Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
ianbetteridge.com
ianbetteridge.com
As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it.
Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does.
In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.
Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better."
Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out."
But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.
It’s broadcasting that Y Combinator is a founder friendly investor. That comes with costs, e.g. if LPs think YC would have doubled down on the next Neumann or Bankman-Fried, or that its leadership is going full Ackman. But it will work at the margins for deal-finding partners, particularly with young founders.
The hilarious part is this obviously wasn’t a message they trusted their partners to deliver. An army with precision weapons and intelligence doesn’t carpet bomb; YC is carpet bombing.
My thing here is with this particular Ian Betteridge post. I don't think it says anything. It feels like it exists just to connect the "founder mode" meme to a cast of prefab heroes and villains, Swarz and Srinavasan, Woz and Jobs. I have a couple problems with that:
* While I don't think the "founder mode" post is aging well, I don't think it's at all about promoting the mythology of Jobs or marca or sama. Like I said in my addled previous comment, I think the "founder mode" post describes a very real phenomenon that people who build companies run into all the time and talk about all the time.
* I don't think "heroes and villains" is a useful frame with which to understand the technology industry, and they're especially not useful for understand what does and doesn't work when building a company. It's irritating that the post sort of implicitly asks us to think about whether Swartz or Altman are better (or worse, or something?) at managing companies.
* It is very weird to me to try to build in 2024 an argument around the idea that Graham is unfamiliar with what does and doesn't constitute effective management.
* I am past tired of people casting Steve Wozniak as the soul of what's good about Apple, and Jobs as a manifestation of what's fake about it. Like Steve Arlo said in Zero Effect: there are no good guys and bad guys; it's just a bunch of guys.
Sorry, some of this isn't really a response to you so much as an attempt to salvage what I was trying to say with my preceding comment. It was our last block party of the year. I was apparently in a state.
I agree that almost all the time its just a bunch of guys. Would you agree, though, that this time round it’s about good vs evil organizational structures?
Specifically, Apple are relevant because their designer stratum (generalizable to Jobs’ habit of reifying ICs, so that Woz enters en passant) rhymes with the intended designer culture in AirBnB (& YC if only because their current prez was designer culture raised)
Let me know if i somehow got the pulse on anything in your opinion.
What you're saying about Apple and AirBNB sounds plausible? I know next to nothing about ABNB's culture and operation. I know a fair bit about Apple's, and reductionist takes about Apple bug me. But like, if you're saying something concrete about Apple you're doing better than the post we're commenting on!
"Vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs". Yeesh.
Some folks internalise the goals of an organisation well, and some internalise them poorly. Among domesticated animals, dogs and horses internalise their owners goals well, and cats poorly. (even in the animal world, specific individuals all have different time constants for how long you can leave them unsupervised before they get into trouble)
Most of the discussion I've skimmed on HN (including PG's original) assumes that founder mode is necessary because the external bigcorp hires are more like cats, and do what they want: pad their headcount, feather their nest, orphan their mistakes, etc.; any indication they added value at their previous job is just a slick con because the C- and V-suiters are exceptionally good at managing upward.
However, let's go back to that time constant: there's another variable here among animals, and that's how strong a reminder it takes to reset the clock. I don't think there's any horse which can be left next to bucket of grain without getting into it eventually. However, some horses can be reminded not to get into it by calling their name; other horses need a tug on a lead line; yet others pretty much need to be tied down on both sides.
A good faith hypothesis would be that the people PG was complaining about did do a good job at their previous position, and the difference is in leadership style: an engineering founder is going to be low-touch; the engineering paradigm is fire-and-forget, get a good person, tell them the problem is X, and they come back with a sol'n to X. What if (as at most bigcorps) the CEO had come up through two or three decades of sales instead? Then they will be high-touch, and constantly checking in to make sure things are moving forward[1], while being very experienced in (and sensitive to) all the ways people bullshit to cover a lack of momentum. So, in contrast to a tech founder, a sales CEO may be very effective out of getting good work out of a "Whiskey Priest" report, who has a short-time constant for staying out of trouble, but also —although they do need some attention— doesn't take much wrangling to remember to walk the line: less like cats, more like dogs who can't help but notice the squirrels, but can quickly be dissuaded from chasing them with no more than a verbal reminder.[2]
Does that make sense?
[0] caveat: I haven't read TFA or the other threads or even the ancestors here, and had been planning to discuss this with gradschoolfail in better context, but thought it might be nice to get your (tptacek) opinion as well.
[1] what is the difference between real estate heaven, and real estate hell? In heaven, there's a lively market and everyone is doing deals right and left. In hell, there's a lively market and everyone is doing deals right and left — but escrow never closes.
