jongjong

Well features hardly matters either in the tech market because the condition of having raised money from the right VCs, who act as gatekeepers for your sector, is still there.

Sure, this is probably as good as we can get and I think his past failures may be the reason why he eventually became so widely known and highly regarded.

Still, this quote "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." is kind of illustrating my point about the strength of the bias which success creates. Even a man who (allegedly) failed 10000 times still feels like his eventual success was a matter of fate (part of his success journey)... That's extremely delusional. Had someone else stolen his 10001th invention and gotten all the investments, that other person would have had all the credit, nobody would know who Thomas Edison is and he would have felt very differently about his failures and the system as whole.

Nikola Tesla probably had a slightly more realistic worldview (especially by the end of his life), but I bet you there are many no-name inventors who invented great things who weren't recognized at all, even after their deaths. I'm quite sure that there are many times more inventors who didn't get any credit for their valuable contributions than those who did get credit. Getting credit for your work is a fluke, not the norm.

Claude estimates that, during their lives, 40% of inventors were not credited at all, 35% were under-credited and only 25% were fairly credited. Now, among those, how many actually got rewarded for it financially? Probably less than that 25% figure.

Imagine how hard it is, how lucky you have to be, to invent something which happens to be useful and that only gets you into the draw for a 1/4 chance of getting some recognition and some kind of reward.

Even if you look at recent AI/LLMs innovation as an example; who got most of the credit for it? Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun are the big 2. These people do deserve credit, however, people barely know who the authors of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper are even though the paper itself got a lot of credit. I'm sure there are even more important papers and authors who got no credit at all. Also, nobody would have known about Jürgen Schmidhuber if Elon Musk had not mentioned him in that one tweet a while back. There are almost certainly many people who have been completely forgotten and are still unknown when it comes to AI. It's kind of insane how many people were overlooked.

Must have been a massive shock in contrast to his life up until that point... But even he is more optimistic being in jail than I've ever been in my life. SBF probably still thinks he can be pardoned. Probably still thinks he will rebuild everything. Success creates a kind of delusional optimism which serves like a permanent light at the of the tunnel; which most people don't have.

That's not conservatism, that's what any system of governance consists of.

Humans are prone to hypocrisy because they have blind spots. The luckier a person is, the easier they have it, the faster and higher they rise, the more ignorant/delusional they are by the time they reach the top. At the top, these people have the power to shape the world in accordance to their fanciful beliefs and severely skewed/optimistic worldviews.

There aren't many people in power who understand reality unfortunately because everyone who got any power had to be very lucky to get it.

The people who get to power are often the least qualified to use it effectively because their entire existence is colored by a myth that everything just keeps getting better if you just set your mind to it.

No person who has ever attained power or success has ever had the first hand experience of hard work never paying off. Yet it is the normal experience of life for the vast majority of people. This realistic worldview demands a very different set of laws than what the typical person who attains power will provide.

I think this makes a lot of sense.

It's very interesting because this is obviously still the reality for elite people; they have to attend all these events to maintain their political positions.

It's hard to believe that Mark Zuckerberg enjoys having to step off his Yacht to meet with Donald Trump. Not because of animosity, but simply because it's a lot of work and there is a lot at stake.

I think the insight for regular people is that regular people within the same social class nowadays have nothing to gain financially or career-wise from each other; so they don't see as much benefit from getting closer to each other.

My experience is that it's impossible to get close to software engineering colleagues; they're way too cynical and sometimes very jealous. And we can't really help each other anyway. My experience with other software engineering colleagues is that you can't trust them. I've been back-stabbed by colleagues which I tried to help on 2 occasions; including a very bad case which essentially destroyed my career through lies and sabotage. Let's just say I will never give another referral for a ex-colleague or developer friend with a current employer ever again.

