somethoughts

"But I know that I won’t be tuning in for the next episode of All-In to find out. I will not fall prey to Gell-Mann Amnesia."

Not sure if the author - Michael Bateman - will ever see this but if he does - just a thought - it could be an interesting and fertile genre/substack niche to do follow analysis of their claims/discussions in more detail regularly as a counterpoint to their podcast.

I found his analysis compelling and it could be popular among HNers.

Agreed - I find it useful to get unfiltered insight into how ultra high net worth people think about the world and view/approach things and what sources they use to form opinions.

I also find it useful to compare/calibrate how much about finance that's not VC specific (i.e. macro economics, interest rates, commodities, etc.) I know relative to ultra high net worth people.

It does require active listening to spot the subtle/not subtle bias, errors in logic etc.

I found this useful

The Problem with Ikigai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeX6kNbaF0w

The TLDR I got from is that first - that the diagram itself was made up by someone trying to write a business blog/book.

The second is that the goal is not to find one singular activity to cover the intersection of the Ikigai Venn diagram. Instead it can be better to have multiple different activities which ensure the union of the Ikigai Venn diagram is covered so you aren't myopically focused on one area of it.

My hot take is that the part that got lost in translation as it transitioned into a pithy airport bookstore business book is that it originally didn't have to be a single activity that covers all of the Venn diagram.

It is more about making sure the union of the Venn diagram is covered by one or more daily activities. So hobbies are about ensuring that you are not just focusing on the vocation circle.

I suspect its a probably a combination of abundance of caution based on past bad experiences/lawsuits as well as also being good for margins:

The Surprising Reasons Soft-Serve Ice Cream Can Be Dangerous To Eat

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/surprising-reasons-soft-serv...

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7149927

From 2005:

More than 120 people were sickened after eating ice cream at their local McDonald's. The health department says the restaurant's dairy mixture somehow was contaminated with staphylococcus, and a mechanical malfunction in the soft serve machine allowed the bacteria to grow. So many people became so ill, so quickly, the director of the local emergency room told me he at first thought there was some kind of bioterrorism incident in the town.... Nancy Smith says she had taken her grandchildren for an outing, and stopped at McDonald's to buy them a treat. Her grandson Darien had a milkshake, and she says he was violently ill an hour later. He became limp and listless, Smith says, and they rushed him to the hospital, scared to death. Then she got sick. She says she had just three sips of Darien's shake, but it was enough to make her very ill. She told us she was vomiting so violently, she thought she was going to have a heart attack. She's now suing McDonald's, as are many of the other people who got sick in that incident.

It'd be really interesting if you could allocate your donation to specific branches of the government (i.e. NSF, Pre-K, etc.).

Interestingly a lot of the larger philanthropic organizations are just as administration heavy as the US government and suffer from the same mission creep and the same obfuscated, bureaucratic decision making process, etc. Not to mention the leadership is often richly compensated (i.e. $1M in salary) and non-elected.

In fact we should probably celebrate gifts to the US government more than we do.

I'd have to say I find the most interesting part of this article is that it is in the WSJ.

This feels more like it belongs as a fun musing in the New York Times or Atlantic that has a slight twinge of "I'm a bit more intellectual than tho" smugness to it.

Is it the sign of a post Murdoch WSJ or an attempt to broaden the readership base? Or is it just me and the WSJ Lifestyle section has always had such essays.

I think if the company could offer Fiber To The Curb and then the last 10-20 feet between the curb and the house's router was either DSL or Cable or 5G, that would ba huge win.

FTTC would avoid this scenario at least where a heavy user brings down the whole neighborhood.

But perhaps the bandwidth through the last 10 feet of DSL/cable/5G isn't enough to upsell customers to convince them the switch or modem equipment is too big to fit at the curb.

This looked interesting last time I looked into using Mindustry to teach coding to kids. The original Logic programming seemed a bit too low level.

https://github.com/cardillan/mindcode

https://mindcode.herokuapp.com

"Mindustry is a tower-defense type of game, now with added Logic. Logic is a programming language, but it is very low-level. It is more akin to assembly than high-level language.