[2] in particular, this suggests that "founder mode" may initially show some positive effects (in that it forces the founder into a high-touch regime), but it would be possible to do even better by teaching founders to "ride herd" — rather than constantly making drastic interventions with individuals (especially other peoples' individuals!), it ought to scale better to constantly be making subtle interventions —story telling?— to keep the mob generally moving in the proper direction at the proper pace. (if this last analogy doesn't make any sense, let me know and I can easily illustrate it with a few examples from defrost's mustering video)
One of those people actually died directly downstream of an act of civil disobedience with the issue being the commons of scientific knowledge. One of those people is on the shortest of lists around blurring the line between train and validation sets for personal financial gain so callously and so effectively that we’ll be years if not decades recovering.
People listen to you. I listen to you.
Aaron Swartz is nothing to do with this perverse contemporary thing. Far more recently than intuitive, our role models would sacrifice everything they have to take a stand. Today influential people take a stand on their own narrow self-interest even if it requires the sacrifice of what everyone has.
I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42.
This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.
Time for the world realise this tech stuff and programming has been around about 100 years! Let that settle in. A century of code. So the tech population is now clever and curious 8 year olds all the way through to 80+ curious and seasoned Algol programmers. And we ALL have value.
#endofrant
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/10/31/when-computers-...
You will also notice the words "computer", "input", and "output" are used without needing to be explained.
Every new cyle comes with ideas that are similar to what we have seen before. Sometimes I find myself thinking, OK, been there, done that, doesn't work. But I suspect that there is a sort of experience bias that lets me see the similarities far more clearly than what's new and different.
In every cycle people claim that it's nothing new and yet, with hindsight, we often find that small differences were important enough to change the world unpredictable ways.
I think it has value for older folks to contribute arguments and perspectives, but let's not be too self-righteous about it. Similar ideas can lead to very different outcomes in a different context.
The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this.
These are old complaints.
My dad worked in the tech industry since the pre-Mosaic days, and even then you'd hear the same arguments and complaints.
The same way people complain about React today is the same way people complained about Spring, and then about how old school C programmers complained about C++ with it "training wheels", and BASIC programmers complaining about "OOP", and old school networking types complaining about built-in TCP/IP instead of spinning up your own stack.
Technologies and frameworks change. That's how tech always works. Sure I can demolish a building with a sledgehammer, but why not adopt dynamite or bulldozers if it efficiently solves the problem.
At some point, all these complaints are just Ludditism from techies who didn't upskill and/or are unable to communicate.
I think the problem here is the usual bloat and enshitification that these tools eventually devolve to due to their success. People get so used to them they want to use them for everything and create this universe where you now forgot why they were created and the places they were useful.
But what about all the mis-adopted or abandoned tech that blew up projects.
The amount of stuff ported to NoSQL that had no business doing so. UML/Nocode tools in the 90s.
A lot of the push away from Java only for a lot of performance considerations pushing devs back to it. Sorry about the projects that got force migrated to Scala since it was, briefly, The New Thing.
The one man webdev app deployed firmwide on some brand new framework which was immediately deprecated.
Again, nothing wrong with any of these tech choices if they were driven by actual user requirements which exceeded the current implementation tech. But most of us know that is rarely the actual motivation of devs...
MongoDB easy (in a way) replication put every single database vendor on watch and led even PostgreSQL to improve, i think we live in a different environment right now due to all the experiments the NoSQL folks made. It might not have all panned out but I think the whole thing was a huge positive for the market, people stated to experiment and try new stuff again instead of "oh it doesn't look like a relational model, it sucks".
Not every tech is the new Spring, OOP, etc.
Not every project benefits from being immediately migrated to the new thing.
Once you've been through a few train wreck "get on the latest thing" projects, you see the benefit of actually delivering to users, regardless of whether the tech is bleeding or trailing edge.
If you are a small tech org, the benefit of being able to hire a team of people who have SUCCESSFULLY delivered with TechX (which is 3-10 years old) can outweigh jumping onto the latest thing.
Us older heads know how often it goes wrong, and know that without a tangible user benefit or commercially positive outcome... It's just busy work.
Oh you are going to rewrite established solution X in Y in 2 years with 5 devs, and it's going to solve all of the problems we have in X, awesome!
Ignoring that solution Y is so new that the guy proposing it has never actually delivered an enterprise solution in it. And since they just got hired, they have no idea what the user facing problems X is actually exhibiting. Often the problems with X are organizational, managerial, and prioritizing. Switching tech doesn't magically change the decision makers.
Invariably hiring a guy who has a string of 18-24 month jobs on his resume, which, uncannily, is the typical runway of a Greenfield re-write project before heads roll.
I completely agree with this. I’m also in my 50s but I lean techno-optimist. Whenever there’s a new hype cycle, I’m looking for those small differences that might overcome the hurdles we’ve seen in the past. For example, the PicturePhone was demoed in 1964. Now we’re all on Zoom constantly. I’ve lived through many AI hype cycles. The current LLM craze is significantly different from past exuberance. LLMs aren’t perfect but they are remarkable when they work.