I have a couple of software engineer friends who I've had for years who I consider close but I only met them online (including a few video calls); we worked on several projects together over many years, none of them worked out financially, unfortunately. I think if we had succeeded, we may have met each other in real life and become close enough to invite each other over to each other's houses... But I guess we're all just in that hustling mindset still and we live in different countries and lack the financial freedom to choose where we live. A shared successful business would certainly have helped to bring us closer.

I think you need to have achieved a certain level of financial comfort and your network should bring a certain amount of social value to justify inviting people over or attending events.

The social benefit has to pay for the stress and hassle, then enjoying people's company is the bonus that seals the deal to really make it worthwhile.

My experience with friends is that there's nothing to talk about besides complaining about all the problems we face and how crooked everything is. We're just simmering in our own misery.

Unfortunately, rich people don't want to befriend me either because they think I want something from them besides friendship; and they're right, do does everyone else in their lives! They don't appreciate honesty.

It's similar with my spouse in a way, but at least there are other things you can do with your spouse besides talking!

Society is in a very bad place IMO.

I think, objectively, I'm a decent and interesting person to befriend, yet the only person I ever met in my life who I can call a friend (besides family members) is my wife. So 15 years of adulthood yielded only 1 true friend out of maybe tens or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people I met. I don't think that's unusual; I think that's the baseline of how hard it is to make true friends when people do not have a financial motivation to be nice to each other in our current low-trust society.

>> They have no other choice.

They do have another choice; Linux! It's free OMG.

They just love their chains!

What's happening is that consumers are paying more money for less value. So any business which produces real value is going to struggle to make a profit while fake businesses 'front companies' which produce nothing except lies are going to be making a lot of money. All the money is going to be captured by companies which control the customer relationship; I.e. media companies.

The global financial infrastructure is set up for this to happen.

It's like how they're trying to put protein in everything now. People are eating less meat and quality natural proteins and instead eating cheaper, low quality, synthesized proteins. Companies can slash production costs while branding it as 'healthy' and charge a premium... Let media brainwashing fill the gap and create the profit margin out of nothing. An extreme case I saw was cheese; the other day my wife bought some horrible cheese with '50% more protein' which tastes like plastic... Paid premium for it. I suspect the protein is from whey which is usually a waste byproduct from cheesemaking; they usually remove the stuff because it makes the cheese taste worse... But now they leave it in slap on a '50% more protein' and charge a premium for it. Then when you watch YouTube, you see all these food influencers using the word 'Protein' all the time when referring to beef or chicken... Brainwashing you into thinking that they are equivalent because they want to sell the cheap stuff to you through a different channel as a premium product!

As for synthetic proteins like beta-lactoglobulin which they feed animals to substitute whey powder (which they now simply leave in the cheese as discussed)... Guess what they use to produce these? Yeast + Sugar! Now you know why all the media has ganged up against sugar! Sugar is the new villain now because they don't want people eating it and drive up the price. They want sugar to be cheap so they can convert it to artificial proteins... Which can be sold directly at a premium.

Basically, the waste byproduct which used to go into animal feed is now fed to humans instead... And the animals we raise for meat now consume synthetic crap made from quality products that are being suppressed by the media.

And guess what; some of the new proteins and chemicals used to feed livestock are difficult and hazardous to produce and so the companies behind those have an oligopoly.

It's kind of insane how the entire economy turned into a pure manipulation play.

Anyway this is on a bit of a tangent from the topic of grapes and wine but the culprit is also media manipulation driven by the design of the financial and political system which produces and supports media monopolies.

The other day, I spent at least 20 minutes trying to share screens with my mother on Google Meet. She uses OSX.

There was a cascade of subtle issues which blocked every possibility.

My mother was using an an Apple iPad and I was using Linux. I sent her the link to the Google Meet to her email. When she tapped it, it opened in Safari browser. Safari did not allow screen sharing via Google Meet so I told her to download Chrome and told her to copy the URL into Chrome. Safari would not let her copy the URL from the address bar... She ended up literally typing out the URL and the resource ID by hand while I read it out to her. Then when she opened Google Meet in Chrome, it required her to download a browser extension (I don't recall having to do this on Linux)... Anyway it was unbelievably tedious.

