berniedurfee

This is 100% true in my experience.

Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity.

At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable.

I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.

Rats leaping from a sinking ship swimming to shore we were.

Kurzgesagt did a video on this.

Though they discuss how advanced civilizations could have existed on Earth and we might not even know it because there wouldn’t be much left and what was left might be so unusual that we might chalk it up to natural phenomena.

https://youtu.be/KRvv0QdruMQ

Seems like we need to start trading anonymity for credibility?

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Anonymity on the web has led to some pretty atrocious behavior.

Plus, at this point, anonymity on the internet is an illusion anyway.

Just use existing trusted CAs to issue personal certs based on some reasonably robust verification process.

Maybe the AI apocalypse will help fix the internet by making anonymity untenable.

Which Starbucks?

If I put in the work to build a successful business and someone offered me a hundred million dollars for it, I’d have a hundred million dollars.

I was in a similar position in a company that _might_ have been able to make a good enough offer, but never could convince the brass how amazing a company it is and I never got any traction.

Disappointing to hear about this, Hashicorp was an amazing company. C’est la vie…

Written by a robot that was written by Amazon and runs in AWS. Vertical integration indeed!

The starving software artist. I like it! :)

I think they have the benefit of mystique. I don’t think you’d find their code quality any better than the average. I also think you’d find the same rush to market mania that plagues the rest of the software industry.

Except the redo and cleanup part never happens.

The PoC becomes a pilot becomes production becomes an exit becomes someone else’s problem. That’s the SLDC that has gotten us to a place with endless amounts of terrible software everywhere you look.

Though, I’m optimistic that at some point, the software industry will be so saturated, all the products have all the features, and the only place left to differentiate or disrupt will be quality.

I was thinking about this the other day. An implantable Yubikey type device that integrates with whatever device you’re using to validate your identity for phone calls or video conferences.

Subdermal X.509 maybe with some sort of neurolink adapter so you can confirm the request for identity. Though, first versions might be just a small button you need to press during the handshake.

“… all the instructors who worked there back in the day were absolutely fucking passionate about getting students into jobs and changing the world”

100%

The fundamental concept had merit, but the business had a very very low probability of succeeding financially. Once the financials flipped, the original mission went out the window.

I’m proud of the work I did there and I know we gave many students great opportunities. It was sad, but not surprising to see it go so wrong. But for a time, for many students, good things happened.

It would be absolutely fascinating to talk to the LLMs of the various government spy agencies around the world.

Yahoo.com will rise from the ashes.

9 of the 10 authors work for the company that makes the $2k mattress cover?

When you find one cockroach, you can be sure there are thousands more you haven’t found.

Not just nation state actors. All that data is available to anyone with a credit card from legit data dealers.

There was definitely good cop/bad cop going on. That’s a really powerful psychological tool.

For the same reason that Ponzi schemes are so successful.

As I was reading this it reminded me 100% of GE. Another manufacturing giant that put profit above all else and many people suffered for it as the company collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence... though many also became staggeringly wealthy.

GE is absolutely a place where leadership is the only “skill” that matters. Leaders are all that’s needed and everyone else is a commodity. Leader worship and success theater killed GE.

I could only shake my head when I got to the part where a former GE leader is in the running to be the new CEO.

Make sure your affairs are in order before boarding a Boeing aircraft.

Our local convenience stores still use them for various items. Milk card and ice cream scoops!

But no, supermarket chains are all heavily data driven now.

I don’t believe HN was created or is being maintained out of the goodness of anyone’s heart.

HN has monetary value to someone somewhere. Plus it’s cheap to run.

It’s also a good advertising and recruiting platform for YC.

There by the grace of VCs goes HN.

It’s less automation and more about cheap labor. Content farms sprung up and flooded the landscape with worthless content to get a micro-slice of the pie.

Very discouraging to many content creators when their work is just going to be buried in SEO chaff.

Also, the automation wave is just beginning. Soon the human run content farms will be overwhelmed by AI created crap.

This is likely to happen in software as well. Every product will need to compete with some AI generated piece of garbage that’s barely passable functionally, but being sold at a fraction of the cost.

Fun times!

I wouldn’t, only because the big O is behind MySQL.

Otherwise, why not? It’s basically a Chevy vs Ford decision.

Madoff was in his 60s.

Not a fix per se, but a safer system going forward.

Given all the variables, is it feasible to build a system that continuously runs through multiple failure modes, predicts where the ship would end up and then guide the ship on a course where even a loss of power would have the ship drift between the supports.

Was there a configuration of the ship that would have prevented it from hitting the bridge even after the power loss.

This seems like something that could be continuously calculated in realtime to keep a ship in a safe corridor, such that it wouldn’t strike the bridge even if the engines failed, based on winds, currents, size, load, etc.

I’m speculating about fixes, because it seems prudent to think about how to prevent the next strike before it happens. I feel like technology could reduce that risk to some degree.

Is it feasible to run large ships on autopilot? Large airliners land mostly on autopilot now, right?

Seems like a somewhat solvable problem to combine a bunch of sensor inputs to keep the ship inside of a safe corridor, such that even a loss of power would be accounted for to ensure it would drift safely.

Is it a much harder problem than my intuition assumes? Cost issue?

How many people can say they own 74 houses. That might be the end game.

What’s the mechanism? You swallow a pill and it what? Enters your bloodstream and eventually makes its way out of the pores on your skin all over your body? For weeks?