Same fundamental design approach, but needed another 25 years of improvement in battery and motor tech.
IIRC the first electric car was proposed in the 1920s or thereabouts.
Why not constructively contribute by explaining what could be different for the idea to work this time? Or if you hate innovation (i.e. retrying age old ideas slightly differently - hoping this time it will work), why don't you pick another industry?
I mean, at least Andreessen communicates directly, even if he's out of touch and tone deaf.
Anyway, we all have our gripes, and I think this article is poorly written, and the original article it links to is even worse. Doing no service to the fact that the people currently orbiting our little hovel of geekdom leave a lot to be desired. Or maybe you think this rant is poorly written and misses the mark...
Charisma is active - as in, the charismatic leader talks you into believing their bullshit. Reality distortion field is passive - as in, you hang out too much around the leader, or people hanging out around the leader, and you end up believing their bullshit.
Back in the day that was called 'being charming', not 'charismatic', and it was an offense: you're being intentionally dishonest and manipulative. Now it just means it's cute. Language changes...
Being charming to old school Germans means you’re a scam artist/unauthentic.
Most ‘greatest generation’ folks (if they’re still alive) had a similar feeling/overtone.
Because it’s true - someone being charming is making themselves likable to be liked (selling themselves), instead of letting their warts show. Because at a minimum they want your company. And it often works.
Someone being grumpy and unpleasant probably doesn’t give a shit, eh? And isn’t trying to sell you anything. In fact, chances are they’d be happier if you didn’t buy anything, and left them alone.
Which one is more likely to be a scam?
Eventually, people just get tired of doing it the same way.
A lot of "tech" is mature now. People whine "where's the innovation" in phones, for example. At this point, WTF do you want them to do? Where's the "innovation" in spreadsheets or word processors?
It IS kinda boring. And it's not going to get better when it's a bunch of recycled pablum shat out by "AI."
I blame greed. It was all the people coming into the field for the money and trying to entertain themselves at work because they don't like tech, they like feeling smart.
At the same time, I wouldn't write off machine learning models so quickly. Applied in tight focus, they're unlocking a bunch of capabilities, even if consumer-grade Dall-E, ChatGPT etc are mostly automated bullshit generators.
While it might be the case, there's definitely something else going on which I would describe as tech "globalisation" or "unification". The industry that looked like an archipelago of islands with their own ecosystems, philosophies and values increasingly looks like monoculture fields replicated zillion times (yc-style startups and "big tech co" being the two most popular breeds). Of course, the reality is more subtle than this - but the alternative voices and perspectives are completely overpowered by the mainstream narratives - to the point of being barely detectable.
Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though.
The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.
There are interesting things going on:
* Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top.
* Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.
* Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind.
* Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities.
* Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard. At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US.
* Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated.
* Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.
This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1]
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-marke...
I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.
Pure electric sales are actually stalling, and multiple car brands (Volvo, and Volkswagen) are backing down on their electric ambitions and pivoting towards plugin hybrids as a better intermediary.
How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since.
Seems to me like an area that could make use the sensor/3d tech from self driving, but wouldn't need to be anywhere near as reliable to still be a useful product. You could probably charge Apple margins if you cracked it first. I'd pay $5-10k for something that would last a few years and could passively clean a bathroom or kitchen to a reasonable degree.
Navigating a house requires a level of understanding that we still can't get using a top end GPU and optimal sensors.
"It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility
This is a great example of "short term improvements are overestimated, long-term underestimated". As someone who jumped from a top-of-the-line robot vacuum in 2014 (not a Roomba - they were already slightly behind) to a high-quality-but-average one this year - those incremental improvements have added up to almost an entirely different product. That's not even counting the experiments out there like SwitchBot's plans (looks like the humidifier is out, but I don't see the dehumidifier on their site).
Eating less isn’t all that much of a breakthrough, but it certainly highlights how hard it is to get people to do something they don’t want to do.
Honestly, I question the whole idea that failing to "eat less" is a personal problem. Historically, we jumped into obesity epidemic straight from the time when food was scarce and not very nutrient-rich. Ability to manage caloric intake in times of abundance may not be something humans have in general, as long periods of abundance didn't happen until 100 years ago.
I guess it depends on what we’re eating less of.
Overeating calorie dense junk food isn’t the same thing as overeating carrot sticks and you rarely hear about problems coming from the latter.
Perhaps that's because "overeating carrot sticks" is a strong indicator of being in danger of starvation? People just don't overeat this kind of food if they have tastier, more calorie-dense food available.
Even in the USA, a country that is not just wealthy but also culturally obesity-friendly, the majority of people are not obese. In less obesity-friendly regions, such as Europe, only a small part of the population is obese.
Most people do manage their caloric intake. And of those who don't, many may still be able to, but simply choose not to.
It seems that humans in general do have the ability to manage caloric intake, but many don't use it.
