I watched Code Rush tens of times. That was my time, I just had my degree in Computer Science in Milan, Italy. Before Mosaic and then Netscape, the only way to get access to information was through an Ampex terminal using tools like Gopher and Veronica. Internet connection was rare and hard to get, and the first browser changed my life forever. Soon after, the first ISPs emerged, and in an instant, access to information became available, even from my 10,000-person town. Netscape is how I became aware of Silicon Valley, and it took me almost 15 years to get there. It has been a lot of fun and excitement; I knew something big was happening, but nobody believed me or even understood me. When Code Rush finally became available on YouTube, it was like being part of the pirate crew from my small town for the first time. I still watch it once a year. It changed everything.
This is an oral history interview with Ken Thompson, created in partnership by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum, in connection with his A.M. Turing Award in 1983.
Yes and no. Are AI companies overvalued? Yes. Will most of them crash and burn? Yes, they will. Are the words "intelligence" or "reasoning" misused? Absolutely. Nonetheless, nobody can deny that some of these tools are useful and have demonstrated they can generate revenue like no other tool, app, or device before. There is something different from the dot-com bubble; many barriers have come down since 2000. Everyone can be connected 24/7 for a few tens of dollars a month. People trust the internet as a medium to perform transactions and access data. The real bubble is in the private market valuations, especially in the pre-seed stage. Many young entrepreneurs don't understand that raising their first round at $30M, $50M, or even $100M post-money will put a heavy weight on their shoulders approaching the Series A. Raising a funding round is a promise you make to the market. Increasingly high expectations will burn many wanna be entrepreneurs whose contribution to make things better for everyone will be lost forever. I'm deeply convinced that the reality check for all those companies is the public market, and in today's world, you can't go public after 3-5 years if your initial valuation has been built on a 20-year-long promise. All the trillion-dollar companies we know today went public a few years after their creation: Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, etc. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor are black swans, not evidence of the power law.
It's incredible how this type of revival from the past gained such meaningful traction, but, in a way, I fully understand it. The online world has become so confusing that many desire a simple one. The same feeling drove me to adopt Threads over Twitter/X—even if I still use them both.
I'm sorry about my basic question. Back in the 80s, AI was betting on Lisp machines — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine — now, of course obsolete.
Is Lisp still relevant in the AI space?
Always been fascinated by Lisp, but I never spent enough time to enjoy its elegance and applications. I went through Lurk, a Lisp dialect, a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs in the last year. I started to grasp a bit of its potential in solving real-world problems, but still too little to understand why it's so right for solving some problems. I'm curious about what other projects you guys are successfully and better solving because of Lisp today.
In your situation, it takes effort to take the leap of faith. I did it 10 years ago, and it was tough even if I had savings and no debts/mortgages. The main issue is managing the 24/7 mental stress for years; back then, I had two teenagers, and life was expensive. Most of the time, the founder's salary is not enough to support your family—at least in the Bay Area—and, besides, when you work 7 days a week, the situation becomes even harder to sustain. That puts much pressure on you and your partner for years before you can get something back.
My suggestion:
a) If you want to do that, be sure you have at least 2 years of savings, and not just to survive, but to live a good life.
b) Be sure that your partner is truly happy with your choice.
c) Startup vs life-style business. Creating a startup when you have a family and financial obligations is much more challenging than becoming an entrepreneur and creating a company to make a living. Be entirely sure that is the road you want to pursue. If you have doubts, wait.
d) Some people have a positive—and balanced—approach to life that can help a lot when your launch your startup. If you are one of those, maybe it's a Yes.
I'm 54, and I reinvented my career 3 times so far. Every single time, I was over 30 yo. Let's start focusing your interest on something you are passionate about and move to an area where you can learn faster.
Being mid-30s is a fantastic time for your career development, so believe in yourself and start learning something you care about today.
I run ElementaryOS 5.1 on a 2010 Thinkpad i5. It works fine for (basic) dev with vscode and javascript + nodejs stuff. I use Brave as a browser: much lighter than chrome. I tried to move to ElementaryOS 6 but it was slower.
It's so refreshing to see someone on the Internet not looking to make easy money showing off some lousy advertising. I would love to know more about the author; she's most likely interesting.
Interesting. I have a few questions:
a) Can investors in a RUV selle their shares in secondary market?
b) Can RUV be used both for convertible securities and priced round?
Talk to people and understand their pain is something you can do without a single line of code. We did that with Sysdig. That said, I'm a firm believer in remote work. I work most of the time remotely and invest in distributed teams whenever I can. What is missing in remote work is serendipity; we lack the right tools, and so today, in-person meetings still matter. That is the secret weapon of being in San Francisco. Things happen all the time. The perfect plan is to have the founding team in the Bay Area and all the rest distributed. That works well in the first 3-4 years, at least.
Don't make me wrong davidw, Italy is one of the best countries on Earth to live with your family, but from the business point of view it's a nightmare. It's cute, unbelievably cute, but sometimes it's not enough to live a happy life.
R&D in Italy it's one of my dreams and remote working tools are out there to help, but in my experience it is very complicated to make it working in the long run when the company scale. You save money, but not that much. On the other hand you slow down a little bit the execution. It's just my own experience.
Sorry but the taxation thing about the new workers is a very messy thing. You have to hire people who is not employed and with lot of others constraints. About the Italian got startups special laws and they should have access to a 35% reduction on labour cost but you need to hire specific categories of people. Talent always has a job.
Yes I confirm this. I live in Italy but the company I co-founded in San Francisco runs thanks to Italian engineering talent. And that's good for starting, not so sure when you raise round A - a good one. If you have money to spend it's probably better to move everyone to California. Don't you think?
However it's true that the quality of life in Italy is a lot higher than the Bay Area, but you need to stop fighting the system or be part of it if you want to have a really good life.
About your "this kind of thing happens everywhere", I'm not sure you are right. At least not in the high tech hubs around the world.
And again, do you think that Portland is like Italy? I've been there just a few times but my perception is completely different from the business point of view. When you are a tourist though, everything is fine pretty much everywhere.
They got smarter and now they are in the government structures. Not everybody of course, but recent facts emerged in gov corruption that mafia and criminal organization in general were directly managing billions of euros in public infrastructure building. Those billions were paid by Italian taxpayers.