how is this affecting the quality of the infrastructure that gets built? the TCO for these projects is going up, but is the quality (read: reliability/time between failures) comparable to what you could expect from the older systems?
7,613 karma · joined September 20, 2013
the reach and scale of social media and how brands can interact (or not) with their followers has really changed the marketing game, and i think premium mediocre combines this insight with the poor economic prospects of the millenial generation
"Premium mediocrity is the story of Maya Millennial, laughing alone with her salad. She’s just not a millionaire…yet. She just doesn’t have a mansion…yet. She just doesn’t drive a Tesla…yet."
strongly implied is the fact that she never will have any of these increasingly mediocre/disposable goods, and that she will be happy to consume increasingly premium but increasingly mediocre asipirational products for the rest of her life because she will never be productive enough to earn close to what her parents earn to afford true quality goods
but also maybe this isn't an intrinsically bad thing and just a sign of a more disposable/fleeting relationship with houses, cars, etc. (which is bad on further reflection, does not bode well for the environment)
unless you're buying a dive computer or ruggedized/solar-powered wrist GPS, you don't need a watch. you have an infinitely more accurate and powerful device in your pocket that fulfills the same function of telling time x 1000000 other applications
time-telling watches are now 100% a status symbol, heirloom, and/or enthusiast good
brand is and will become that much more important as the old school "quality" collectors and wearers die out and are replaced by brand/social signaling watch consumers
same to a lesser extent with clothing - you're sitting in an air conditioned office or car or your home for most of the day, but it's a powerful expression of who you are and what you can afford when you wear your new balenciaga sneakers out to drinks on friday night and pull out your $5 branded bic lighter.
mediocre quality is good enough because our environment is so tame, brand is everything
Look at how Blizzard did computer opponent AI for games like Starcraft and Warcraft in the early 2000s.
The "insane" AI builds its base and units well, controls its troops quickly, and can micro manage different types of units.
But its real strength is that it gets 2x the normal amount of resources that a human player gets, allowing it to build structures sooner than human players and build 2x the units.
This is the necessary tradeoff to make up for the fact that a human can recognize and exploit computer weaknesses, and the computer generally can't infer what its opponent is doing through the subtle hints that humans pick up on.
For example if you catch even a slight glimpse of a certain type of unit an enemy has, or see that an enemy has moved into a certain part of the map early on, you can guess with a reasonable confidence level what build or strategy they are going for without seeing the full playing board.
“Those multiplayer games are harder than Go, but not that much higher,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “A group has already beaten the best players at Dota 2, though it was a restricted version of the game; Starcraft may be a little harder. I think both games are within 2 to 3 years of solution.”
2-3 years would be amazing to solve these problems IMO for non-perfect info games.
“To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will find that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile.”
from The Conquest of Happiness
Philosophers, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists used to define, study, and critique generational divides before advertising became such a pervasive part of the modern economy
i can't really think of an example of hyperliterature that has stuck with me outside of the annoying bloomberg article animations they tried for 6 months and dropped sometime last year
i think that's why plot-rich video games are so popular as an alternative means of storytelling - they're based around really good writing, but also involve some core interactive mechanics that keep the audience engaged, challenged, and empathetic rather than distracted or frustrated
interesting concept, can it be extended outside of a few webpages and apps?
i doubt he really hates his product at the end of the day, it's just a catchy way to market it. if he did, he would've walked away when his partner did to freelance some more or do another startup.
the disagreement is whether or not we want a more powerful distributed system monitoring and enforcing the law
cops aren't perfect and often have biases but you can't just push some code to a server and make them do whatever you want them to, as you could potentially do with an AI-based system.
if bad people got control of the system they would be able to more effectively impose their will on the population
in the best case they will be heavily audited and will not be allowed to make important decisions.
in the worst case biases will be programmed into the systems decision making algorithms, amplifying the power of those controlling the systems
one of the best systems we've come up with for government relies on biased actors fighting each other and compromising to reach fair agreements. giving too much power to one of these branches of government is not a good thing, no matter how much inherent human bias it eliminates from the system
The Alexa Fund is a good example - Amazon wants to create an ecosystem of innovation and development around Alexa voice technology, perhaps one of the clearer examples of AI today, and is shoveling cash into the space.
Big enterprises have brought the VC model in-house, closer to R&D and the problems they need to solve because most of these companies are flush with cash and facing a declining number of good ROI bets coming out of their actual R&D departments.
