smattiso

I've been fascinated by this forever. It seems like it's mostly for EE and ME people though? Are you working in Marine Science?

1.) Piracy effectively kills independent movies and books. -- Outside of showstopper Marvel, Star Wars, Avenger-esque media, most movies lose money or are rolled up into subscription services. -- However other showstopper type franchises arise as people tire of the same old Marvel universe crap.

2.) Most magazines go out of business.

3.) Because of 1-2 maybe we actually start to do something about piracy and enforce laws?

4.) Autonomous cars only work on the freeway and use mostly commodity parts (cheap LIDAR, cameras). Level 5 driving is abandoned.

5.) AMZN and MSFT grow. GOOG shrinks or stays the same.

6.) FB shrinks by 50%. SNAP, TikTok, FutureSocialNetwork all grow, however a large set of young people abandon social media all together.

7.) Related to 6: AAPL releases iMessage for Android, puts some security settings in there, adds bitmoji, face filters, etc, and kills 50% of all social networks overnight. Twitter is still the go to place to listen to celebrities.

8.) VR is abandoned or is a niche product.

9.) Tech bubble bursts. 300k programmer salaries are gone. Lots of unemployed coders out there. People with generic CS degrees are a dime a dozen.

10.) Hard sciences rule. People with Masters+ in Material Science, Biomedicine, Aeronautics, Mechatronics/Robotics are king.

11.) People that know how to setup data processing pipelines to facilitate #10 are still valuable. As are those who know how to build the systems that robots rely to navigate and manage their work. Specialize or die.

12.) Recession. Reduction in prices of housing, but consolidation of the housing market into the hands of the elites who no longer want anything to do with VC.

13.) Many IT, agricultural, warehousing, retail, grocery, and trucking jobs are lost. IT takes the biggest hit.

14.) Machine Learning is tapped out. No AGI. Insights from Big Data aren't what they are cracked up to be. ML helps discover patterns for drug discovery, helps robots to orient in space and see surroundings, but the logic is still driven by humans.

15.) Crypto goes to 0.

16.) Species loss and human sprawl continues.

17.) "Peak software startup" reached in 2018. Next startups are in medicine, energy, space, environmentalism. This is good. Bad for coders though.

More positive thoughts:

18.) Incredible advances in medical diagnostics. Routine screening (for wealthy people) includes full body MRIs and ML detection of cancer. A Theranos style blood test is invented. Many cancers, if caught early, and maybe alzheimers are manageable medically.

19.) Crispr is still immature and not widely used.

20.) Plastics are slowly being phased out.

Good. Javascript needs to die. It was far simpler to build performant multi-device UIs 15 years ago than it is today. Building UIs natively on iOS and Android is so much simpler than building for the web.

Technical question: 1.) What is the speed of WebAssembly on iOS WebKit and Android WebView? 2.) Is it feasible to write an entire app UI in something like Qt and target WebAssembly? 3.) Android, iOS, Windows versions of the app are Qt apps natively or possibly through the device's WebKit.

Is this possible today? Is there a better UI library than Qt for this?

Sure I'm all for automating things we don't like doing, but everytime we outsource some piece of ourselves to technology we lose something in the process.

We invented farming and lost our communal hunter gathering cultures. We invented mass production and supply-chains for our food and lost our farming culture (for the most part). This isn't necessarily good or bad, but we are definitely losing something every time we invent something to make our lives easier. At some point there will be a tipping point of diminishing returns.

Personally I believe "the singularity" would be the worst possible thing to ever happen to humans. Sure we can visit distant parts of the universe and live forever but only as passengers to some AI. Would you rather be a dog in today's world or a human 1000 years ago?

Progress is unrelenting though and I certainly enjoy not having to wash my clothes by hand.

Are we losing something as humans by automating so much? I mean I'm all for technical progress but at some point our computers will have killed so much of what makes us humans.

Chess, go, driving, flying, math, written language, music... when does it stop?