I do think it's a personal problem. (But we should still work together as a society to help those who fail to help themselves.)
Rather sad though that instead of implementing what empirically is already known to work in so many cities there's a quest for a solution to a problem that's completely self-inflicted.
Self-driving might help a bit with transportation in NA cities but it definitely won't be the solution, there's just not enough physical space on the roads to be a game changer, at worst it will create even more issues with road usage. And my fear is that instead of realising it was the wrong bet (just like the car-centric approach) it will be doubled down into some ever-more-complex maze of solutions to make cars transporting 1-2 passengers to get to their destinations quicker by interconnecting them, and doing traffic management on a network of cars.
Those are fun problems to think about and try to solve but completely missing the mark about what actually works for a city and why. Someone will call that "innovation" and sell it to some suckers, just like car-centric urbanism.
Why not just build trains? They don't need technological breakthroughs, there's existing expertise all around the world on how to build; are much more easily automated (even more underground); can transport lots more people than busses; scheduling is much easier, etc.
I don't know what about the American culture creates this magical thinking, if it's the short-term thinking, the culture of looking for business opportunities everywhere, the inability to approach complex systems in a more holistically way, and/or the hyper-individualistic view of society.
No single technology will be the silver bullet, transportation (as any complex system) requires layers of solutions, maybe automated vehicles are part of it but there's already technology to solve 80% of the issues, it's unfortunate the USA doesn't have the will to change its ways to proven solutions and keeps chasing its tail.
The world unfortunately is lot more diverse than that.
It is, but only at the surface level.
99% of the actual problem of driving in urban areas is the same everywhere on the planet, because all human cities are pretty much the same, because all humans are pretty much the same - once you start comparing with the rest of the universe, and not just with other people. San Francisco, Moscow, Cape Town and Prague are almost entirely unlike each other, yet they're all obviously the same when you compare them against ant hills or forests or coral reefs.
Self-driving is a physical reality problem, not social diversity perception problem.
But, there are a lot of places that are quite similar to San Francisco! Can we scale it to a thousand cities it'll still be revolutionary. And we then haven't even started talking automating transports! It's just taken longer than what people thought. The usual Gartner Hype Cycle.
My favorite example is a major intersection with no traffic lights. Everyone just drives onto it and then you get a sticky sauce of cars that move at a fraction of the allowed max speed until they leave the intersection again.
Horns and eye contact are used to negotiate progress by all paricipants. I would love to see a "self driving" car on such an intersection.
My guess is a video of this car's encounter would go absultely viral. But not for the reasons proponents of this tech hope for. ;)
Just like the newbie it will learn, and get as good or better than everyone else.
You'll see it and then either regret it, or join the cohort of people saying it's not true eye contact because there is no soul behind the window of machine eyes; mimicking the current talk that LLMs are just stochastic parrots without a mind behind them.
At that point we're basically talking autonomous cars with big external-facing emoji screens. "That Fiat is looking red in the face, it's about to cut in".
That's more communication and emotional bandwidth than 99% of driver-to-driver interactions. Someone cuts in and you flip them the finger, how often to they even see it?
Contrary to your assertions, operating a vehicle in an environment with humans is a social problem.
Only if you assume driving is solved as a baseline. For self-serving, "driving" is the 99% of the problem; "driving in $specificCity" is just the cherry on the cake, a small part of the problem that doesn't even need to be solved.
Keep in mind that humans are the most flexible parts of any system they're in. When human and machine negotiate, human always yields, simply because the machine cannot. With increased popularity of self-driving cars, infrastructure and social norms will adjust to eliminate technical problems and cultural idiosynchrasies that the tech can't handle. This is how it always was.
(1.75 centuries, to be exact)
Norway: hold my beer. 94%.
https://electriccarsreport.com/2024/09/norways-ev-sales-set-...
You might as well call helicopters "flying cars."
Which is exactly what people do in reply to the question, "where are our promised flying cars?". They exist, they're called helicopters.
The one criterion this does not meet, that's often hiding implied in the word "car", is "car as in private car ownership in United States". This will never fly (excuse the pun) with flying vehicles, because not many would be willing to go through enough training to be able to operate an aircraft safely. Most drivers don't even get adequate training to operate their own cars safely (drivers' license requirements are a joke), and piloting takes at least an order of magnitude more than that.
(And that doesn't even touch maintenance, which most drivers don't do, and a good fraction of those are willing to spend extra money to get their broken cars stamped as road-worthy.)
Which is why human-piloted helicopters and self-flying passenger drones are the closest we're going to get to "flying car" anytime soon; physics and human stupidity precludes anything else.
And your assertion about the meaning of "car" is absurd. The meaning, which is profoundly missing in VTOLs, is a vehicle that you can drive around on ROADS, on WHEELS. Nobody cares about the private ownership. They care about rolling it down the street.