To stay relevant A16z needs to pick the SMB fruit that doesn't have access to its own in-house VC biz.
Notice how the document is aimed at people who own their own biz - "What can you do with AI?" "Applying AI to your business" etc.
They're hoping to stumble on SMB teams/problems that can solve a SMB problem quicker than a solution a huge enterprise can incubate in-house, then either scale it up to a late-round/pre IPO private company or sell it off to a large enterprise for the exit.
Agreed that part of that is just asking the question - have you thought about what this new technology could do for your SMB? As well as being a thought-leader in the space and putting out some educational docs so that people know A16z has a good handle on the latest AI craze and a framework for monetizing it.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/valleyvoices/2017/02/14/corpora...
integrity implies that you are unified or "integrated" as a part of a stronger whole, and working towards the betterment of that whole
that you share certain core values and ethics with another group of people
in the past large companies might have been integrated and integral to a certain city, region, community, country, cause, etc. - or as you put it, "our democracy"
facebook, and most large tech companies, no longer have or need such ties towards individuals, communities, or countries
they pay their taxes in all different jurisdictions (or sometimes mostly just in ireland) and then are free to do as they like to their users who keep coming back for more screentime because they're addicted
facebook has no sense of care for the user, or a sense of being in it together as a relationship, nor is it really possible to have one at Facebook's scale
i wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg still considers the majority of Facebook's users "dumb fucks" and sheep to be monetized, an ethos that will inevitably trickle down through the company from the top
facebook's integrity is aligned with their customers, the advertisers, and that's about it
we can only hope that facebook employees are doing what they can to preserve their own integrity with their friends/family/community, and that this push is strong enough to shape the development of the platform for the better, instead of towards further addictive, attention-grabbing, echo chamber construction
dragging themselves through the [social media] streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded [techies] burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up [making student loan payments] in the supernatural darkness of [brooklyn] floating across the tops of cities contemplating [ads],
who bared their brains to [FAANG] under the [Oculus Rift] and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on [luxury investment property] roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating [Silicon Valley] and [Jobs-light] tragedy among the scholars of war,
who [dropped out] from the academies [to avoid] crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their [RSUs] in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall
What may have happened is that somehow Snapchat further doctored their numbers after Stories came out to hide the impact it was having on their userbase, then slowly rolled the impact in post IPO leaving the company where it is now, with a sudden slowdown in user growth post IPO and $6 share price down from $24 on first day of trading. same issue of doctored numbers with 2 different timeframes
The reason this is coming out now is that large institutional investors that bought in at $17/share at the IPO are now left with $6/share stock are looking for a way to recoup losses from a bad bet. If Snap had gone up, nobody would have cared about the doctored metrics.
Usage metrics have always seemed extremely unreliable/easy to game from my perspective, but if investors can somehow prove Snap was lying about its metrics, they could win back some $$$. Just not sure how they could prove it - Snap is probably the only company that has full visibility into these numbers and I don't think there's a paper/audit trail like there would be for accounting fraud
Here's a summary of how the whistleblower, Anthony Pompliano (not sure if it's the same guy that incessantly shills for bitcoin on twitter), accused Snapchat of doctoring numbers in 2015: https://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-unseals-anthony-pom...
The investors will probably try to prove that Snapchat continued to do the same shady user engagement reporting through 2017 when Snap IPOd
Not to mention the knock-on effects of the many jobs the HQ will indirectly create - cleaning, food prep, waste mgmt, facilities, security, transportation, etc.
But yes, I agree that NYC is probably the city with the highest bargaining power in the US due to its size and economic diversification. And yet they still submitted a bid, even while Mayor de Blasio was badmouthing the company [1]
It will be interesting to see what the incentive package was - that's when we'll know just how much Amazon profited from the whole bid/selection process.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-de-blasio-amazon-hq2-de...
Not participating in the bid would have been suicide for the politicians of any major city save perhaps Kreuzberg, Berlin [1].
The amount of wealth creation and subsequent tax payments/land value boost that any FAANG company would bring with a new HQ is way too big to be ignored.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/09/fuck-off-goog...
changes to the economic definition and legal enforcement of anti-monopoly are one issue, but a general slowdown in the pace of technological innovation combined with globalization/spread of technology is the primary force driving consolidation/horizontal/vertical integration in many industries
The alternative was some god awful platform without a WYSIWYG editor where you have to code surveys by hand, an enormous waste of time and very inflexible compared to Qualtrics.