You could be right, but in the hypothetical world where he's 100% right, and the current path the project or feature is taking is heading towards a dead end or is broken in some way. I feel there is a real cost that can be more easily ignored, e.g. working on a dead end or slowly failing thing that isn't set on the right trajectory is ultimately demoralizing and ends up in hindsight having been an opportunity cost and waste of your time vs. working on something else. And conversely if he's right about something like this, there should be positive feedback when it is turned around and starts performing better for the team involved?
Yeah I don't mean to say founders, CEOs, etc, should ignore problems when they see one (let's assume they correctly identify the problem, ie 100% right): quite the opposite!
But there's a (slower, harder?) way to right the ship and make the team better, and (quicker, easier?) way to swoop in like a Marvel Avenger and break everything (and everyone) in the process.
I feel Founder Mode should in theory be the former, but is in fact excuse for many to do the latter (I've no evidence for this, just what it looks like to me).
Ah ok yeah I see where you're coming from there. It's kind of like the question of did Steve Jobs need to be an asshole to be as successful as he was. And it can be tempting to think that they are intrinsically linked, but I also like to believe there is a world where he grew more on the empathy side but was still able to lead Apple perhaps even better.
A CEO/founder can be the most brilliant person in a company, and still not be as well informed about a specific aspect as someone else, simply because they don't have time with their other competing responsibilities.
So the allure of parachuting in and fixing a problem also comes with understanding the limitations that your brief on the situation was by summarized Powerpoint.
Which is one thing that's been said about old Microsoft era Gates -- he simply worked that much harder and faster to be able to do it effectively.
I think this is a pretty common and growing sentiment that I've felt too. One thing that has grounded me is learning and reminding myself that capitalism has driven extreme poverty across the world to the lowest share in known human history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#:~:text=Extrem...
I'm not sure if this on its own is enough to make up for the negatives, but it did personally restore some perspective that there is some real good to it alongside the bad. So I've personally shifted from more doomer sentiments on peak capitalism to feeling a little more hopeful. (That despite the dysfunctions of it there could still be a functional good foundation worth keeping and iterating on rather than the only solution being throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
Capitalism is a concept, a tool to organize production in a society. It doesn't do anything by itself.
And the capitalist didn't do any of those things.
It was the social democracy that demanded and made capitalists around the world to share the benefits of the system to the rest of the society.
For example in the Victorian era Britain the working class people were dirt poor working 16h a way 7 days a week. The capitalists didn't give anything willingly the working people had to demand these things via unions, labor movements and social democracy.
The fundamental precondition for all these changes is that capitalism massively increased the overall wealth of Britain. The market did the rest: higher wages, lower prices, new inventions improving life for everyone, increased living standards.
Workers negotiating and fighting for better condition, and joining forces with other workers have nothing to do with social democracy, it's a normal market mechanism to regulate the supply and demand of workers.
Where social democracy enters is with the political activism and the relative legislation, limiting working hours and banning child labor.
Trying to understand what you're saying, especially with 'let's fix that right there'.
Is it basically the idea that the good we've gotten out of it (like driving down extreme poverty) has required 'social democracy' as another concept or force, to bend capitalism towards something better? And that a more useful perspective is zooming out from just capitalism by itself to include that?
I do feel like I still have a pretty limited understanding of how all of this fits together, so I appreciate you trying to teach me something here.
For me Ted Chiang short stories are like a little trip in a story form. He's not the most rounded storyteller in atmosphere or dialogue and rich characters, but the central idea he's interested in exploring in each story often blows my mind, and that seems like his end goal, like breaking open the boxes we're stuck inside a little bit. He seems satisfied if he's able to reach that destination concisely.
Yeah but the burden is now on you to sift through the garbage to find the good stuff, especially since it's mostly mixed together in recommendations or search results etc. It feels more limited to me the other way around, like yes we have added some more good stuff, but good luck finding it.
If my favorite hobby store kept on expanding and expanding and the ratio of great stuff to garbage kept going down, I would definitely perceive the overall quality as being well into some death spiral.
Youtube makes it pretty easy for me. The algorithm recommends videos nd channels, and I say 'not interested' to the garbage, the result: a high quality subscription tab.
There seems to be a few topics which will cause your recommendations to spiral into conspiracy theory nonsense pretty quickly. Unfortunately you’ve got to be very careful with any gun content in YouTube as they almost always lead to bullshit in your feed.
Garand Thumb videos I've seen have been very good. Like the one about what supersonic rounds sound like going overhead. I'd guess there's somewhat less overlap with his content and conspiracy stuff.
This has always been the case since the printing press practically. There's always been way too much quality 'content' to manage and you have to sift your way through it. What has changed is that everything is now at our fingertips and we expose ourselves to the recommendation feed. I guess I'm saying that the problem hasn't changed, just our awareness of it.