The point is that VTOLs are not flying cars, any more than helicopters are.
If they solve those well enough, it means a lot of the operational restrictions that make helicopters very limited in scope (few landing sites, insanely high operating costs due to needing very specialised, highly trained pilots and maintenance crew etc.) could be somewhat lifted.
Fairly big "if" though. Rotary wings are inherently high energy, and heavier-than-air flight has much, much tighter safety and reliability requirements than cars for a good reason.
Would disagree, we have possibly regressed. We have more gizmos (like diabetes monitors) and diagnostics, but no real cures and a significantly more sick people.
As for the public healthcare and hospital industry in a few key industrialized countries, going through a bit of a ... "downward spiral" is a separate issue from the technology itself. (USA)
As for more sick people... diabetes is going up, and people aren't exercising. I cannot refute that. Perhaps a healthier work culture where people have more time to cook proper food and take care of their health will do wonders, but "who is gonna pay for the loss of productivity" always gets in the way.
I'm about 10 years post diagnosis and in those 10 years a ton of progress has been made. It's to the point where I've moved from considering MS a probably lifelong incurable disease to 'if I can hold on for ~20 more years without significant relapses, it can probably be cured or controlled.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJRu8rZxufg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuFgAjy4gjs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCNMBCu8y9I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpbvX1wsfUM
Contact me if you have success some months/years down the line. Will also take a negative feedback from you. Caveat: you may have to wean off medications.
Source for above links: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXPH44VC
Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.
This can be said about practically any technology outside agriculture. It’s wild to pretend the items on that list don’t increase quality of life.
- Automation is good. Striving for "100% robotic warehouses" is a recipe to further concentrate wealth around the handful of corporations that can deploy it.
- Electric engines are good. Thinking that we would be better off by giving one car to every adult person instead of simply redesigning the overall transit network is a horrible idea.
- Finding new sources for rare earths is good. Jumping to the conclusion that this means we can then extract them is absurdly naive. We don't even recycle plastic properly, what do you think is going to happen with all those metals in the failing car batteries 20 years from now?
- Improved drones are good. Arguing that progress is "getting VIPs out of congested areas" is absolutely dystopian.
- Having drugs to treat diabetes is good. But having these drugs under the control of pharma corporations who worry more about their bottom line than actual health of the population is outright cruel.
I am all for developing technology. I am not a Luddite. But we got to ask ourselves "cui buono?". Whenever we see somebody pushing some technology or project to solve "humanity problems", the immediate check should be "if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it?"
This has been claimed for everything from writing to the printing press and steam engine. If you want perfectly deliberated technological development, you’re against new technology.
> if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it?
You’re describing research, not technology.
This is absurd and the exact opposite of what I am saying.
It's fine to work on new developments. It's not fine when people take their new developments and try to force them down everyone's throats.
To illustrate, look at Sam Altman going to congress and having the petulance to argue that they can not make a business if OpenAI had to pay for copyrighted material.
He is not arguing "we should work together with the copyright holders and give them ownership in the venture".
He is not saying "developing this is crucial and can benefit everyone, so we hope we can make up for the copyright infringement by putting all our work in the public domain."
He is just saying "I need this because without it I can not make money, and to make this I need money". It's self-serving circular logic.
> You’re describing research, not technology.
Which is exactly how VCs dress up their investments and justify how unethical their companies are.
Sure. That is bad. That doesn’t make GPTs bad nor the good they do irrelevant.
> Which is exactly how VCs dress up their investments and justify how unethical their companies are
Sure, arguments can be used well or badly. The point remains that technology has to have utility to be technology. Otherwise it’s research or art (or fraud), the first two of which we pursue for their own purpose.
I haven't argued otherwise. My argument is that utility alone is not enough a justification to keep working on specific technologies, much less to promote them as an universal solution to existing problems.
Having drugs to treat it is good. But a food system and built environment that causes a big chunk of the population to develop T2D in middle-age, and sees the solution as "take a pill to make it go away" is a profoundly unhealthy one.
Insulin-insensitivity is supposed to be a rare-ish disease of old age, not a common disease of middle age.
I expect this one to be a big one. Food production is not yet a solved problem. Imagine if robotics could scale "food forest"-style organic farming to the size of our current mono-crop farms.
It would be nice if we could get rid of factory farming though, but I doubt we are close to a point where we can have free range cattle being tended mostly by robots.
Robotics within farming is often more about improving what is already being done in a more sustainable way. The primary benefit of monocropping is easier automation and larger machines. Cheap and good robots that can manually look after individual plants allow a more dynamic growth environment and more control over pesticide and weedkilling applications.
But I think we are still a ways off before this starts to affect the market noticeably. Robots are still too slow and too expensive, or so I heard from asking a local strawberry producer who looked into what was commercially available.
Raspberries: My grandad used to have a vast number of raspberry bushes mindfully nurtured to give unfathomable harvests each year, but they are a bit more maintenance. He had 20 or more bushes, if I recall.