It's obvious that operating system companies have been intentionally making it difficult to 1. Know where you are when browsing your file system or the web and 2. Copy the URL or path between different apps.

This has been a major point of frustration for software developers. First, it started with OSes hiding file extensions, then converting the address bar into breadcrumbs/buttons which can't be highlighted or selected... Then hiding the protocol (e.g. http:// or https://) then hiding most of the start of the breadcrumbs which make up the address so that you can't even see the full path in a single screen and you can't even select individual words to copy even a single folder name.

And this trend spread to a lot of other apps. Sometimes in downright dangerous ways. For example, recently, I noticed that my email client was hiding most of the email address of the sender of an email I had just received. If I clicked on the email address it opened up their contact card in a modal but only showed their name! Their email address still cut off on the contact card view and also not selectable... I just wanted to see if the domain name was legit but I physically couldn't see what the domain name was. OMG. Nowadays, whenever I'm forced to use one of these crappy web applications, I just open up the Chrome developer panel and inspect the HTML directly. I don't know what's wrong with people that they put up with this stuff voluntarily.

There will always be idiots who see a 10 second video of someone and think that it gives them enough info to fully understand the subjects' values and motivations but I think most people understand that a meme is not reality.

It's like how some people can come across as very 'nice' and helpful superficially but really it's all virtue signalling and they're actually serial backstabbers; awful, unreliable, untrustworthy people. I met many people like this so I know not to judge a book by its cover.

You know the extraction is more like 10000-to-1 than 1-to-1.

But in essence I do believe that I (and thousands of others) could have had at least $100k more net worth if they hadn't monopolized all user-acquisition channels and if they hadn't helped bring about the many laws and regulations which made this possible.

I have no ill feelings towards them but I just don't want them in my state competing against me for limited resources using money which they acquired through an unjust scheme which I was coercively made a part of but which I never agreed to and have been protesting for almost a decade (on deaf ears).

It's not personal or even saying anything negative about their character or abilities. From my perspective it's just pure self-preservation. They either need to contribute more tax to make up for the injustice or they leave.

When they sell their assets, it makes those assets more affordable for the rest of us. So any forced sale is good for society. I don't see any issues with it. We were/are forced to prop up their stocks through government contracts, grants and regulatory monopolies... So they should contribute something on their end too.

And I don't care about the "jobs they create" - They created jobs for my competitors to get easy money in cushy jobs. I want those jobs gone too! I don't want FAANG employees bidding up house prices in my area.

I only want to compete against people who are playing by the same rules as me! I don't want to compete against people who can rewrite the rulebook as we go, to suit them.

But I think the purpose of a wealth tax is precisely to get rid of greedy billionaires.

So if they vote with their feet and leave, then that's an even better outcome. Now they can't manipulate the government anymore. They can go manipulate and continue extracting wealth from some other place.

Sure, but to know where the real limits are, you need to compare frontier AI with frontier human! That's where the bar is.

I hadn't heard about Jev but when I read about what it does, I understood we are in an AI bubble.

I wrote a function pretty much exactly like Jev about a year ago... I would provide my function an array with a bunch of labels as first argument and a string of text/content as second argument and it would give me a relevance score for each label in the array against the provided text/content.

It's really easy to implement. Took me like a day or so by hand. You just compute the embedding vector of each label in the array then compare each one against the embedding vector of the text/content and it then return an object which maps each label to its similarity score.

I used it to allow users to tag employee data from LinkedIn. I had essentially forgotten about that code until now...

This situation illustrates exactly the limitation of AI and why we still need humans in the loop.

It reminds me of a junior coding bootcamp lecture I once gave many years ago before AI coding. One of the first slides said "Computers will do exactly what you say, not what you mean."

Even corporations realized that the word "done" has many definitions.

