cool, it could be dumb, it could be a great idea with a poor execution. You won't know unless you give them the space to build their ideas. While I'm skeptical of Dia, I think The Browser Company at least deserves to be heard. It's a new idea, it may seem weird, but we can't judge it for real until we see how it's executed. Until then, they've got an idea to completely rethink the browser, it's naturally going to sound kinda stupid, we'll just have to see it when it's out. That's the fun of startups and indie devs: we'll get to see an idea come to life. What are your thoughts on this? It doesn't have to specifically be about AI, or any of the products mentioned, but the concept of hearing people out in general. Let me know down below or on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, or email.