malthaus

so, why is google paying you an absurd comp still. what exactly do you bring to the table that your pm can't order argon to do?

i'm actually curious on what your view is despite the snarky tone.

i'm usually not one to defend europe's (over-)regulation, but having ownership of such data and being able to direct it to other providers for easy switching is one of the pillars of a lot of data related regulation

so either they can forget about their moat or forget about the continent with those practices

the global innovation index is such a bad proxy / misinterpretion of "startup scene"

we score high on innovation rankings because of 1) large corporates (e.g. pharma) and 2) strong universities.

while we have deep tech spinoffs profiting from this, it is not a 1:1 correlation and the startup ecosystem (in the SV interpretation) in switzerland is extremely weak (lack of VC appetite, low risk culture, high cost of living, small domestic market with high cultural/language barriers, no startup visas for high potential foreign graduates, etc) compared to its potential

sure, as long things go up, smart. when things no longer go up, they will take the whole economy down with them akin to the banking crisis in 2008 or the dotcom bubble before that (which both had far less circular incestuous activity going on) and will shamelessly act surprised after the fact.

as long as things go up people conveniently ignore the lessons from the past.

we are long overdue for a correction and given the fear mongering oligopoly shenanigans we must be very close.

"our burn rate is insane, let's all calm down collectively, fortify our moat so we can do regulatory capture & rent-seeking for the next 50 years"

fear is still the best tool to get masses to agree with whatever plan you hatch for yourself

the story really comes full circle for me now. i've read the book in the 90s and recently listened to hess's POV via a ccc talk (https://youtu.be/USDNMWZsR5o auto subbed/dubbed video here)

great nostalgia for when the internet was still amazing

it's time for a worldwide reset on tipping culture / assumptions.

america was always weird - the tipping practice leads to over-the-top fake service, is abusive to staff and only benefits restaurant owners. and they turned all that up to 11 over the last few years. how americans can cherish and even defend this, i can't get my mind around it.

meanwhile in europe, american practices are imported by way of POS terminals asking in outrageous use cases for outrageous amounts of tips. no, im not tipping 30% for an item i pick from a shelf in a store. add to that the awkward interaction at a bar or so when you have to select a tip under the watchful eye of the server.

people are shamed into tipping in all manners of ways and let those abusive practices plow over them.

it's a disgrace.

i wish for a world where all prices, including tips & taxes, are on the label / menu when i buy them and asking / giving anything on top is illegal. we would all be better off, even though americans for some reasons can't accept it - i have little trust in the headline of the linked article becoming a bigger phenomena.

over the last few years there was a huge demand for analog synthesizers again after them being mostly replaced by digital synths since the mid 90s for 2.5 decades with users demanding from the traditional companies to re-issue the classics

they are classics for a reason and subtractive synthesis is mostly "done", so it's more about bringing classic sound characters due to subtle differences in components / architecture back

wasn't that always the reaction historically whenever people felt like their livelihood was threatened by new technology?

now back your claim with money and bet accordingly on betting sites to see if you uncovered some actual alpha here

i'd say having "invented" the internet is a bigger claim to have influenced people rather than looking good in a bikini.

so fair game to cash in on that legacy.

nice, that's another 4 years of spacex data center usage runway!

yorck unlimited made living in berlin 10x as exciting

but you could always be sure that the old lady loudly crunching on every.single.crisp. was there in the showing as well

i'm swiss and also own property in central berlin. while i was having insanely fast internet in all the places i lived in switzerland since the year 2000 (first cable, then fiber), german telekom has still not been able to connect my flat to fiber, even though the street facing building side is and i'm stuck with semi fast but fully overpriced dsl, which on top is spotty because someone decided to install cheap copper - while cable internet is not an option because 2 cable providers fight over who owns the access to the building.

whatever the roll-out in switzerland is, it's heaps better than in germany and most other places.

"that gets you on", ie. the kind of personality that literally pays & hustles to be featured on such a list to fuel their own ego?

colour me surprised

people still seem to think that forbes scouts the world for the best talents instead of the lists being basically a paid ad

hackernews as a whole has the same issue software engineers have - overestimating one's wisdom and overapplying it with confidence to everything, resulting in horrible takes that might look like signals but are mostly noise

your trauma is my happy memory - being a lotus notes admin/dev consultant during my studies made me live a very comfortable life as a student!

very hard to feel sorry of you when countless professions experienced the same in the past - only that they were poor / working class and not overpaid software engineers at FAANG.

also very egocentric & pessimist way to look at things. humankind is much better off when anyone can produce software and skilled experts will always be needed, just maybe with a slightly different skillset.

it's a tough pill to swallow for developers, but nobody cares about your ability to write code. people care about you shipping something people want.

i can easily hire 100 sweatshop coders to finetune your code once i have a product that works but the inverse will never happen

so something that is a horrible store of value, has monumental transaction fees, non-instant confirmation and is associated by laypersons mostly with speculation, fraud & illegal transactions will solve those?

... where they come with their own idiosyncratic mental/moral flaws

you gotta treat communities like newspapers - acknowledge their bias and diversify

going off my example - chatgpt knows everything about me including desires, goals and issues im struggling with.

combine this with the fact that i have disposable income.

i can't fathom how much advertisers are willing to pay to put themselves in front of my eyes vs a google search for "dining table"

... and it will turn into a "technically true" rat race between the main players on what the definition is exactly while you can ask any person on the street with no skin in the game who will tell you that this is nowhere near the intuitive understanding of what AGI is - as it it's not measured by scores but instead of how real and self-aware your counterpart "feels" to you.

from my experience in the corporate world, i'd trust an excel generated / checked by an LLM more than i would one that has been organically grown over years in a big corporation where nobody ever checks or even can check anything because its one big growing pile of technical debt people just accept as working

... until reality catches up with a software engineer's inability to see outside of the narrow engineering field of view, neglecting most things that the end-users will care about, millions if not billions are wasted and leadership sees that checks and balances for the engineering team might be warranted after all because while velocity was there, you now have an overengineered product nobody wants to pay for.

if only they could also anticipate what will happen once the tide is falling

i have aphantasia and extensive experience with psychedelics

for me, as long as my consciousness is still in control, i have no closed-eye visuals akin to what others see. the more i lose control/consciousness, the more visuals i get but only over a certain (high) threshold.

dmt is the only substance that consistently gives me visuals but only at close to breakthrough dosages where i effectively lose consiousness. and they are never "things", they are always the known patterns, ie just raw signals and nothing meaningful - but my mind interprets them in whatever it thinks sensible.

otherwise i hallucinate like i dream or think - in an abstract, non visual way, the only thing i "see" are white flashes in nothingness

leaving the use case aside (i don't think it's needed, sensible or succesful) - i have to say i'm admiring how stripe manages to be forward thinking and takes a smart strategic position on every new wave that appears.

never full on moving the tanker like zuckerberg or a16z but always ready to sell shovels to a (potantially) viable submarket that is aligned with their mission and becoming a strategic player in that angle.

very smart.

sorry, but while it definitely looks better than it did in the 90s, it's neither a professional level design nor better than mac os. and you don't need to be a designer to see it.

those misleading hype statements are the reason why stuff like "this is the year of the linux desktop!" is a meme because anybody outside of your nerd/tech bubble will just look at you like you're insane.

maybe i'm too cynical but to me this looks more like an orchestrated "win" story for the eu ecosystem with some backroom dealing/incentives and some ex-post rationalisation sprinkled on rather than a strategic invest by asml.