Initially, I thought Socrates' stance on writing was some kind of eccentricity but now that I have seen first hand how the meaning of words can change over time and differ between people and places, I now have a better understanding of how much context is lost in writing.

When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.

When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.

Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.

Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.

For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.

In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.

People accept a surprising amount of unreliability. For example, I've been using SharePoint to modify excel files at scale. We kept running into issues with cache that we would write to a file, the service would respond with success, but then when we read the file, it shows the old cached value, not the new one we just WROTE! And there was no reliable way to check when the newly written value had been completely flushed using that API.

Microsoft will call this 'optimized'. They'll say that caching is good; it's a feature, not a bug!

But really, it's unreliable! It's not doing the job it claims to do.

I disagree that a viable market exists. What set of arrangements exist there may be viable, for select few people, but it's not a market.

A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market.

Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.

I'm kind of disturbed that it took me 7 years to find out about the Feross incident: https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/

This guy is literally a high profile individual from my own niche Node.js open source community and I'm literally an open source developer from that exact same community and I had no idea.

> They sell insurance against the maintainer, when the maintainer is the one person in the chain who can actually make the code more secure, and she gets nothing while a company two layers up gets paid to tell you whether she did.

Damn, this is a really good line. It's the reason why existing tools like Snyk give so many false positives and miss so many actual vulnerabilities. They're kind of useless really.

They create false comfort and busy-work for staff whilst providing a ready-made "Snyk said it was secure" narrative to cover everyone's asses when things inevitably go belly-up.

And Snyk be like "We responded as fast as possible, so we fulfilled our part" yet what really counts is not even in the equation.

Personally, I stopped contributing my code open source. I still write it and I've built a major project I'd love to make public but I'm keeping it for myself. I'm waiting for communism or UBI to arrive, then I may resume publishing as open source.

If it takes too long, I will pass it down to my son and he will wait until communism arrives to make it public.

The first time I understood there is a systemic problem was years ago when I started attending investor events and was pitching my open source software to tech companies and investors and they were all asking me "But what are you selling?" and I kept telling them "I'm not selling anything, I'm just looking for adopters of my open source product." and I was shaking hands with every person in the room.

They couldn't understand. They must have thought I was crazy. But the thing is, I couldn't even sell it for free. Even though it was provably useful and many similar companies did use my product successfully, at scale. It really felt like "It's a big club and you ain't in it."

It was like; they couldn't believe how much work I was putting in to give away a product for free. I think it might have made some people uncomfortable even.

And although I am more honest and cynical now about my own intentions, I still think that 'making money' was not and is not the primary goal; it was always a secondary goal which I planned to attend to later if/when the conditions would be right.

I was literally just trying to get big companies to adopt so that other smaller companies would look at them and tell themselves "Look, it's OK, big company X is using the product, so I can use it too!"

My goal was not to sell anything, it was to dismantle systemic taboos which worked against me as a small contributor.

10 years later, the taboos are worse than before! I don't know how anyone can start an open source project without the badge of corporate sponsorship these days.

This is why I just advocate for UBI nowadays. It's impossible for certain people to get paid for work they do and value they create and the reasons are numerous and different for every single person.

A lot of it is because human attention has been fully centralized and monopolized. Regulations are the nail in the coffin.

This industry is cooked, to a crisp. Tech people who have been excluded from the tech markets should be paid some kind of compensation.

The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free.

Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them.

No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated.

So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0.

Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.

When I started to understand how money works, it started to feel like everything I've been raised to believe was a lie down to the foundational principles.

Even Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" also fell apart when I came across Grey's Law "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

The complexity is extreme and more intricate than any person could have designed. Clearly, it evolved over long periods of time to get to this point. It's worse than a "conspiracy" because a conspiracy requires collaborative intent and a shared understanding. With this system, participants have convergent intent but very little to no shared understanding (as essentially none is required).