Mindcode is a high-level language that compiles down to Mindustry Logic. Mindcode includes higher-level constructs, such as expressions, user-defined functions, control statements, or "direct" memory access.

Mindcode now comes with significantly improved code generation, including data flow analysis, loop unrolling and function inlining; for a list of recent changes, see changelog."

I feel like creating software applications is not what leads to high salaries as a software developer.

Its creating software applications and then signing up to support said software codebase for 100K+ users and agreeing to pager duty and triage management for it for more than a 5-10 years.

Perhaps AI purveyors should focus on automating customer/bizdev support by creating frameworks/workflows for AI pager duty and AI triage management.

It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname. At some point if you sell your company, you are putting the surname of all your descendants in the hands of some other entity outside of your/their direct control.

I think it's part of the uniqueness of the United States that different states can try different experiments.

If states like Texas and Florida governance want to run fast and are ok with potentially breaking things environmentally by easing regulation - we should let them.

Perhaps they are right that commercial/industrial interests should be prioritized over the state's local population if the United State's space ambitions are to be achieved.

Perhaps there's plenty of available land so not much is really being sacrificed and if something really bad happens? Elon, the leadership and engineering teams can probably move (back) to California.

Is this notable due to the lack of HN comments?

I wonder if its partly an issue when there is a combination of :

- decriminalization of drug use

- free access to treatment centers

- lax laws regarding unauthorized camping

that would a large number of dedicated drug users to migrate from out of state to Oregon (or whichever state tries it) from across the entirety of the US.

This would easily swamp any treatment facility capacity plan.

I think knowledge work perhaps is more similar to being a composer rather than a musician.

Musicians performing existing pieces add touches of nuance but are penalized if deviating too much from the original.

A composer on the other hand should be adding significantly new components to the existing body of works and is measured on how much they are deviating from the existing body of works.

A sports analogy (although a bit weaker) would be Olympic/NBA/NFL/MLB/FIFA sports which have known rules and limits versus X-game/RedBull type sports which are pushing boundaries of non-existent rules.

Tech activities more similar to athletes/musicians that benefit from repetition would probably be like timed competitive leetcode or competitive Excel tournaments[1].

[1] Financial Modeling Worldcup https://fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/

I think its instructive to look at the early history of Google and Facebook. In the early years they did not really turn on the ad revenue levers and just focused on increasing users (i.e. Don't Be Evil) - until a decade after offering their respective services.

Similarly Netflix is just now starting the ad revenue model after years of only subscription based services.

Eventually the temptation for multiple sources of revenue (i.e. subscription AND advertising) will likely be too great due to:

- IPO and Wall Street demands net income growth (i.e. FB/Google)

- Private Equity buys the company and needs to pay back leveraged debt

- The number of customers willing to offer up a credit card for Search stagnates and a lower cost ad tier appears and the ad infrastructure that is built is applied to the paid tiers

The hypocrisy is apparent when you notice that the pretty much the only brand of products that miraculously does not have third party resellers listed (and hence escapes third party inventory commingling contamination issues) is Amazon Basics. [1]

[1] Only "Amazon Resale" third party resellers are shown https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-8-Piece-Non-Stick-Kitche...

The hypocrisy is apparent when you notice that the pretty much the only brand of products that miraculously does not have third party reseller listed (and hence escapes third party inventory commingling contamination issues) is the Amazon Basics. [1]

[1] Only Amazon Resale third party resellers are shown https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Basics-Anodized-Non-stick-Stac...

The annoying feature of Facebook and LinkedIn is that every month or so they will suddenly wake up and clog up my feed with Suggested Posts. I actually prefer seeing Sponsored Posts versus the Suggested Posts because the quality of the Sponsored Posts is way higher than the AI generated Suggested Posts. Like I'd literally rather just see target full-blown ads versus engagement clickbait.

