I haven't been following him for some time, but admit to enjoying his stuff, earlier in the century. He gets a bit too shrill and self-aggrandizing for me.
Xkcd is even scruffier, but has always been a daily visit for me. The ideas are more important than the artwork.
Well, no. The locksmith paradox is where a skilled person can walk up to a novel problem and quickly solve it, irking the customer who paid a large sum for the results. Here the thieves almost certainly didn't trip over the Binance vulnerability and solve it in 20 minutes; they planned and researched this task for a long time before executing.
If you want to get that narrow, then why not dismiss my comment by saying that they are not literal locksmiths? The locksmith paradox is about underestimating the expertise behind a quick result, and that expertise can include extensive preparation.
The locksmith paradox is about paying a lot for a small amount of apparent work, right?
The paradox is resolved by considering the expertise, which took a long time and much effort to acquire.
With the heist, the analogous paradox is somewhat weakened. There is hidden effort, but it’s highly specific to the actual target task.
With the locksmith, the hidden work is done on entirely separate tasks and so on, which happen to provide the necessary skills for the current target task.
The mistake is believing that you can make no mistakes. Either you make a mistake by taking too long to polish everything to a blinding sheen, or you ship at a reasonable frequency and sometimes make mistakes in what you ship.
You guys must not have a lot of years of experience? My friends groups have a few hundred million dollars each (the junior developers are in the lower hundreds)
We're older. We missed out on the AI boom and the really juicy stock grants. Throw in toys that depreciate in value, tuition for the kids, a couple divorces/trophy wives, etc. and the money goes fast. It's amazing we have anything left at all!
The good: smartest people I have ever worked with, though also some of the dumbest (think of a saddle curve rather than a bell curve :-). Really interesting, fun, and really super-hard technical problems.
Discouraging-but-part-of-life issues: nobody is in a rush because everything is a marathon. It typically takes decades to get anything into the market; though regulators over the past few decades have been changing things to speed things up (basically doing science to make the process more adaptive and dynamic) it's still hard. You're continually looking for needles in haystacks: wispy signals that may be noise, extracted from huge datasets. As a startup, expensive slow, e.g. an overnight session on an HPLC can be a $10,000 experiment (or more because you're probably running a lot of those instruments in parallel at once) after having a bunch of people working all day to prep the samples.
The terrible: the industry is riven top to bottom with fear. Fear that the science will not work out. Fear that someone else is smarter than you (as a result: pervasive arrogance and hostility). Fear in the FDA that some company trying to game the system* will get something past you, or that the inspector general will launch an investigation, or some congressperson will launch a missile at you for no legitimate reason.
Also, you're launching artillery shells that can't be altered in flight. You write a study and then you have to run it with the protocol you wrote and got approved. You can't alter your marketing message unless it refers to scientific results explicitly demonstrated in a trial. And since the trials typically take years, there's a lot of sitting around.
* Back when I was in the biz we absolutely did not try to game the system and it made it a lot easier to work with the Agency (FDA). But the rules kept being made tighter and tighter to lock our bad action by companies. And of course the recent destruction of the FDA means all the rules have been thrown out the window, but by then I was already long gone. But my friends in the industry are still shocked and appalled.
reply