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bobxmaxon Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

Spoken like someone who has never marketed anything.

No, the marketing is everything. The product is just a floor... it just has to be "good enough".

See: pop music.

bobxmaxon Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

Yes, and are you aware the role that the massive distribution and marketing machine played in making it that big?

bobxmaxon Why I stopped angel investing after 15 years, and what I'm doing instead

You don't need to sell your stake for it to be a winner. It's a winner because his stake in the company is worth significantly more than when he bought it.

bobxmaxon Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

She's an artist, not some poor wage slave. The fact she gets paid a living wage at all for doodling in a notebook is thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.

Van Gogh couldn't trade his paintings for stale bread.

bobxmaxon Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

She didn't produce value. Someone else created value out of what she created.

You ironically and accidentally stumbled onto the very reason Marxism has always failed so miserably.

bobxmaxon Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry

Highly unlikely given sterilization before launch and Venus basically being a deep fryer

But also technically not impossible. For example if the dormant microbes react to prolonged microgravity and radiation in ways we don't understand, perhaps it brings back something we haven't seen before

Could be a fun science fiction plot

bobxmaxon Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

How does that remotely apply here? If she has the value, why didn't she distribute it herself?

bobxmaxon Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

Exploitation? Thousands of people are getting paid $90k to paint pointless characters nobody will ever see. It's not exploitation because one of them succeeds.

bobxmaxon Young people aren't as happy as they used to be [Global Flourishing Study]

lol and any children you have will likely die horribly before your eyes, good chance you'll die of something terrible like diarrhea or the plague, and whenever you need medical care there's no anesthetic (your wife will LOVE childbirth)

oh and you're probably dragged into war at some point, and you eat stale bread once a day. you didn't "have a good meal" at the pub.

the lack of perspective priviledged westerners have blows my goddamn mind. and no, people didn't get "happiness" in the past by being in a constant state of alcoholism - they did it because they couldnt' afford clean water

modern man isn't happy because they have no resilience and are deeply entitled. that's why you have more than any of your ancestors could have dreamed of but you think you're opressed and struggling

sorry but it's pathetic

bobxmaxon Show HN: My self-written hobby OS is finally running on my vintage IBM ThinkPad

little hobby gadgets much more interesting than the most ridiculous technology in human history

bobxmaxon Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

Since any group of order 3⋅2n3⋅2n has ∣G∣≥3∣G∣≥3, it cannot admit a Cayley graph which is a tree. Hence:

    No Cayley graph of a group of order 3⋅2n3⋅2n can have a unique path between every pair of vertices.

bobxmaxon Alphabet Q1 2025 Earnings [pdf]

I wonder if they'll go on an acquisition spree (which they previewed with Character AI). There are so many strong AI labs right now ripe for the picking.

bobxmaxon Alphabet Q1 2025 Earnings [pdf]

I think Open AI is still far ahead as a consumer choice, and I'm not sure that Google can catch them.

However model capabilities, and especially now that they're integrating Gemini into Google Search (which was a disaster initially, but improving now) the Googlefying is happening.

It'll be curious what they do with projects like Imagen and Veo though.

bobxmaxon Alphabet Q1 2025 Earnings [pdf]

It's hard to bet against Google now, and Sundar deserves his flowers when a year ago everyone was proclaiming the death of Google.

They've caught up and even surpassed Open AI.

bobxmaxon OpenAI releases image generation in the API

I'm embarassed that you find revolutionary tech uninteresting.

bobxmaxon Norway's $1.7T Wealth Fund Reports $40B Tech-Driven Loss

I like that you think AI superiority is some binary moment in time

bobxmaxon Shortest-possible walking tour to 81,998 bars in South Korea

Sure, but that's still an astronomically higher number of bars

the UK in totality has 45k pubs, nearly half Seoul's number

this is mostly emblematic of South Korea's major alcoholism problem. way too many bars and too much drinking.

bobxmaxon Norway's $1.7T Wealth Fund Reports $40B Tech-Driven Loss

Economically, militarily, whatever is necessary in this new world where the US becomes a pariah state.

bobxmaxon Norway's $1.7T Wealth Fund Reports $40B Tech-Driven Loss

You seem to be under the Trumpic-delusion that the US exists in a bubble and all of it's successes are it's own.

If the US decides to do that, the US dollar will be removed as the global standard and the entire planet will flock to China who will, in very short measure, annihilate the Americans.

bobxmaxon Shortest-possible walking tour to 81,998 bars in South Korea

If this is correct, it seems like Seoul has over 40x the number of bars that Chicago has, despite having only about 4x the population

How in the hell?

bobxmaxon More Everything Forever

Elon has done more to help stave of climate change than every climate activist and non profit org on this planet combined. He's a megalomaniacal douche who has undone all of that goodwill, but it doesn't change the fact that he did that against all odds.

Capitalism will solve the world's problems as it always has, no matter how much do-nothing authors, journalists and "social scientists" will bloviate to the contrary.

"Why don't they stop focusing on space and solve world hunger" they say, not considering the utter priviledge that they can live a safe, happy life while writing tripe contributing nothing, which is only thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.

bobxmaxon OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience

Great podcast!

bobxmaxon Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?

I didn't say anything remotely close to "Dude Trust Me" - perhaps you need to try a bit of "vibe learning how to read english"

bobxmaxon Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?

Do you really think Airbnb software engineers would accept the final code if it was low quality?

Seriously, the wishful thinking around this stuff is embarassing.

bobxmaxon Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?

Vibe coding means AI-assisted programming. That is it.

bobxmaxon Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?

It's easy to tell yourself you're not losing by constantly pushing the goal posts.

bobxmaxon Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?

Nobody cares. Ancient devs are insisting that vibe coding is going to lead to a bunch of tech debt.

1. Nobody cares. It's still worth the insane productivity improvements.

2. There is no proof that it's going to lead to long-term issues, because why would it?

bobxmaxon Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?

https://analyticsindiamag.com/global-tech/airbnb-uses-llms-t...

You might not be good at estimating, but professional software teams at the most successful tech companies in the world generally are.

bobxmaxon Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?

AirBnb just did a 1.5 year engineering migration in 6 weeks thanks to AI.

"Vibe" coding is here to stay and it's only devs who don't know how to adapt that are wishfully hoping for otherwise.

bobxmaxon Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet

just gotta crack that pesky FTL travel