Strawberries: Strawberries are a massive pain. They are difficult to weed and need to be replanted with the seedlings each second year for an optimal crop.
Plums: Fun on paper... But it can be too productive to the point of absurdity. 20 plums... tasty. 20 buckets of plums and mushy sugar water in the whole yard? Less fun.
Cherries: Banger pie and jam... but I think 20 pies is a tad excessive. We mabie pluck 5% of the yield each year; the rest is left to birds to and replant in our neighbour's bushes.
(I'm not disagreeing with either point btw, I think it's a better way to live, but good luck convincing the wider populous).
We live in a world where we simultaneously (a) can do basically anything with a glass rectangle in our pockets and (b) do not stop feeling a sense of boredom and dread. Re-learning how to do some things that take time and do not satisfy our immediate sense of gratification would be a good thing.
But as the sibling comment pointed out, sufficiently advanced robotics will be prohibitively expensive for a long time ahead. I'd like to think that one day in the distant future a team of robotic "monkeys" can go out and harvest only the perfectly ripe oranges from a plot of diverse mixed vegetation. We are already starting to see this for tomato harvesting in greenhouses, so it's not completely unfounded.
As for cattle, the good news is even the free range ones are surprisingly quite automated already. The dairy cows can milk themselves with robots, and the cow fitbits are quite effective at identifying the ones who need vet attention.
Techno optimism and opportunism go hand in hand, of course. But I don't see anyone else inventing the future. To paraphrase Alan Kay.
Techno optimism will always refer to Star Trek (realistically the ds9 version), not whatever crap Anderson tried to make up with that term.
A pill that people need to take forever and whose formula is patented and can not be produced without bringing profits to any of the pharma labs that developed it is not a "cure".
A cure for type 1 diabetes is very much a thing millions of people really need
So, I'd say that a cure falls more in the "nice to have" than "absolutely need".
As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped.
Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts.
Tech news is all jobs.
I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.
If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers?
It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not blaming employees for doing what's best for them, but it feels naive and unempathetic to put the blame of aligning incentives to founders, when the problems are systemic.
VC have a distorted view of the world because they look for unicorns in a world where most companies just aren't. Most companies don't start out using VC money and finance their operations with revenue the company makes. It's easier than ever to get started building a company. All you need is time. And even that is getting better.
The web and cloud removed most of the cost over the last thirty years. And with LLMs we can remove a lot of people and time from the equation as well. It's gotten to the point where you can outsource a lot of things to specialized service providers instead of doing them in house.
He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.
I have no desire to contribute to this whole circus full for fraudsters
yes, non-participation is hardly possible though
This sounds like someone who is looking for someone to blame. If founder after founder is having this problem what are the odds that there is something else going on and perhaps the reports are doing exactly what the founder is rewarding?
I see in a lot of tech companies is a system where all the incentives are about getting promoted. IC's are trying to build things that look big and complex and "hard". Future maintenance burden, product impact, etc are difficult to measure and also super easy to game. All that matters is that they might get promoted so they can jump teams and do it again. Managers are promoted based on headcount and do everything they can to keep reports and grow like weeds. A dysfunctional org? Yes please, let me triple it in size to solve the problem, we have the money and this org is important, and I become important in the process. Sure some (not all) might need to grow the top line by X%, but in a growing industry/product category/company that might be the default so the focus is again on growing their career. They spend all their time on hiring and annual reviews and promo committees and almost no time on actual strategy. And getting rid of under performers was difficult and as long of a process as possible because there was no incentive to make that simple.
As long at the tide rises all boats and the CEO rewards this behavior everyone plays this game. When the water starts flowing out suddenly you have a CEO looking around going wtf when everyone did exactly what they incentivized.
"Organizational disaster and organizational decay: the case of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration"
http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/Org%20Decay%20at...
The hackers have disappeared and we're apart of the prohlem.
Should really have a tag rule to prevent any boring business start up bogus discussions when the poster wants.
This isn't really true. Look at the current top Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544969. Zero business discussion on there.
I've been avoiding the business threads on HN for about 10 years now[1], and the frontpage still has enough stuff to keep me coming back, and the comments on those threads are fine as well. There are fewer comments on those threads, and that too is a good thing.
HN is 3 distinct sub-communities, to my mind: startup news, hacker news and what I think of as "the human condition" news which encompasses humanities posts like lithub and so on. I participate in 2 of them.
I agree with you that we hackers are part of the problem. But it's not a systemic problem. We can still choose what we attend to. We're not lacking for options.
[1] I really wish that people used HN's favorites feature more, and that favorites were more organically discoverable. Here are mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik
Ideals count, certainly for hackers. If you have billions in the bank you might start to look to work on some real pressing problems instead of looking to get a share of the next Privacy Suck.