The standard answer is that we will automate all the dull parts of living and allow everybody to work in some sort of higher order capacity. That sounds great and all, but what happens when our systems learn how to make music as well as we can ourselves?

At some point we will simply become consumers of our machines and while that's a comfortable existence, certainly we are losing something as a species with all of this automation.

Maybe I'm old.

Not necessarily, speech to text engines are pretty decent so it's conceivable a listening device could just send the transcript.

The unfortunate consequence of this is that some previously viable types of movies won't make financial sense in a mostly streaming world. Spending 50 million dollars to produce a comedy only to have it end up on Netflix competing directly with thousands of low budget comedy TV shows and indie films isn't going to work. Would a movie like Austin Powers be able to make money today?

What would it take to get this running on iOS and Android?

I did this and my advice would be “it depends”. It’s been a mixed bag. Financially I’m much worse off than I would have been staying at my 300k job (who knows what it would have grown to now?). I will say the stress of not knowing what you are doing and questioning yourself can be immense. That being said perhaps I’m not the best example as I took years off living a hedonistic lifestyle and truly adopted the YOLO mentality. I consulted here and there. It was fun but ultimately draining.

The corporate coding lifestyle can be without a doubt an existential mind fuck. It partially depends on your mindset and job responsibilities though. If you care about the purpose of your product, you aren’t some product managers code monkey, and you are making money that isn’t the worst thing.

That being said... FOR ME I have learned that the concept of retirement is a joke. It’s not all that great and at least for me people feel better having a meaningful purpose. Even if your purpose is make believe I think it’s neCessary. So I wonder about the utility of doing something you hate for 30 years just to end up “retired” and miserable anyway. That’s what I’m trying to do, I don’t want to retire but I don’t want to sit in front of a computer coding up some app UI for someone else. but I have a family on the way so we’ll see how it goes.

I think maybe optimize for that purpose you have in mind for yourself rather than starting a business just for the hell of it. If you are getting paid 500k by google to prosecute child pornographers that’s likely going to make you feel better than starting your own 1 man SaaS business running email marketing....

It depends.

But isn't that why companies hire employees on visas to begin with? I would venture to guess for every 1 truly pioneering mind that is working in the US on a H1-B visa there are 100 people working on CRUD software at Amazon or Microsoft.

I think that depends on how good our physical simulations become? If we can model our robot to a sufficient degree of physical precision, and our world simulation is good enough, with the right objective functions it seems like one probably build a robust control system without really understanding any of the control theory at all? Granted this might take the equivalent of 50 years worth of learning but it seems possible? This is how animals have learned to move over time right?

Interesting. As part of your Comp Bio PhD did you learn the fundamentals of AI research? How are you planning to transition?

I dont think that's it at all. Even in "undesireable" places the rents approach what a median income earner can afford anywhere. It's akin to why we have minimum wages. Without them people will work (out of desperation) for pennies because they have to.

What is the cause in your opinion? Undersupply? Or an economic stable equilibrium that sucks for everybody besides owners?

As a percentage what are talking about? There are homes and apartments aplenty, the biggest issue is the economics of it. What would cause rents to go down? An oversupply? What would cause an oversupply? Barring some regional crash it would have to be overbuilding. People aren't dumb and they won't overbuild. They will build as demand increases but they certainly won't lower prices. If anything they will raise them. It's obvious.

Calling it an affordable housing "shortage" implies that we need more housing in order for it to become affordable. The fact is there is already plenty of housing (people live somewhere don't they?) the problem is that it is unaffordable because supply and demand will never cause the rents to go down en masse. It's one of the few limited resources that people are forced to buy that essentially has no maximum price.

Everybody starts getting basic income? Rents will rise to eat up the majority of that income without some external control. The same way we needed unions, minimum wage, etc. we need a collective bargaining system for the renters vs. landowners. Rent control, what have you. It's kind of the antithesis of the American dream but what we have isnt working all that well.

Have there been notable cases of a malicious actor installing a compromised OS on a target's phone for spying purposes?

With Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. seemingly investing in so many promising technologies (ML, robotics, infrastructure, etc.) are we past the era when innovation primarily came from startups?

It used to be that BigCorps didn't want to rock the boat for fear of disrupting their businesses. These tech companies were built on the missed opportunities of the entrenched players, and with our current financial climate and its easy access to cash, they are not likely to make the same mistake?

Who knew holding in your pee was so dangerous?

It depends on what you mean by failure. If you build a MySpace/AOL/Netscape and 15 years later it "fails", most people will celebrate you. However if you spend three years in your garage building a CRM tool that never launches, that will be uninteresting to most and therefore not celebrated.

This seems like a strange comparison. Teens have eschewed FB in favor of Instagram and Snapchat for years. My feeling is that YouTube is simply becoming more popular and Facebook is becoming less. This is like saying that "America's Teens are Choosing Buzzfeed Over Facebook." They aren't even in the same category. The writing is on the wall for FB as a web property.

This is why I wish I had gotten into video game development rather than app development. Once the game is finished it is (for the most part) complete.

I was exactly where you were and it didn't work for me. In my opinion the only way to build something substantial enough that is worth selling is to quit your job. If you put your whole mind to something you can accomplish exponentially more than being scattered about. I think a more realistic approach is to put all of your effort into saving money via a job, and then all of your effort into your own business. Jack of all trades, master of none and all that. Again that's my opinion YMMV. Whatever you are doing make sure you are enjoying it otherwise what's the point?

What exactly are your golden handcuffs? I assume you are a developer in the US? Unless your handcuffs are paying like 300k+ yearly then one thing to consider is that you can probably find another similarly paying job without too much work. You definitely don't want to miss out on a huge IPO but sit down and do the math.

I work at Google now. What made you decide to leave?

that is impossible to estimate. If I were able to estimate that I wouldn't be asking this question. Also, your usage of the term NPV is flawed. Thanks though.

Awesome! I coded this exact same concept about 4 years ago (livetabber.com... your name is better). I was really hoping somebody would do it for real.

Do you plan on adding functionality to help people create SoundSlices? I'll just list the features I put in the concept maybe you will find some useful.

* Ability to slow down the track to let the musician hear the notes more easily while transcribing. * Import existing ASCII tabs and input a BPM to create a base annotation that the user can then tweak. -2-4-7- gets imported differently than -247-. Does this by stretching the tab to fit the time of the song. This was very useful. * Attempted to do pitch detection and bpm detection... didn't work so well maybe tech has changed. * Show guitar fingerings. * Allow the user to "highlight" a portion of the song so that it will loop only that portion. This is useful for both annotating and learning. E.g. highlight the solo and slow it down to "hear" the notes better while annotating while looping it, or slowing it down to practice it repeatedly. * Use arbitrary formats as input (spotify, pandora, mp3 file, etc.)

Please kill GuitarPro and ASCII tabs for me :)

Relative volatility of KYAK was 3x the normal amount during the day. The news was released after hours. Long live insider trading!

I used to have terrible sleep problems. Insomnia, restless sleep, etc. I changed two things. No caffeine. No alarm clock.

I sleep amazingly well. I'm rested every morning and I wake up at the same time everyday.

This is an art and over time you will get better. But I suspect there is no "solution" and this is part of being a programmer :)

I mostly do OO programming, so I'll speak to that. In general there is no magic bullet and the only way to guarantee code quality over time is to refactor. That's just how it is. That being said in practical terms there are some ways you need to be diligent.

Resist the "oh it's just one more...." urge. Whether that means a new method, data, condition, etc. If the scope of a class is increasing past what originally intended then split it up! No need to go crazy. When a class is becoming a PIT due to too much code or lack of flexibility then fix it. Don't plan too far in advance. This is hard and the urge will be strong but don't give in (unless the business demands it.. gotta make that $$$$).

When you encounter a situation where you clearly get a benefit by making things more flexible. Do it. Refactor. Don't wait it will only get worse.

I struggle with this all the time. In my opinion don't think too much about it and just do what feels right. You'll know.