Well said. To expand on what you wrote, I like to think of there being three components (axes) to activities: fun, value, and meaning.
Fun is you enjoy doing it. Playing video games and watching TV is fun.
Valuable is it makes money. Importantly, it's what other people are willing to pay you money for, not what you think is important or even good.
Meaningful is it's spiritually enriching. These are things you would regret not doing on your deathbed. Spending time with your family or going to church are common examples of things that are meaningful to people (and potentially fun). This one is defined based on one's internal compass and varies significantly from person to person.
You can come up with activities that are pure fun, value, or meaning. Measuring activities against these three axes has been a valuable mental model for my time management and life design.
There's jobs that are fun and meaningful, but don't pay much. This is like charity work or passion tax industries such as game dev, music, or art.
There's also jobs that are fun and valuable, but are meaningless. Working at a trading firm/hedge fund is a common example (though some people may find that it's all three or only one). Another example is being a successful startup founder working on the wrong problem.
Finally, there are jobs that are valuable and meaningful, but maybe not all that fun. To me, this is what being a startup founder (working on the right problems) or how I imagine a professional athlete is like.
The grand slam would be having all three, but in my experience these are exceptionally rare. If it's fun and meaningful, everyone wants to do it, and supply and demand pushes the value down. Most of these cases are due to unusual personalities that let one find fun or meaning in activities others don't. This ties into the common startup advice of paying attention to "founder-problem fit" and "what are your unfair advantages".
I think there is yet some other thing which has a bit of both your Meaningful and Value. Stuff that you decide you should do not precisely (or maybe precisely and this comment is just not well enough considered) because it's meaningful to you but because you just feel it should be done.
Maybe because you just recognize that someone has to do it and you should at least take your turn if not make it your whole life. Maybe because you want to live in a world where it gets done, even if you live in a society that doesn't provide for it to get done. (no one will pay you or anyone else to do it)
Phrasing these things as meaningful makes it into something someone else can say is simply your choice. If it's important to you, you can do it. And let you shoulder the entire burden for something they absolutely benefit from and should be pitching in their fair share towards in some form or another, if not tax money then time or effort, something.
It is definitely meaningful for some people, the people that are so moved that they actually give their time & energy, but those are people for whom it's actually a large part of their life & identity. I'm not like that. I am not going to volunteer for whole shifts anywhere. I care about a strangers problems intellectually. I care in the sense that I want it dealt with humanely with dignity as if I had the problem myself. I don't care directly and personally, emotionally, unless they are somehow close to me. But I would happily pitch in my fair share if we all were, because it would be small.
It's partially value because we all get value from living in the better world thanks to the various thankless tasks some people perform.
Eh, maybe I'm arguing up the wrong tree and what you expressed already covers this.
I am thinking something like "This thing should get done not because I derive meaning from it.", but really maybe what you're talking about isn't even trying to deny that. The point would still be that I might choose to commit a certain amount of my life capital towards something, because of a certain amount of value and meaning that I, let's say recognize not derive or get, from it.
I'm leaving out fun. You can have fun cooking soup for the homeless. I can not imagine having fun cleaning someone who can't clean themselves and can't pay you to do it.
This is my article! I was surprised to see it here again. I hope you all enjoy it, I had a blast writing it. Thanks again everyone for the kind words and valuable feedback.
Great article. Other comments will have plenty to nitpick, but that will always be true for an article this long that covers such a broad spectrum of the financial world (from interest rates to venture capital incentives!).
Hi HN! I'm the author of this service. Thank you for your support.
There may have been some temporary downtime due to residential proxy running out of bandwidth. I have purchased additional bandwidth. (I run this service for free.)
There also may be some errors with particular videos because they are not accessible in certain regions. For now all requests to YouTube originate from United States, but open to change in the future to some kind of round-robin or fallback system.
I know it's not perfect. I developed the tool originally for my own use. It's open source and I'm open to any patches or pull requests.