Erosion of democratic societies via algorithmically boosted disinformation campaigns, climate change, healthcare, you name it. Tech is not neutral in the societal sense, far from it.
Also, I doubt if AI (now even more widgets), with those tech leaders pressing for it, is compatible with being a tech enthusiast. Techies like tech first, results second.
If software engineering becomes chess, it will be preserved as tournaments, not business.
Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.
101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software.
That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about.
And enterprise software is truly boring. And that an understatement. I got very bored and disenchanted with software because it all sort of sucked.
My other hypothesis is that there will be a resurgence of indie consumer and SMB software that’s not so soulless. And I hate to mention AI but I think it’s the enabler of these apps being viable for very small teams to not go after funding and keep their soul.
The 101 billboards are endemic of no Woz and no Jobs. Just... blandness. Beige. Cubicles updated for an open office plan.
When I'm thinking who's putting out excellent work, the software that's actually great to use, the list is almost exclusively solo projects (Overcast—arguably the greatest mobile app of all time) or scrappy underdogs (Kagi—seriously, Kagi rocks).
Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit.
I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords.
There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.
This is the same thing. Businesses that are closer to the consumer make more money than their suppliers.
I bet a young Woz today would be a hell of a lot better off in Graham’s world than in this guy’s “big companies are great” world.
Can you quote the part?
In this case the OP stresses Graham’s lack of experience working for big companies.
I think you could also make the case for saying that the industry is full of Zuckerbergs (maybe Sam Altmans in a few years), but I'm not sure the advertisement industry is really all that related to tech. I know it may not be the most popular thing to say, but is there really that much of a difference between selling Tobacco, Coca Cola, Search Engines or Social Media? All are popular products which haven't really changed the world for the better.
I suggest you read the post again. It's not against MBAs as such, its against blowhard "heroes" that go around trying to proxy what Jobs did by copying him being an utter prick, rather than a domain expert.
Jobs was successful despite him being a prick. He was fired for not doing what he was supposed to do, and over stepping his mark.
NeXT Inc. burnt a boat load of cash, and were destined for obscurity had they not been bought by apple.
I personally don't like Zuckerberg, but hes not an altman. Altman has virtually no redeeming qualities apart from being able to make PG think he's jesus.
Zuckerberg has many fucking faults, but he is much much closer to Woz than Jobs. Thats probably part of the reason why he's so hated. Because he's either incapable or unwilling to worry about the public persona.
Altman is in the same class as Adam Neumann, ie a mystery cult with great funding, that happens to be a tech CEO.
Hmmm, sometimes yes, sometimes no. Apple III, Apple Lisa, Apple Newton, Apple Pippin.
The utopia would be an equitable society, where we work far less than our ancestors did, allowing us to focus on pursuing our interests and desires—not just buying security. But not only does that seem unattainable, it's pursuit is considered laziness or opting-out of a social contract whereby 99% of people fight to make 1% rich with the delusion being that maybe it's me that's the 1% and that with the riches I can score I can ride off into the sunset, and get off this foul ride forever.
Makes me sick how far we don fell.
Technology has become so powerful and integrated into our society that the companies that drive it have become as powerful as governments, and our political systems cannot keep up.
I see this in how the EU suddenly is stepping up to regulate American tech companies, something it was never designed or meant to do. They are suddenly the only organization with enough regulatory power to do so properly, as the American government seems to have given up trying themselves.
I don't think this is unsolvable. I'd love to see "fiduciary duty laws" disbanded for one, and America being less of a pushover for lobbying would go a long way as well. By time, we will figure out what works and what doesn't.
The raspberry pi community is also in the hacker space, I think the shortages and the price of the newer products hurt it some but I'm sure the spirit will come back. [1]
Overall I'd say that people spend too much time on the internet and it's effectively a full time job form them but with no breaks, which of course leads to burn out/disappointment. [2]
I'm rambling at this point but maybe there needs to be a hobbiest hackernews or something.
[0] When most stuff is priced $10 at most and they're are onyl at most 100k devices on the market, there is not much money to be made.
[1] I'm still disappointed there is not much of a gamedev/creative software community around the raspberry pi.
[2] And when you read about angry sad things all day because that's how Merchants of Despair keep you on their sites. Well it's hard not to feel angry and sad.
hackaday.com community?
Yes, it would be good to get some domain experts in, rather than people who are comfortable re-hashing press releases with an "trust me, the physics of this perpetual motion machine check out" or "lol they are shit" overlay.
Especially as tech now is moving from a "oh thats a simple idea, just needs executing" to actual "shiut the physics of this make it super hard" (ie AR)
Even in the steelman case of the Hollywood celebrity promoting a cause they are clearly not qualified to evaluate, I think we ought not belittle the speech act itself. Better to just present your counter-arguments if you disagree.
If everyone felt free to share their opinions, the better the quantity and quality of ideas that surface after due examination.
