The point I was trying to make is what are the situation where an independent small startup can make it big. Your examples are instructive, engineers were able to make id Software big because you didn't need a lot of hardware to invent 3D shooters, but Jobs gets the credit for the iPhone because the engineers needed hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to pull it off.
pg is giving advice based on him getting rich from that period of time where the small startup could make it big. But those conditions are probably rare going forward.
The real trick that made Google possible, and the following web 2.0 era startups, was that linux and commodity hardware was all that was needed at the time so engineers could strike out on their own. Comparing it to the current ML era where you need many millions of dollars of data and many millions of dollars of hardware to compete, the guys that wrote the transformers paper are stuck in bigcorp and aren't going to be the next Larry and Sergey. OpenAI might be one of the few new big companies but it's run by a VC/CEO, not the engineers that figured the stuff out, and he had to sell half the company to Microsoft anyway.
I'm considering doing a career switch from one tech area to another but I hate how hard it is to see job trends. Supposedly there are job openings in "AI" whatever that is. Does anyone know somewhere to find real job trends over time broken down by skills?
This sounds similar to what's happened in Oakland, CA. When I moved here 25 years ago there was a huge underground music and arts scene in West Oakland warehouses but the last 10 years of gentrification has wiped it out. After the pandemic (and constant right-wing propaganda) Oakland is now once again deemed a wasteland and businesses are fleeing, but I've started noticing a new youth culture is slowly starting to emerge here and there.
I've seen the pattern in several other places as well: arts thrive in the affordable undesirable edges of society until it generates enough buzz for capitalists to notice it and move in seeking to profit off of it. The problem is that culture is not valued in capitalism because it has no landlord.
But you're contributing to HN which is owned by VCs with increasingly aggressive political postures (which we are not allowed to discuss on here) who could pull the rug on us whenever they want to.
The problem is that the n^2 stickiness of social graphs makes competition impossible when they scale into the millions. All the value is created by the users but accrues to the network owners, and then the owners are able to abuse and manipulate the networks as they see fit without repercussion. I think the ideal model for social networks is that they would be owned by benevolent nonprofits, but besides wikipedia VCs were able to capture every important social network of the Web 2.0 era.
Why would the math be different for apartment buildings? They also appreciate and they usually have better accountants to make sure no money is left on the table if it's available.
I don't know what the difference is between a threat and an attempt but just yesterday a U.S. House panel unanimously approved a bill that could ban it. Today Biden said he'd sign the bill it if it passes.
That follows only if your highest vision for society is optimizing profits in a capitalist framework. That the capitalist machine is first, humans second.
Political momentum keeps building for banning it in the USA as well. It's driven by both Chinese (too much control) and Israeli (not enough control) propaganda concerns.
Anyone who has owned a cloud connected device or software will tell you that companies cannot be trusted with remote access, they will abuse it every single time. And they'll have the useless cargo-cult security industry telling users that it's "best practice" and for our own good while their companies are spamming us or spying on us or removing features or outright hacking us or taking away access to our own data while they sell it to third parties and try to lock us into their ecosystem.
I mostly agree but the $100k is only launch cost, it doesn't include the engineering and manufacturing of the satellite or the ongoing operational costs.
I've seen some really nice UI query systems that have plenty of expressive power for 99.9% of queries but also include an escape hatch to allow you to use a query language. Mixpanel has one that I really like and I've seen non-techy business types go to town on it no problem.
The other option I've seen is a guided query language with helpful UI affordances as you type. I've seen it on Datadog as well as Jira's advanced search.
Most Republicans want to censor just different things, just look at all the book bannings across the country. There are tons of things that lefty people complain about being censored on social media but we don't here about it because left-wing media is nowhere near as powerful as right-wing media. (The main lie in a lot of these discussions is that corporate media is lefty.)
If you're doing worker threads with multiple callbacks to listeners whose lifecycles are properly managed to avoid memory leaks then Rx will probably be simpler. If you're not doing threading or if your listeners only receive one callback then Rx might be overkill.
This would be a lot more true if we could break up the trillion dollar tech monopolies. And we could do it if we would muster up the political will to do it. Step one is to stop idolizing the crony VCs and billionaires.
Doesn't this just mean that the LLM ingested training data where people talk about banning controversial propaganda type of newspapers while nobody talks about banning nyt or wapo?
If you were serious about this line of argument you would be appalled by the massive waste of potential in today's population, so many wasted brains especially in the "third world", and you would be an advocate for global wealth redistribution, generous welfare, increased spending on education, better nutrition, reduction of pollution that affects health, etc.
It depends on your definition of elites. "Deep state" and "drain the swamp" is about attacking government elites but the same movement promotes less regulation and lower taxes for business elites.
It is not new. America is special because we are a nation of immigrants. Always have been. And it is one of America's biggest strengths, one of the reason why we have been so prosperous. The acrimonious immigration debate is also not new, there has always been anti and pro factions. What is new is the level of surveillance and bureaucracy to notice and control immigration and the partisan polarization on the issue.
1. the real keys to the kingdom are held by TSMC whose fab capacity rules the advanced chips we all get, from NVIDIA to Apple to AMD to even Intel these days.
2. the old advice is to sell shovels during a gold rush