EB-4: Dingboard - Transcript - Part 3

[01:18:47.808]🧑‍🦰 yacine: So I basically created this debate with Rocco on Twitter Spaces, and then I lost the debate. So often, well, when these debates will happen is I'll lose them, and I made a big ruckus on Twitter.
But what most people didn't know is that I actually planned that whole thing with Rocco from the very get-go. It's like, hey, message Rocco and say, hey, let's make this big debate and let's make a big stink about it. I'll pretend to lose. I had a pre-recorded conversation of my wife yelling at me or something, and I played it during the Twitter space. It was a lot of fun. And I think you should not take those debates too seriously. Basically, as a listener, if it's not entertaining, stop listening to it. It's done. People are just like...
Talk over each other. Conversations are a better purpose for understanding each other. We're being able to model each other better. But don't try to convince other people. Who cares, dude? It's not like we can actually do anything. My position is like, bro, technology is like water. Technology, once you invent it, it'll fill every single crack that it can to make people's lives easier. That's what happens. And it's going to keep on getting better. And you just need to learn how to adapt.
Like set up the VTuber podcast thing. Like figure out how to like, you know, do some face track. Like, you know, like ride the tiger because we don't have a choice, bro. The tiger's coming. It'll eat you, dude. Get on. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Yes.

[01:20:16.874]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Ride the tiger indeed.

[01:20:22.346]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: You know, what would you want out, you know, if you could just like close your eyes for a second and think about, let's say, a ding board in 12 months, what would you want it to be?

[01:20:38.292]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Okay, I'm closing my eyes. I'm thinking about Dingboard. I would like to have a lot more users. I would love to have a lot more users. I would like to have a lot more features that makes it like useful. Like I want everyone to be using this thing, dude. I want every fucking person on the planet to be using this thing. I want, you know, MS Paint, remember MS Paint, dude? MS Paint was so good, dude. Remember MS Paint, man? I fucking miss MS Paint, dude. MS Paint was like, you know, like it was, it was like right there, dude, like JS Paint. Oh my God, you're gonna have to cut that out of your podcast, by the way. I just like flashed some stuff, I bet.

[01:20:48.974]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:00.426]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: very functional.

[01:21:10.336]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Uh...

[01:21:12.437]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I didn't notice the porn in the background, so it's okay.

[01:21:14.14]🧑‍🦰 yacine: No, no porn, but it was definitely some like, uh, Confluence documents. Um, so yeah, like this is, I mean, let me, uh, sorry, future editor editing eight. I apologize. Uh, but yeah, so this is just, remember this dude? Remember this, you could just like do things. You could just like make a happy face and it was always there for you when you needed it. But now we're all running Mac books and Linux and no one uses, uses windows anymore. I want people, I want this, I want this thing.
I want Dingboard to occupy the same space as this thing. I want Dingboard to be like, basically, I want Dingboard to be basically exactly this, where you just load Dingboard, it's like, there immediately, you can make an image super fast. It has cool new features that make it a little bit better than MS Paint. And I want like, at least I'll be happy if I have a billion users, a billion, with a B. I'll be very happy if I have a billion users, a billion. I want people to be like, oh dude, just use Dingboard. Were you fucking, don't, like,
Creative Cloud, forget about that. Just go to dingboard.com and just use Dingboard. It works so easily. You can do so many cool things on Dingboard. So that's where I want to take it. Basically, I want it to take real estate in people's heads. I want to be able to just have people use Dingboard. You know what I mean? It's more of a thought space thing. I'm somewhat financially motivated, but not super financially motivated. Yeah. Hopefully that answers your question.
students.

[01:22:39.63]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: So just for listeners who are not on video, Yacine just took an anime image, drew a pink paintbrush over the eyes of the character, and placed a pair of sunglasses, which fits directly into the animation. Pretty impressive in the last 20 seconds.

[01:22:58.856]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Yep, it just went.