In the beginning, the industry was dominated by nerds and hackers who were passionate about tech. Then those with business acumen noticed that this could make them very rich, and swooped in to "help out" those hackers, who, being fair, probably wouldn't be able to run a successful business on their own. But there are also examples of hackers themselves getting business savvy, and business people becoming tech oriented, and many combinations in between.
While the Silicon Valley, VC funded, hypergrowth mentality is incredibly toxic, I think you'll find many examples in the industry across this spectrum. What we're seeing with crypto, AI, etc. is just the usual hype cycle. This will inevitably be flocked by all types of characters, but we've always had these. Remember the buzz around the early web, the "information superhighway", and the inevitable dot-com bubble? Or the video game crash in the 80s? The same will happen with modern tech. We'll eventually reach the plateau of productivity of these technologies, or they will lose our interest and we'll move on to something else.
In the current corporate model that dominates modern capitalism, it's the shit that floats to the top. I am hopeful of a future of mass self-employment and away from finance-led, quarterly-focused, bottom-line driven corporations that stray from their missions and seek to serve a minority of overweighted shareholders, at the expense of employees, customers, and the "common" shareholder.
"But the other reason why the whole founder mode is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership. Yeah, I know: Graham has been involved with building more companies than I have."
However, the about page on his blog and his LinkedIn indicates he has zero experience running any companies, small or large. Am I missing something?
That said, a cat may look at a king, and everyone can have an opinion.
Andreessen was one of the first people who saw the potential of the web in the early days, worked on the first graphical web browsers and built a highly influential business around it. Then he went on to create one of the most powerful VC firms in the industry, which in turn funded some of the most successful companies. His impact wouldn't have been anywhere near what it is today had he stayed working as a software developer. His ideals and goals were clearly much higher than that, and he got rich in the process. Sounds like a capitalist success story if I ever heard one.
Funding crypto nonsense, “apocalyptical” AI, and questionable politics. Meanwhile, writing “manifestos” that complain people don't recognize how great he and their peers are. I mean, thanks for Netscape and all, but Andreessen is as bad as the rotting VC culture can get.
It's kind of ironic we're discussing this here, considering YC is following the same model, and has made similar investments. And yet both firms have also funded many companies outside of the sectors you dislike. Invoking ad hominems doesn't change the impact that both YC and a16z have had on the industry.
In "Endurance", there's a short note on how shackleton hired crew members for his expedition. Seemingly on a whim and a 5 minute chat. I interpreted that as deep experience of his area combined with a keen sense of judging people. They combined to work magic. That kind of thing takes a lot of time.
>
"Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
- AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
- VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
- Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
- WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
- 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
- High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
- Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
- Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
- Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
- Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
- SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
- CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
- Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
- GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
- Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)
The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?"
Me again:
It's definitely boring. All the good stuff is hidden behind $50 subscriptions (or whatever), hacker culture from what I've seen (and being alone most of my day) is everybody just working their jobs then disappearing or heading on to video games/a distraction.
It's ..something.
Definitely a bore fest. I like smallweb stuff. Cool projects, seeing things.
We went the wrong way.
And it is super apparent, especially when you look at the latest from OpenAI. They applied CoT duct tape and bailing wire to a glorified mechanical text processor that magically balloons the token generation costs for marginal improvement. Cha-ching! Not a new model architecture or whatever.
But in any case due to the cumulative nature of both knowledge and our own aggravating problems with sustainability, the impact of this socioeconomic malfunction is probably the gravest its ever been.
There are very few hints we can escape the stranglehold (as in, effective organizational forms or governance that are immune to this regressive cancer).
But todays supression feels almost catholic in its reach across the economy. Which is imho directly linked to digital tech being both a set of sectoral technologies and the universal means of information exchange.
To further your point– if we can't even get our act together on this planet, what evidence is there that we could get our act together in space?
I think the survivors of these early centuries of the third millennium will be forced into space. By this point infrastructure from mining and refining rare-earth minerals will be in place. It will be survivable, but it won't be comfortable. It may never be.
Our debut as a space-faring species will mark a long dark age in our history. With no evidence that we can create microgravity, terraform, travel even close to half the speed of light, or put ourselves into some form of abeyance (cryosleep)– we will become divided, isolated, and oppressed to a degree we never have in our history. We will struggle for every resource we currently take for granted.
I have no doubt that humanity in some form will continue to survive, but I don't think it will be comfortable or ideal.
Also Jimmy Wales is not some kind of saint working for free, he cashed in nice pay checks from wiki and it was more of his lifestyle business than charity work.
I see laundry list presented as infantile so I don't really have time or will to address each one of the points separately. All those topics are much more complex than "should have been public".
Millennials grew up. And we found that it cost a crap ton of money to just survive, let along thrive. Student loans were the first bodyslam, then figuring out owning a place to live. A ton of precarity is out there.
No kidding people get locked in on economic incentives.