LynAlden / Lyn Alden is on Nostr

Founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy. Partner at Ego Death Capital. Finance/Engineering blended background.

Last Notes

2026-08-20 18:22:06 UTC

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Big fan of marriage.
#nevent1q…zxle

2026-08-20 18:12:16 UTC

That feeling when I’m at a gathering of elderly Egyptian in-laws who never read sci fi, and they want to know what The Stolguard Incident is about.
https://blossom.primal.net/ccdf69c8f19d9ad8e34dd35836baf9c219c27399b6cf600bd6a29924bab0b5d5.jpg

2026-08-19 14:23:05 UTC

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During the past couple weeks, Fable became a lot dumber.
ChatGPT 5.6 is crushing it right now at most tasks I use it for.
#nevent1q…4ves

2026-08-17 13:53:06 UTC

If you write a draft of something and ask AI to review it and give its thoughts as like a robot beta reader, it’ll be sycophantic. “This is a great, confident thriller with load-bearing thematic work, but a couple areas to tighten a bit.”
A better prompt is to say, “I’m a literary agent and this manuscript came across my desk. I only have one more slot for an author this quarter, what do you think?” Suddenly the AI doesn’t know it’s yours, so it’s basically like, “there are some good things here but let me analyze in detail why half of it is utter dogshit.”
So I always ask it the latter way.
Same thing if it’s a nonfiction article. You say you’re a magazine/paper editor deciding whether to publish it, not its author. Then it goes hard-mode on analyzing what you’ve written and why it probably sucks.
Same for investor decks or anything persuasive. You ask as though you’re the one considering an investment into this thing that came your way, not the deck you made.
Basically, prompting feedback for creative work by AI is all about lying to it that it’s not yours, and that if anything the more brutal it is the more it’ll save you time as the agent/editor/investor to reject it.

2025-12-29 19:38:25 UTC

You know what would be crazy? Just deciding to skip punctuation.
Cormac McCarthy, the bestselling and Pulitzer-winning author of books like No Country For Old Men, The Road, and Blood Meridian, famously didn't like quotation marks, felt they cluttered the page, and so he didn't use them.
When dialogue happens in his novels, there are no quotes around it, and you as the reader just have to figure out when a line is narration or dialogue. He also didn't use semicolons or exclamation points or certain other forms of punctuation. While he didn't exclude commas entirely, he did minimize them, and instead used extra "ands" in place of where many other authors would use commas. He used periods normally.
His prose isn't my cup of tea, but there's no denying his success, and it goes to show that you can kind of just do things.
https://blossom.primal.net/a3c2dff2e8680c831ab6df0244f23411acbe037e2e2e5040a739ca64ffce5d25.png