I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by blocking/disliking when possible.

Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that will curate people's feeds on their behalf.

I think an interesting follow-up discussion/blog post would be - okay getting a job in tech may suck... but doesn't getting a job outside of tech suck even harder?

In other words, if you were starting college today, would you still do tech? Is it still better than getting any other job for equivalent pay bands?

Specifically comparing early career job seekers:

* Easier/harder to get $50-100K tech job versus $50-100K job in other fields?

* Easier/harder to get $100-150K tech job versus $100-150K job in other fields?

* Easier/harder to get $150-200K tech job versus $150-200K job in other fields?

Other fields are things like marketing, accounting, law, medical, biotech. A quant/finance job is probably CS or CS adjacent these days so its basically a tech job.

My take is that by the time you get above $130K there probably is not any other field outside of tech where this is possible unless there is some very unique skill.

And instead of annoying but somewhat objective leetcode/live coding whiteboard interviews; hiring is way more subjective, credential based, network based and gate kept.

My hot take is that GPT is getting better everyday at generating complicated and correct code that's maintainable, but its still got quite a ways to go.

On the other hand today it's already passably good at generating stuff that requires less precision and less accuracy (i.e. humanities type stuff, marketing, managerial/secretarial tasks, etc.).

So while you might be looking at your own CS job eventually being in jeopardy, whole swaths of alternative careers you aren't looking at are probably way, way more in jeopardy.

The fun part is, as far as I understand it, the EV tax credit as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, did eventually include Teslas - even though Elon wasn't invited to the initial photo-op announcement party thrown by the White House due to the lack of unionization at Tesla factories.

On the flip side, support for the EV tax credit will probably be phased out if Trump wins according to recent articles I've read.

So then it seems it's not necessarily business logic but more about personal ego, etc.

It'd be interesting to understand how this is measured practically to determine if the infringement is occurring.

Is it based/would it be based on a measurement using lab equipment - perhaps measuring volatile organic compounds? Or would it be based on a panel of experts sampling it blind?

Just out of curiosity, is it easy to jailbreak a Peloton bike? Or are there any interesting open source stationary bike platforms?

Could be interesting if there was an alternative industry which could profit from the land and then the funds could be used for counter lobbying and offer an alternative source of tax revenue for the state.

I wonder if ecotourism would work. Like some sort of American safari to see these Pronghorn migrations.

I think the challenge is to determine whether or not AI applications are generalizably useful to all of society as general purpose PCs and smartphones or if they are more narrowly focused like crypto applications.

The million dollar question (or trillion dollar question I suppose) is for the upcoming quarters - will there be pallets of h100s waiting shipment, 2x pallets of h100s or 10x pallets of h100s... or have all the pallets are shipped for the time being.

Has demand saturated while downstream AI engineers tinker on actually profitable use cases or is it going to keep growing exponentially.

Probably most stock price models assume at minimum linear growth for the next 5-10 years. But if the future reality is that it nearly plateauing and will likely drop off...

"This is a typical "move fast and break things" mentality.. " with a big dash of “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” thinking thrown in for good measure.

Staying relevant is all that matters these days.

"There's many factors that make Europe less competitive than the US: small fractured markets"

This first one seems the largest hurdle w.r.t. startups. If you are a startup founder of say a ride hailing app - the total addressable market is much larger in the US for the same level of effort. If you want to scale beyond your home state (i.e. California) in the US, there are probably just a handful of different state/city taxes/regulations that need to be accounted for.

If you start in a country in Europe, you need to factor in:

- language translation of the entire app

- different country cultures/customs (i.e. tipping, wording of prompts and promotions) - even down to the naming of the app which might have a negative connotation in a different language

- prior to the Euro - differences with respect to currency, trademarks, patents, etc.

- entirely new country regulations and politicians that need to be "handled" - each in their own separate language which means a separate lawyer and lobbyist needs to be on staff for each country

- home court advantage - French probably prefer to support LeCab while Spaniards probably prefer to support Cabify