The pulp mills must run, that capacity is already paid for. Let us convince the chattering classes of their value to the human enterprise in putting words down to keep the presses running.
"Romance" literature is honest in its own provincial way. No pretensions to much besides entertainment and consuming printing capacity.
Is it really on you to sort and sift, or is it on you to find a good guide? In the hobby store example, there are other people around to ask, and I think that is similar as well.
The future is more content, not less, so finding mechanisms to cope with that is well worth the effort.
Not exactly. Assuming the number of people in the hobby store didn’t grow exponentially, you would be completely empty in your favorite isle, most of the time.
But you aren't, because there's really only a few stores, not thousands, so people congregate at the same ones, and if there's nobody in those aisles continuously, they stop getting stocked (people create less content if nobody consumes it).
The problem is almost never that there's nobody in your aisle, it's about finding the right way to connect with them. There are numerous ways to do this. Even just leaving a comment on a video asking a question or responding to someone else's comment. That's about as low effort as you can get, but actually works.
Quality niche creators are partially motivated (and sometimes supported) by viewers. The bigger the sea of garbage they are swimming against, the less inclined they will be to start or continue.
People are motivated by viewers, but once it gets above a certain amount I think it becomes a different motivation. When I write things on reddit on a specific topic subreddit that have few posts in it, and those things get a few upvotes, I am more motivated to continue than posts in huge subs which get boatloads of upvotes. Because in order to get those one or two important ones, you need to know something specific and valuable, but to get thousands you have to find a way to appeal to a lot of people in a broad way.
Trying to chase the broad appeal will lead, in my experience, to a downslide where content gets less and less useful and more pop-culture oriented, or it becomes outright fraud or manipulation.
I'm surprised I don't recognize a single one of these companies. Isn't YC most famous for companies like AirBNB, Reddit, Twitch, Instacart, Dropbox, Doordash, etc. all things I use and that broke into pop culture? Or is that entirely from pre-Altman era and now it's just all tools for developers?
YC has been doing a lot more B2B for the last decade or so than in its early days. Many of the early unicorns (including all of those you listed) were B2C companies, so they're more well-known.
Oh ok. It looks like as a small business we use Gusto, so that's been useful for us. But it's kind of strange to me they had such a string of big B2C successes early on and then that side evaporated entirely.
The B2B stuff seems like things YC companies can just sell each other and make startup pain points easier, like pick axe stuff that doesn't require as much original vision or as much risk.
If you don't recognize any companies from that list (a number of which are very successful), then that's likely because you only learn about companies once they hit a truly massive scale, which takes time (and explains why the ones you know are older).
I have heard of that one, and I guess to be fair looking at the list again I've heard of OpenSea a few times too as an NFT marketplace. Just not the target customer I guess, I am not a developer (or into NFTs).
This is more about back in its peak, but E3 used to gather all the gamer's attention to a single keynote, it was like the Super Bowl of gaming. Basically if your game was on stage/shown off well it would be covered by every single gaming press and magazine and almost guaranteed mainstream gaming culture hype.
Today Geoff Keighley's Video Game Awards basically took over that role and similarly is the single biggest stage/audience to announce a new game to. If you had a game that they were interested in revealing + you thought it would sparkle to its audience it's a powerful platform.
I think the question is more like could a great team produce the next FIFA AND the next Call of Duty due to some kind of process improvement? I don't know, maybe there are hugely inefficient processes right now, but the sorcery of the art, to find 'the fun' of a new game concept or formula still feels very mysterious and ambiguous. Of course most games are just building on existing formulas of fun, but then you need a fresh edge to fight the established incumbent of the genre.
And if you found this secret process or meta formula for coming up with new amazing game formulas, why not just keep it to yourself to build the most spectacularly successful game studio in history. (Maybe that's Nintendo? Blizzard at its best also has some magic touch on any new genre they touch, even where they mess up like Overwatch they end up making and taking down the entire genre with them.)
I dunno, maybe in ten years game development will be like some automated AI windtunnel/R&D lab remixing various game genres and formulas and spitting out new fun things. But I like that there is a sorcery to it for now that elevates human creativity over process.
This is of course very true, genuine creation in video games is still and perhaps always will be (and indeed arguably we should hope it will remain?) an unsolved problem! I was just being somewhat snarky due to the parent seeming to wholly disregard the idea of assembly line video games when they are very much a feature of the landscape :P
When I compare the two Elon was (lucky?) to at least have a string of vision-fueled ventures that became a thing. What is Sam's history of visions? Loopt? Is Y Combinator considered in a new golden era after he took over? Did Worldcoin make any sense at all?
I'm honestly hoping I'm entirely ignorant of his substance and would feel better if someone here can explain there's more to him than that… I would feel better knowing that what could be history's most disruptive tech is being led by someone with some vision for it, beyond the apocalypse that he described in 2016 that he tries not to think about too much:
"The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
I'm with you, listening to his interview with Ezra Klein gave me the impression that he doesn't actually think that deeply about the possible impact of AI. He says it worries him, but then he seems to wave those worries away with really simplistic solutions that don't seem very tenable.
