Our politicians are absolutely pathetic. The minuscule amount of work they do manage to get done is almost laughably dystopian, self interested, and out of touch. No accountability, ever.
Do you think we decide to do things based on whether it works, or is right? It’s a product they’re selling. Nobody really cares about anything except making money.
Because we are in fact so disconnected from our military today, modern people have forgotten that human civilization itself has been a military industrial complex forever. Not much to do with capitalism in particular.
Definitely possible. A cool idea. But that’s also a lot of credit for “big tech”. Meta, Google, Netflix, and others have produced almost nothing cool for a decade. Apple is one of the few behemoths seemingly capable of actually getting any real work done, so you’re right they’ll be a big contender. Smaller players have less capital, but a lot less blockers too. They can take real risks, move faster, and don’t have all the bottlenecks that come with having 50,000 employees.
This resonates with me, thanks for sharing. It’s always felt obvious to me that dreams are the brain processing. Usually my dreams are anxious, and I’m an anxious person during the day.
In the immortal words of Andrew Lahde who closed his hedge fund up 800% in 2008, “I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.”
Assuming these people have any level of sophistication is what gets us into these messes. It’s good to remember they are betting billions of dollars based on nothing but fomo and don’t know anything special at all.
Sam Trabuco still on his yacht hoping they forget about him. It was literally as simple as not gambling customer deposits on shitcoins. That’s all they had to do. Greedy little Jane Street alumna.
It feels like you immediately get on the right track and can refine it with no clutter whereas when you Google you may flounder for a bit before finding the path among the ads, bad blog posts, questionable StackOverflow…
No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. All this guy does is wake up at 4, work till 10, and sleep. Cuts his own pay voluntarily. Didn’t double his headcount while revenues fell like so many. Tim Cook is such a beast. Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook.
Usage numbers to me mean nothing here because in my mind it’s the same 1,000,000 people using Nostr, setting up Mastadon instances, running crypto mining nodes, whatever else. There are two kinds of users - people who care about what window system their OS uses, and people who don’t even know what that means. One group uses every FOSS tool they can, the other doesn’t care at all. You don’t need to get the one kind of user, you need the other.
I remember when I was a kid and I went to a friend’s birthday party, a Warriors game. His Dad was general partner of a VC firm, owned part of the Warriors and we had a center box with a buffet and everything. The mascot came to hang out with us, and much later some team members
Obviously I had no idea what was going on. I went home to my parents very middle class home and promptly told my own Dad I wanted to take my 4th grade girlfriend to a Warriors game with box seats and a limo! How funny looking back.
Great move by them to introduce a license requirement for 250+ seats but not waste resources enforcing it (as far as I can tell). Those who will pay, will pay. Those who won’t, will switch tools no matter how painful. They stayed relevant by keeping all their users, even those technically breaking the license, but also collected some cash.
There was some innovation but 2010-2020 had some dead air as investors lavished ponzi scheme SaaS companies with cash and big firms poured the profits of early internet into VR, AR, AI, drones, self-driving, etc.
The last year and a half things are starting to pop off. OpenAI, SpaceX, Comma, Helion, many more…that doomer “everything sucks and is collapsing” mentality is on the way out in my opinion. The time for talk is over and it’s time to build, or so they say.
Being easy to reason about is so important. In my experience this is somewhere Security teams often make what I consider mistakes. Although something may appear to make the system more secure, it can make it much more complex, and then troubleshooting it or changing it becomes so burdensome that people skip upgrades, use weak passwords, and a litany of other workarounds to be able to actually use the thing to do their work. You also have no visibility into where holes might be. For example by creating unique interfaces for every operation, you do separate concerns. You also ensure no one will have time to review them all. Interesting tradeoffs.
In my opinion 90% of the reason we don’t have more accidents is because people are so predictable. Watch dangerous drivers weave through traffic - it’s only possible because everyone follows spoken and unspoken rules. Randomly stopping is not some “you need to be prepared, it’s your fault” moment.
It’s just as easy to tell a story about how the employees tried to be decent, were ignored or silenced, and had to speak out more aggressively. Your view is clearly biased and it’s a take as old as time - if that darn Dr. King didn’t block the streets, he’d get better results. Just calm down and have a chat, says the already wealthy and happy worker.
You’re not asking it to rearchitect your whole company and software stack. I think you’d be surprised by how much value is there, instead of writing HN essays about what we all know isn’t there. Same goes for crypto.
Have you used it? Start working on anything. Next time you go to Google how to do something, or want to name something, or want to convert formats, or a dozen other things, just ask GPT. Say “give me 5 cool names for this”. Any task. “Show me a garden plot given plants from this time of year.” “Tell me about different types of LLCs and the tradeoffs.” “This code isn’t working what’s wrong.” You’ll quickly be able to feel how it can do your work for you, or shortcut hours of digging through garbage blogs and ad-infested pages served by Google. Go read one of the Twitter threads with 100 different insane, mind blowing examples of use cases.
The brand in general is incredibly weak now. When I use Google it feels cluttered with ads and useless results. Using GPT was such a relief. I use it 75% versus Google 25% for data science hobby projects.
Watching the Bayhem piece by Every Frame A Painting gave a ton of great context for Michael Bay’s work. Super interesting, ten minutes long, worth a watch. That channel is full of grade A content.