[01:23:03.932]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Exactly, dude. Just make something just, yeah, just make something that's like not dog shit. There we go. I'm wearing sunglasses, bro. That's it. We're done. Right? Like, that's what I want. I want people to use it. I want people to like, I want users, bro. That's what I want. Yeah, OK.

[01:23:20.216]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Where did the name Dingboard come from?

[01:23:22.168]🧑‍🦰 yacine: I was on Cloudflare and I was just putting in random words. And ding, I like write console.log dingus when I'm debugging JavaScript software. And I was like, oh, that's my debug word. So ding is my debug word. And then I was like, holy shit, no one's bought ding board? It's like fucking seven bucks? I'm copying this right now.

[01:23:25.761]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Uh-huh.

[01:23:31.9]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[01:23:44.454]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Hahaha

[01:23:45.152]🧑‍🦰 yacine: So Dingboard, you can actually, I could probably dig up the tweet and send it to you. But like I started building Dingboard when I was watching a movie with my wife and I asked HatchieBD4 to like just generate me a scene and that I can drag images around because I just needed it. That's how I started.

[01:24:00.11]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: amazing. I love I mean, it has a little bit of learning curve for me. I've used it like I use it yesterday. I hit 35,000 followers yesterday on Twitter. And I was very excited. And I used it in board I had the I had the woe jacks, the two woe jacks, you know, pointing at a 35k follower. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And and I had them pointing at it.

[01:24:10.348]🧑‍🦰 yacine: That's amazing.

[01:24:19.477]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Dude, what a great meme. What a great meme. I love the Wojak meme.

[01:24:27.506]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Actually, no, it was the Soyboys. It was the Soyboys pointing at the 35K. Um, it was, uh, yeah, it was, it was fun. It was good to use. Um, I, I'd actually, you know, I've tried to use, um, Adobe a few times in my life. And I've always gotten like, you know, you, you know, you have to hit this. Yeah. There's a learning curve and you have to hit that point in the learning curve where you have to like push through in order to like really learn how to use something.
And then if not, you kind of get discouraged, right? And then once you get discouraged, you're like, oh, you know what? Uh, I'm just not going to do it. And you, you ask someone else to do it or you're like, you know what? It's not that important. Like, you know, you, you hire someone, you ask a friend or whatever, or you, or you, or you're like out. Right. And I've definitely faced that with Adobe a few times. Um, never learned how to, uh, you know, uh, edit an image, uh, in Adobe. Uh, it's just too complex for me.

[01:24:59.55]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Exactly.

[01:25:19.342]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I, it's, it's a little bit crazy, right? Like I am, I am machine learning developer. I have like Jupiter notebook running here and you know, et cetera, et cetera, and whatever, but I think all of us, you know, you, you look at a new, new form of software or a new, new vertical of software, and even though you're very literate, you kind of like, you know, do, do I have the activation energy to get, get over it or not? And the activation energy for Adobe is high. Right.

[01:25:42.333]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Yes.
It's friction. It's friction, dude. It's like, like the actual loading of the Adobe homepage takes longer to load than ding board itself. And then you have to click through and then you have to buy it. And you have to like click through five different options. So like, Oh, like, are you a student? Are you going to pay us a thousand dollars? Do you want the option to get, you know, a cancellation fee? It's all this friction to like actually just use a software. And then when you land into the software, dude, there's like 5,000 buttons. Why are there so many goddamn buttons? Just, I'm just trying to fucking make an image. I'm trying to paste two images together and add a transparency layer. Like, why are there so many goddamn buttons?
And that's the thing I'm trying to avoid with Dingboard. So you said something where it's like, it took me a while to figure out how to use it. And that's something I'm actually trying to fix. And that's something I'm treating as a bug. So I treat like, I watch people very keenly when they start using Dingboard. And I try to understand the new users when they drop what they're trying to figure out to do and how they're doing it from their perspective. And because I'm running this in a game engine, I think I can do things like actually have an edit.
literally get played out in the game engine, in the events of the game engine, and then show you how to do it. And then there's other things like I can like, know pre-segment things and then like, highlight them so that like guiding people to click on them. Ideally, there are no buttons on DingBoard, right? The fact that there are buttons at all is actually kind of crappy. So ideally there should be no buttons at all. It should just work. Like the less buttons, the better. And it's actually been quite difficult for me to add features because like I'm very against that, like adding complexity. So.