Hey this is really cool, I literally had the same idea about a month ago but ultimately decided to not pursue it. Glad someone else did.
A few quick Qs -
1) Do you use the available auto-generated transcripts from youtube? Or do you do any audio parsing? I know transcripts aren't always available.
2) Do you have any plans to monetize in some way, do you think it would be possible? It's definitely a neat product but a tad generic and replicable, so I'm curious.
1.) We do no TTS of our own. We either use the original transcripts uploaded manually by the YouTuber or we use the auto-generated ones supplied by Google.
2.) No, I plan to keep it free as the operational costs are relatively minimal.
Thanks for your response. Yeah that's nice and simple. I wonder how much you'll burn keeping it up for free, are we talking like on the order of $20/mo? If you use models like 4o-mini it might even be less, that thing is insanely cheap and not terrible. Cheers
Thank you for the article! I found the "I understand computers and therefore the world" in the beginning a bit pretentious, but after reading the rest anyway, it doesn't anymore. I'd summarize the piece as:
"The hacker mindset comes with powerful tools: The urge to figure stuff out, the creativity to use it in unusual ways and the passion to share knowledge. Let's use it to make the world a better place. Start a company and gather allies. If enough of us do this, we'll have an impact on the world."
Yep. I know this is probably a bit revisionist (old-timey inventors wanted to get rich quick too) but it feels like companies used to more often be geared toward longevity, not ascendance, and I don't see how they could achieve longevity while constantly trying to make shareholders rich. Longevity really should be up there on the list of goals, with security and prosperity for all those involved.
I suppose a meat grinder growfast company could invent world-improving products that justify employee churn and abuse, but those would be unicorns with diamond encrusted horns.
What is the point of any of our actions if they don't benefit people?
The story of GE under Jack Welch and his underlings that spread out from there is horrifying. Boeing got caught up in it with the MD reverse acquisition. There was an audiobook I listened to recently that covered a bunch of this but I can't for the life of me find the title right now.
The idea is to focus on creating value that fits your morals and values, not just to focus on “creating value for VCs” which is what usually begets the “scale at all costs” conversation that has been so popular during the ZIRP we’ve lived through.
We work across all major ecosystems and platforms. Our specializations include EVM, Cosmos, Solana, Move (Aptos/Sui), and L1 code as well. We're a full-service provider and can do anything from auditing ZK circuits to web frontends to hardware wallet firmware. Clients include LayerZero, Solana Foundation, Aptos Labs, Sui Foundation, Starkware, Jump.
Me and my cofounder also previously founded the #1 CTF team in the world, perfect blue. In general our talent is top-notch, we exclusively recruit and retain the world's top hackers.
Fun is you enjoy doing it. Playing video games and watching TV is fun.
Valuable is it makes money. Importantly, it's what other people are willing to pay you money for, not what you think is important or even good.
Meaningful is it's spiritually enriching. These are things you would regret not doing on your deathbed. Spending time with your family or going to church are common examples of things that are meaningful to people (and potentially fun). This one is defined based on one's internal compass and varies significantly from person to person.
You can come up with activities that are pure fun, value, or meaning. Measuring activities against these three axes has been a valuable mental model for my time management and life design.
There's jobs that are fun and meaningful, but don't pay much. This is like charity work or passion tax industries such as game dev, music, or art.
There's also jobs that are fun and valuable, but are meaningless. Working at a trading firm/hedge fund is a common example (though some people may find that it's all three or only one). Another example is being a successful startup founder working on the wrong problem.
Finally, there are jobs that are valuable and meaningful, but maybe not all that fun. To me, this is what being a startup founder (working on the right problems) or how I imagine a professional athlete is like.
The grand slam would be having all three, but in my experience these are exceptionally rare. If it's fun and meaningful, everyone wants to do it, and supply and demand pushes the value down. Most of these cases are due to unusual personalities that let one find fun or meaning in activities others don't. This ties into the common startup advice of paying attention to "founder-problem fit" and "what are your unfair advantages".
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