u/waytooucey

Longtime lurker, finally have something to post about.

started a 7-week AI PM cohort on Friday. week 1 was supposed to be intros and easy stuff. ended up being the most useful slap im going to get this quarter.

week before the cohort started i spent 90 minutes in a meeting arguing we should switch our llm feature from Sonnet to Haiku because Haiku "sounded just as good" in my testing. cohort homework week 1 drilled it home that what i was calling testing wasnt eval, just vibing on like 6 prompts.

a real eval is a held-out dataset, a scoring rubric (LLM-as-judge or human review), run against every model change. results go into a comparison table. point is repeatability, when an engineer asks "why are we picking this" you have numbers not vibes.

monday morning i redid the comparison properly. Sonnet was winning by a meaningful margin on the cases that matter most. would have shipped the worse model and felt smug about saving on inference.

Been doing pet sitting and dog walking for about eight months, mostly word of mouth in my neighborhood, it's going well but the payment side has always felt slightly awkward and I'm not sure I have it figured out yet.

Right now I'm doing a mix of Venmo and cash depending on what the client prefers, the cash clients are fine but the Venmo ones are inconsistent, some pay immediately, some take a couple of days, one forgot entirely and I had to follow up twice which felt uncomfortable.

Curious what others in here are actually using, specifically for collecting at the end of a visit rather than invoicing after, I want the transaction to close before I leave the house not two days later over text.

been chipping at this chord-melody arrangement of Body and Soul for a couple months and finally got through it last weekend. it wasn't even that the chords were impossible, it was that my workflow was a mess. i kept losing what bar i was on, kept guessing at one note then having to redo three measures because that note was wrong. anyway, finally clicked when i changed how i was approaching it instead of just trying to grind harder. curious what shifts have helped other people get out of that same kind of stall.

Been at capacity for about four months. Booked out further than I'm comfortable with, turning down jobs I'd normally take, starting to think seriously about whether bringing someone on makes sense

The thing that kept stopping me wasn't the cost or the insurance or the licensing. It was the admin question. Right now I write every estimate myself because I know exactly what I looked at on the site visit. If someone else does the walkthrough, how do I make sure the estimate that goes out reflects what was actually there? That's not a small problem when your reputation is attached to every quote.

Before I could seriously think about hiring, I needed a system that didn't rely entirely on me being present at every step. Getting the workflow onto a platform where the estimate comes out of the visit itself rather than out of my head was the first step. It's not fully solved but it's in a different place than it was. I'm using Bizzen for the estimating side and it's made the handoff question feel more manageable than it did when everything lived in my notes app.

Still not sure on hiring. But I'm closer to being ready for it than I was when the whole operation ran through me personally at every step.

Shoot weddings and corporate events, for two years Venmo and bank transfer handled most of my collections and it worked until it really didn't, a corporate client with a company card I couldn't take, a Venmo sitting pending for four days after I'd already delivered everything, and a client who just didn't pay because nothing had actually been charged yet so it felt optional to them.

My rates aren’t that high to afford a fee for a tap to pay app, what are you using?

Posting this for fellow creators wrestling with the same problem. Midjourney is untouched for creative work and I don't think that changes anytime soon. But for "same person looks identical across dozens of outputs" it wasn't designed for that and the alternatives have gotten serious.

foxy ai trains on about 3 reference photos and builds a personalized model. Strong identity preservation across poses and settings, images and short video. From $14/month. Viral presets useful for batch content without detailed prompting.

rendernet has facelock for consistency, controlnet for poses. Free tier (10 credits daily), paid from $9/month. More granular control per image, better for deliberate creative direction, slower for pure batch speed.

stable diffusion locally with dreambooth or lora is the quality ceiling for this use case. Maximum control, zero ongoing cost. Needs gpu (12gb+ vram), technical setup, real learning curve.

leonardo ai has character consistency and lora on paid plans from $10/month. Leans stylized over photorealistic, better for editorial portraits than "real instagram selfie" content.

flux with ip adapter does decent face matching without training. Less consistent than dedicated tools but more accessible for quick experiments. For midjourney users the cref flag helps for similar poses but drifts fast with angle or lighting changes. If you need true consistency across varied content, the trained model approach is the reliable path forward.

dont @ me but I've started using suno for something I never expected: studying chord progressions.

backstory. been writing my own songs for years, mostly stuck in the same handful of chord patterns I learned ages ago. picked up suno a few months ago to generate reference tracks in genres I dont normally write in. jazz, neo soul, some bossa.

the chord progressions some of these tracks land on are way more interesting than anything I'd come up with on my own. there are voicings and substitutions in there I literally do not know the names for. probably stuff thats been in the great american songbook for 80 years and im just discovering it now.

so I started reverse engineering them. play the suno track, try to find the chord on piano, look up what its called, write it down. doing this consistently has taught me more about extended chords and modal interchange than years of fumbling around on my own.

the catch is real though. catching every chord by ear is brutal. my ear training isnt good enough to nail the upper extensions in real time. some chords I just give up on and move on, and im definitely missing the most interesting voicings because those are the ones that are hardest to identify.

anyone else doing this kind of suno-as-teacher thing? curious how youre actually pulling chords out of these tracks reliably without losing half of them to ear fatigue.

Lost a brand deal last month to someone with half my engagement. Half. The brand's marketing manager was pretty blunt about why, they said my community is strong but the other creator's content was repurposable across their website, ads, and email campaigns. A creator with beautiful content and decent engagement gives them multi use assets, a creator with great engagement but average looking content gives them one instagram post and nothing else.

And honestly from their side it makes complete sense? They're not just buying a sponsored post anymore, they want the photo for their hero banner, their ad creative, their product page. If the visual quality isn't there none of that secondary usage works.

For solo creators though this is genuinely annoying because the bar keeps rising while most of us are still one person with a phone and a tripod at the same gym every day. I've been trying to close the gap with editing presets, canva for graphics, and foxy ai for aspirational promo content on my socials so the overall brand reads as more polished. But the tension between being authentic and looking premium doesn't resolve neatly.