[01:27:10.762]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Interesting.

[01:27:14.498]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: So let me take a step back and say, I think we've come to the end of our session. So Yaseen, thank you so much. This was an amazing discussion. And let me...

[00:00.47]🧑‍🦰 yacine: So I think it's important to mention the VTuber thing. This is pretty cool. Why are you, I guess I have a question for you. Hopefully you have the time for it. But why are you running VTuber as a person, running the podcast? So some background context is I set up this VTuber thing today, like an hour ago, or two hours ago at this point. Why did you choose to?

[00:24.645]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Okay, so both of us are running VTuber. I'm running Unreal MetaHuman. You have much way cooler, like, anime avatar. I think my background for it was, and I'm semi-docs, like a bunch of people already know who I am. There's no real reason. I think, you know, for me, it's about information delivery. Is information delivery more efficient, more fun?
is the package that you're receiving, you know, more worthwhile, you know, watching or listening to, right? And I think eight is not me, right? Eight is a persona I play. And the interesting thing about eight is, you know, it's purely on what I've written. Eight was created purely out of stuff I've written down, rather than from kind of like reputation

[01:07.115]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Right.

[01:22.401]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And for me, that was very important because it was kind of proving out kind of like the writing, proving out the themes, proving out the ideas without having this attachment of like your ego or your reputation, where you went to school or all of these things. And that was very important for me. And I decided to just go where the wind was kind of blowing me.
Because I never, you know, this was a shitpost account and it just kind of got pulled out. Like, like when I wrote something that, you know, was interesting and people responded to it. I wrote more about it. And, uh, and the eight character, you know, tons of people know that I'm actually a guy. And, uh, a bunch of people, I think know that, you know, I went to Stanford and I have a electrical engineering degree and I actually didn't talk about that for a very, very long time until the account really kind of blew up.

[02:21.55]🧑‍🦰 yacine: That's fascinating. Because earlier, we were saying it's a video game for you. It's like rolling a new character. It's basically like rolling RPG from the start, and you shed away all of the baggage that you've got. It's basically like you're rolling from the start. You're running a new run, and your armor is all dog shit again. And you're building up. That's awesome, man. That's really cool.

[02:21.973]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: and

[02:38.437]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[02:44.361]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: And it was actually, it actually started out because Balaji Srimaniamasana, he wrote about pseudonymous kind of characters, et cetera. And that kind of drove me to set up Eight in the first place. And then it just, I never expected the account to get this big. I never expected to be doing a podcast in the role of Eight. It just kind of happened. And yeah.
if the information delivery mechanism is good. Because the other thing is, you know, I'm very conscious, as I said before, that podcasts are an audio product. And so one of the reasons I do a female voice is because I believe that, you know, when you listen to tech podcasts, it's like 80% are male voices. And the audience is also kind of 80% male, which is kind of unusual, because normally...
Um, you know, guys tend to listen to female voices more often, right? Like it's more, it's like it penetrates more. So I, so I was thinking, you know, just from a marketing perspective, why not? You know, I already have the eight character and I was like, it will be really cool to like instantiate like manifest eight out of thin air and, you know, eventually launch it in VR. Right. So I'm like, you know, is it actually possible? And so we're actually using a fair bit of technologies, Unreal

[03:46.733]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Yeah.

[04:11.069]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: you know, a bunch of stuff going on. There's GPUs involved.

[04:11.374]🧑‍🦰 yacine: That's yeah. When you told me that, when you told me your setup was like the probably the coolest thing ever, I think like that's actually like, um, when you reached out to me to do this podcast, I actually like was super excited because I saw that you were like setting up a like VTuber thing. And it got me, cause I've always wanted to set up one before like, and to kind of like help me help motivate me to do it. And I don't know. I think it's cool. It's I think it's fun. I think it's like quirky. I think it's like, I think you should keep on doing it. I really like that. It's really cool. Um, and you should definitely like share like how you've done it to other people because.

