Comment by pragmatic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pragmatic | Hacker News Reader

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Hacker News just recreated startups from first principles! /s

But seriously folks, this is why there will always be room for startups.

Megacorps are slow lumbering beats that suffer from entropy and signal loss at every edge on the graph.

The example here is that some marketing function gets the signal from Zuck to put Lego duplo characters everywhere because metaverse. Of course 90% of the company knows its dead on arrival so they are going to drag feet and try to work on their actual problems (or their local feifdom mandate) and wait for the latest fad to blow over.

Super wasteful, super inefficient but hey ads make an insane amount of money so Zuck can do whatever for a loooong time.

This is why Warren Buffet advocated dividends. Companies and people have few good ideas. Management however uses this money from the good ideas to fund boondoghles (see metaverse). The thinking here is that the money would be better utilized returned to investors to fund other good ideas.

Warren Buffett would rather have dividends than autonomous driving. Investors like him are the enemy of long term moonshot R&D like deepmind and Waymo. I’m glad Google shareholders don’t think like him

> Investors like him are the enemy on long term moonshot R&D

That's because he comes from a generation who has "the government and universities take care of R&D" as a mindset. A lot of the stuff we take for granted today - *nix, TCP, IP, the Internet itself, lasers, microwave, radar - came out of universities, government grants or the military.

The idea that the government is incapable of R&D is relatively new and originates in small-state / lean-state / starve-the-beast ideology.

And personally, I rather believe the wisdom of an old man who made a metric shitload of money by being a good honest citizen than others who got rich on advertising and stonk market shenanigans.

Imagine having to tell voters that the government is going to spend 11b (Waymo funding since 2020) on automating an entire profession away, good luck winning your next election. It is inherently infeasible to have popular support for the most revolutionary technologies that will cause societal upheaval. Voters have voted to preserve their lifestyles in amber over positive revolutionary change every time, see: public transit, building dense housing, corn subsidies, etc.

> Imagine having to tell voters that the government is going to spend 11b (Waymo funding since 2020) on automating an entire profession away, good luck winning your next election.

So what, NASA spent billions on the new space race, with everyone knowing the true aim was to kick Boeing's ass and Boeing being widely known as a pork distributor first and foremost and rocket/plane manufacturer second.

The job of politicians isn't to cater to the whims of reactionaries, the job of politicians is to do the right thing and sell it to the voter base.

> Management however uses this money from the good ideas to fund boondoghles (see metaverse).

I'm not sure we should be critical of risk taking in large companies because there was some notable failures. But maybe it is the sort of thing that doesn't scale well in a large org, they want big immediately.

> Megacorps are slow lumbering beats that suffer from entropy and signal loss at every edge on the graph.

True. I work for one and its terrible. My work is 95% jumping through hoops imposed by other teams, restrictions put in for political reasons by substandard business 'leaders', and often even keeping vendors happy (really why should we care, we are their customers not the other way around :( )

5% is doing actual improvement. And meanwhile HR want me to show I'm making a difference to the company. Well yeah 5%.

I hate it a lot but the pay is good and a permanent contract with 20 years service is valuable (if I'd get made redundant I'd get more than a year's severance so I'm definitely not leaving on my own for something that may not work out)

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