What bothers me most is that the picture he paints of success itself is some handwavy crap about how it could "create value" or "solve problems" or some other type of abstract nonsense. He has displayed exactly 0 concrete, desirable vision of what succeeding with AI would look like.
That seems to be the curse of Silicon Valley, worshiping abstractions to the point of nonsense. He would probably say that with AGI, we can make people immortal, infinitely intelligent, and so on. These are just potentialities with, again, 0 concrete vision. What would we use that power for? Altman has no idea.
At least Musk has some amount of storytelling about making humanity multiplanetary you may or may not buy into. AI "visionaries" seem to have 0 narrative except rehashed, high-level summaries of sci-fi novels. Is that it?
I agree, listening to the podcast I think the answer is that “yes” that is it: faith in technological progress is the axiom and the conclusion. Joined by other key concepts like compound growth, the thinking isn’t deep and the rest is execution. Treatment of the concept of ‘a-self’ in the podcast was basically just nihilistic weak sauce.
AI is not an abstraction. It's rational to be hand wavy about future value, it's already materialized. AI is basically an applied reseaarch project, he should be more like a Dean herding researchers and we should take him as that. In a previous era, that's what it would be: a PhD from Berkley in charge of some giant AT&T government funded research Lab thing. He'd be on TV with a suit and tie, they'd be smoking and discussing abstract ideas.
The main question about OpenAI is this: can you have any better structure to create singularity
that will happen anyways (Some people don't like the word AGI, so I just definine it by machines having wastly more intellectual power than humans).
Would it be better if Google, Tesla or Microsoft / Apple / CCP or any other for profit company did it?
Are you really insinuating that Elon was simply “lucky” when it came to disrupting and transforming two gargantuan and highly complex industries at the same time?
I think my main point was more that despite what you (not you personally, anyone reading) think of Elon, at least he has this track record of visionary companies and Sam does not.
Personally my take on Elon is something like this – he found a vacuum in the industry of smart engineers who want to work on something truly ambitious, the kind of people who feel most SV startups are bullshit. And as a sci-fi nerd he came in with money and pitched several sci-fi ambitious project ideas/visions that attracted these engineers etc. to make them happen. And I think he was rewarded for this. You could tally that as another vision that he had that was onto something.
well, you're definitely correct in that one of his superpowers is attracting some of the best talent to work for him (at least that was the case when he started Tesla and SpaceX). But you're completely overlooking his ridiculous work ethic (100+ hours per week for years on end), plus his own elite engineering chops (he was the chief engineer at SpaceX), and there are interviews of rocket engineers that worked for him stating that if you weren't on top of your game, Elon would call you out on it, even citing specific sections and page numbers of rocket science books on the fly mid-conversation. It's not just money he brought to the table.
Part of the article's characterization of that camera as a toy seemed to be how simple it was to operate and designed, and that's what allowed a non-photographer astronaut to make use of it, or the engineers at NASA to remix it days before the launch for their priorities. So at least it makes some case for the value of 'toys' while it might simultaneously look down a little at them. The toy-like approachability and simplicity is what enabled these people to play with it and have space photography taken seriously as a result.
Well the idea they might look down at John Glenn or think a fancy camera might be too challenging is absurd too.
The article misses that John Glenn was himself an engineer who had an exceedingly good grasp of operating exceptionally complex machinery. Of course he could figure out how to use any camera on the market.
There are lots of people in photography who are not technically inclined but pretend they are cause they can use a camera, after all being technically inclined is not what makes you good at photography.
It's totally possible John Glenn & the other engineers bought a whole bunch of cameras and did exposure tests and ergonomic tests in terms how easy their modifications would be and then selected this camera as superior to what the Petapixel guys might have thought was the superior prosumer camera of the late 50s.
>bring technically inclined is not what makes you good at photography
I think you would be hard-pressed to find anybody who asserts that is the primary skill/inclination needed to be a good photographer, but as I said, in another comment, I wouldn’t necessarily frame being technical as useless or particularly secondary. It is as integral as “having an eye,” which frankly is just another way of saying somebody understands the technical aspects of how to frame a photo, even if they don’t know how to articulate it (which they will eventually have to if they actually want to be good at photography). Even affordable prosumer digital cameras require some technical proficiency if you want to get the best results out of them.
For mobile gaming there might be some creators here or there scratching out a living like that but probably about 0.1% as many as you imagine, or as there seemingly should be considering how much money is in the ecosystem. The vast majority of that money is sucked up by big IP and older established apps and pseudo publishers/install networks that rip off the latest trends and blast them to their audience full of ads etc. Apple Arcade was trying to create a healthier walled garden within App Store but years later feels kind of like a big brand bargain bin the way it's been run. It's just very extreme winner takes all dynamics.