[04:38.334]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[04:41.246]🧑‍🦰 yacine: I think the technology itself is pretty awesome.

[04:44.081]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, I think the interesting thing is I have some sense of where the tech is going. So I know that within 12 months, this is going to be even better. And so I also do a bunch of things a little bit earlier in the curve, because I know that I am early in the curve. So I know that this tech is going to become so much better in 12 to 18 months. And I'll be able to show this character progression over time.

[05:00.095]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Yeah, you're like.
Yeah.

[05:12.226]🧑‍🦰 yacine: That's awesome. That's so cool, dude. That's actually so cool. That's awesome, dude.

[05:17.021]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: So yeah, so I'm excited. The voices worked out much better than I thought. I actually prefer listening to the eight female voice over my own.

[05:23.442]🧑‍🦰 yacine: It's crazy. Yeah.

[05:28.19]🧑‍🦰 yacine: I was, I was really impressed with the voice actually. When I first heard it, I was like, wow, that's actually really cool.

[05:33.713]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, I actually put a fair amount of listening, listening and tweaking and getting it right. And I have Python things running to clean up the noise, do noise reduction. And like you, I learned a bunch of things off GPD4. And I have a high pass, low pass filter running and cleaning up the audio. And I had a.

[05:51.402]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Hell yeah, dude. Amazing.

[06:00.433]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: you know, uh, browser login, uh, browser automation to kind of get the voices swapped and then, you know, 11 labs put out a API. And so now I'm using the API. I set up the API yesterday. I got a bunch of stuff running. There's like a bunch of like tech running some, you know, some of which I have to debug, you know.

[06:10.251]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Nice.

[06:14.198]🧑‍🦰 yacine: That's amazing. And it's so cool how like, dude, it's so cool how like GPT-4 basically like made that possible for you, right? I mean, for me too, it was like, I don't know, I think I messaged you at 1130 and then like 12 PM I had like face tracking running and then like at like, I think like 1 PM I had this like avatar set up and like, like I'm running this on Linux. I'm like piping it through OBS and back to Chrome. There was a bunch of shit I had to fix. Like GPT-4 is just incredible for like reducing the friction and for doing just like awesome shit like this. Hell yeah, dude.

[06:41.085]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, you just need intention and perseverance, right? You just need those two things. You don't need skill. You don't need skill in the middle, you know.

[06:44.05]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Exactly. You just need agency, dude. Yes.
You need to just actually just do the thing, dude. Like it's so simple. I don't understand why more people don't do it. It's like, it's like back to what you're saying about like, why don't like VC companies just like compete with Dingport? It's like, I don't understand, dude. I actually don't, I don't know. That's really cool, man. Keep it up. That's really cool.

[06:50.312]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: So...

[07:04.698]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I think there's a risk, there's this activation energy in your mind about like taking a risk or doing something new, right? And, you know, that's hard. That's hard for, I think, a lot of people. And I think that's one of the things that I think in AI also, people understand that change is coming and a lot of people just don't like change in general, right?

[07:11.596]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Yeah.

[07:28.521]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: while some people thrive on it and are absolutely insane, seeking new things and seeking like change.

[07:30.539]🧑‍🦰 yacine: Yes.

[07:36.362]🧑‍🦰 yacine: I'm amazing. Yeah, very cool, man. That's very cool. Like, yeah, like, definitely kudos. Like it's I'm definitely excited about your podcast.

[07:47.847]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, things are going well and I have, thank you for agreeing to come on.

[07:54.582]🧑‍🦰 yacine: No, hell yeah, dude. No, thank you for the time. I like hanging out with people. So I just like spending with people online. So for me, this is super fun. Hopefully I didn't ramble too much.

[08:02.121]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: No worries, no worries. All right then. Cheers.

[08:04.234]🧑‍🦰 yacine: All right. Peace.