yannis7

"we were promised social networks, what we got was social media" -- Elad Gil

briefly reminded me of my MATLAB days... back in the 2000s/early-2010s it was all the rage. Great IDE too

the USENIX YouTube link took me down quite the rabbit hole

I think the most tragic of all is that, based on my experiences in both startups and corporate cultures, most of that work people are killing themselves for is just "busywork" handed to them by managers who themselves don't know any better.

The amount of waste in human energy & effort in pointless jobs that optimise for "being busy" is, as far as 1st-world problems are concerned, a humanitarian tragedy.

your last sentence I think puts the 2nd pillar into the problem, which is not only technological (i.e. the abstraction problem mentioned in the original article) but also cultural

VICE seemed to make sense at a given time + place + context: * Gonzo journalism: "On my way to North Korea I'm gonna stop by my auntie where over lunch she'd beg me not to go" * Peak hipster: pre-pandemic hyper-urbanised young white collar people who started making money * Excitement about Web 2.0 weirdness and the over-sharing culture

all of the above created a compelling package back then, but don't seem to scale to a "global media empire" Shane Smith wanted to make, one that would topple the incumbents.

interesting how certain industries were never "disrupted" by startups, no matter the amount of hype that was generated in the mid-2010s [1]; banking is a major example (no startup bank overthrew JPMC) but the same seems to apply to legacy media.

[1] Shane Smith (VICE founder) quote about Murdoch during an FT interview: "I have Gen Y, I have social [media], I have online video. You have none of that. I have the future, you have the past." https://www.ft.com/content/61c51d64-4a9c-11e2-968a-00144feab...

This is also recommended by Donald Knuth in one of his technical writing guidelines [citation missing] so +1

not according to Pew - Instagram is still strong amongst teens https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...

Shazam belongs to that class of iPhone apps that when they were released I was like "wow, the future is here" -- this alongside the first accelerometer and AR ones

+1+1 spot on -- it's a very common issue nowadays that few people actually touch upon, or be able to verbalise

omg Ars Technica is still around! that takes me back..

nit: there are some fragments, say the speech of Spartan King Archidamus, which are recorded in sources like Thucydedes -- these you _may_ consider them as sources that reveal Spartans' self-understanding to some extent

curious if this is a direct challenge to Google by people like Thiel who have had a historic beef with them [0] - according to the "Super Pumped" book [1], it was Larry Page who personally ordered the litigation against Levandowski - and he was pretty decisive about it.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-15/thiel-urg... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pumped

A few anecdotes from my side: - I had one colleague and a former boss, both staunch Democrats, who knew GW Bush from Yale; they both independently mentioned to me how likeable he is in person vs. how bad he's in his policies. This comes in contracts to Obama (who my ex-boss had met in a fundraising dinner) who's super likeable/charismatic publicly but a bit distant/aloof in person. - As for the WMDs in Iraq, it's the classic intelligence fallacy; "send my people to find evidence for X", and guess what, your minions _do_ find plenty of data to support their boss's view! This happens to all organisations from govt. to companies - and will be only made worse with "Big Data" and "AI"

reminds me of a super-nerdy magazine column we had back in college, printed (on paper) in raw LaTeX

well, no matter if you agree or disagree with JL, I think it's great WIRED can still occasionally publish great articles like that

typo: "Email would probably..." ;)

as @gexla mentioned down below, I prefer looking for leadership/culture advice on historical / biographical books.

For example, "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was recommended to me, for examples of how on earth did the US manage to get a bunch of primadonna scientists to finish a megaproject on time (though this is not the main scope of the book) -- I haven't read it yet, but I would it put forward as a suggestion.

von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Rutherford, Turing, Teller, Szilard, Wigner, Meitner... the list goes on... -- how did that time produce so many people of colossal intellect? War certainly can't be the primary factor, given that many of them were brilliant/productive even before WWI

there's a lazy sensationalist style on that article that I find off-putting -- the relevant Wikipedia page is more sober and actually (or because of that) makes you more in awe of the man in question.

and by the way, where on earth are Larry and Sergei?

I've been a social smoker for ~15 years; I attempted Juul-ing about a month ago -- had to stop it as I was immediately (from the 1st puff) feeling unwell, super dizzy and occasionally with a massive headache. Even if this is not linked to any "contamination" of the pods, the amount of nicotine the put in those things is just insane. Didn't even bother giving the vaper to somebody else, I just threw it away

REF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ

wasn't Larry Ellison last year who was bragging that the whole of Amazon/AWS runs on Oracle?

Agree with comments. Not only quant funds have been around since forever but in fact the new trend is in a hybrid approach of discretionary/fundamental & algo/quant strategy -- see DE Shaw article on their "quantamental" approach in:

https://www.ft.com/content/0364850c-3ebf-11e9-9bee-efab61506...

> keeping an eye out for John like an awkward combination of James Bond and Pac Man.

instant classic

John D. Rockefeller was managing global oil monopoly and occasionally in the letters to his wife he raised concerns about his "mental strains".

By reading [1] it seems to me that the way he very efficiently coped such immense amount of pressure was through strict sandboxing of his work-vs-personal life and proper delegation to his lieutenants; it gave him ample time to spend with his wife, children, in-laws, his church and his hobbies.

[1] Rockefeller's biography "Titan" by Ron Chernow

we've all dealt with such people and I hear you on all the concerns raised.

But as pointed out, what you describe has nothing to do with the "generalist vs. specialist" debate

Adding to the comments of science politicisation, I also believe that the "popularisation" of science has taken a significant blow to its public perception.

Take all "I f-g love science"-like websites that portray research as people spending public money on if chocolate makes you better at sex.