In terms of outcomes, the system functions in much the same way as a conspiracy, but without any of the self-restraint mechanisms which might otherwise limit the group's actions (as would come naturally if each member had full awareness of what the group was doing)... Which in this case, disturbingly, spans the entire planet and all human affairs.

The first step to solving a problem is understanding that the problem exists. This makes this problem particularly difficult to solve because it has power over the collective human minds which created and uphold it. It can replace any dissident with a compatible 'attention head' within its neural net.

The idea of compensating victims proportionally to the value of objects which caused harm is interesting and reveals an interesting mindset.

We are so far removed from this mindset nowadays that it seems illogical. But there is an underlying logic that; the more expensive an object, the more human labor went into building it, the more the owner should pay if it causes harm. There is a notion of "with great power comes great responsibility."

Had we still had these laws, we would look at trains, airplanes and AI very differently and we would never have allowed corporations to exist.

It does seem like there is a deep wisdom in there about the dangers of complex and expensive objects. The creation of complex objects and structures (including abstract ones) is a form of idolatry.

You obviously haven't worked on a good codebase. I've worked on both so I know the difference.

Same feature on a good codebase vs bad codebase is like 1k lines of code vs 20k lines of code and is worse in the latter case. Not an exaggeration.

Clean code is real, it's just not what's been peddled to us.

If your code is full of bugs and you ask Claude or Codex to build more features, it will take 10x to 20x the effort because of workarounds and hacks which keep compounding.

If your code has very few to no bugs and no hacks/workarounds, it will also implement hacks/workarounds and no bugs. The difference is pretty insane actually.

You can try it yourself; create a really low quality codebase, full of hacks and try to build features with AI based on its recommedations.

Maybe, but the parts of my brain I'm still using are a lot easier to use.

I was dreaming to be promoted to a cushy management role where I could talk bs for a living.

I managed to attain 'hands-on team lead' and later an ill-fated 'bootstrapped cryptocurrency CTO' role... Nobody wanted to pay me to talk as a career. Now they do!

So I'm very happy about that.

I feel contempt for all the people who had it easy and 'chose' to be engineers voluntarily.

I would say that 'what not to build' is the second most important decision.

The most important decision is what limitations and constraints you are prepared to accept. There are always limitations and constraints but they are rarely identified up-front.

The most difficult, hard-to-revert decisions are those related to hard constraints imposed by the systems and/or data you have to rely on. Maybe it's not physically possible to obtain the data you need to solve the problem you need to solve for the price you need for it to be viable. Maybe you need to be able to process large files which may take many hours to complete. Or your input data grows father than you can process on a single CPU core. Or the security requirements of a particular piece of data means that you can't efficiently connect it to some external piece of data as you need.

This is your intent until I finish implementing and then you complain that it doesn't also work with folders or large files and it doesn't work with any file system. Or you will complain if your colleague accesses your file without your permission.

Reality of software development is that the user would expect every single one of those things but they simply don't understand what they want up front.

There are three different aspects to consider in my experience; what the user says they want, what the user thinks they want and what the user actually wants.

The three can have substantial differences.

I've been coding for 22 years, 14 years professionally, so I appreciate AI coding.

It was annoying before when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted and yet it still took a whole week to implement.

Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled.

Everything it's generating looks almost exactly like what I would have written, just written faster.

Personally, I feel avenged by AI because I had been saying for years that you don't really need static typing once you reach a certain level, getting types right isn't the most difficult problem and isn't a significant source of bugs. Everyone was gaslighting me about this... Yet now everyone can verify themselves because AI has reached this level I was speaking of.

Now anyone who coded with a frontier model on both TypeScript and JavaScript can see that it makes no difference at all. I can't remember ever seeing Claude mistake the type of a variable with either language... And TBH, I find Vanilla JavaScript from AI to be more succinct, not over-engineered like Typescript. Which is a point I'd been trying to make for years about incentives and actual patterns of usage (as opposed to theoretical benefits).