crwalker

As a San Franciscan, I am so happy to see this. SF needs negative feedback on the poor choices it makes, and so far the tech boom has somewhat obscured the consequences.

Start and then sell a financial services company. Then build the space company.

I am hardly a fan of Gerard but this is a well written summary of the guidance.

The only thing I would add to clarify money transmission as "transmitting value that substitutes for currency" is that exchanging funds for goods (normal commerce e.g. buying a coffee with credit card / cash / apple pay / stablecoin) is probably not considered money transmission. But I'm not your lawyer.

I would say ... they folded.

One-star reviews are the best signal I can find for product quality. They will let you know if there is a repeatable issue with trustworthy incentives. If there are more 2 star reviews than 1 star reviews and there is no pattern in the 1 star reviews, that's a great sign.

Yes on negative connotations: the title "Turbotax for Bankruptcy" made me think this would be a hit piece on an unscrupulous vendor.

Jira also has the least consistent UX of any SaaS product I've used (Skype may be a close second).

Fused filament fabrication (FFF) is fighting against physics in the same way that O(n) vs O(n^2) vs O(n!) algorithms have wildly different performance at scale.

It's a point solution, depositing ~1 voxel per unit of time. Running print heads in parallel is still O(1). Speeding up the print head runs out of steam because you run into vibration limits for the machinery (you can hear the rattling in the audio for this article). To really scale you need to deposit ~n voxels per unit of time (HP's MJF technology) or ~n^2 (Carbon's CLIP).

You need lots of voxels for high resolution for most applications. There are certain exceptions like prototyping in PETG or 3D printing concrete houses where the speed limitations of FFF may not be a big issue. But for 3D printing to compete with many forms of traditional manufacturing, simultaneous parallel structuring of matter is key.

This seems really observant. If the true goal is "building beautiful tech" then shipping an actual product usually takes one (far) away from that goal. Those who appear to self-sabotage by pushing back launch dates may simply be revealing their real goals. I think it's critical to honestly evaluate motives before starting a project to avoid burnout.

I keep suggesting that folks name their next child Ashurbanipal, Shalmaneser, or Tiglath-Pileser. So far nobody has taken up the offer ... but think of the excellent nicknames: "time to wrap up The Prince and study some more endgame strategies, Tiggy!"

This sounds like a preeminently practical strategy.

Fair enough: I am most critical of the hype cycle itself, and haven't looked through the longer publications in detail.

Yes, I think it's more about signaling and CYA than fact-finding.

I've found the Gartner hype cycle paradigm to be vastly overrated after experiencing real hype cycles in several industries.

If you examine their hype cycle charts over about a decade, you'll notice that technologies join or leave the chart randomly, and very few actually move in a linear fashion along the hype cycle: the charts offer no real predictive power.

I think the "hype cycle" narrative only matches a small fraction of tech innovations. Sometimes tech is adopted in a fairly smooth sigmoid. Sometimes it dies suddenly pre-plateau because it was actually vaporware or a substitute became more competitive. Sometimes there's a single giant hype cycle (dot-com?). Sometimes there are several repeating cycles (looking at you today, cryptocurrencies).

Is the tin from a conflict-free source? How can you be sure without a blockchain to ensure provenance? (This is an even poorer joke)

Both views could be correct: Taleb's point is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I haven't read Sapiens, and I hope Harari is correct, but I'm not tracking the second argument. Certain governments believe they can conquer minds, as evidenced by detention/propaganda camps and universal surveillance/scoring. If a government with this perspective successfully invaded another country, wouldn't they institute a similar program there and expect similar results?

Thankfully, we seem to have left the world of total war.

Deaths in armed conflict form a fat-tailed distribution. Extreme events dominate, and the absence of any world wars for several decades is not evidence that humanity has gotten more peaceful if world wars happen roughly every couple hundred years. See Taleb, who is much more clear. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violencenobelsymposium.pdf

I thought I was going to hate this essay but it was wonderful.

He discusses the graph structure of a city: it should be a semi-lattice and not a tree, and there we agree entirely.

But a city should be a tree in the sense that it's an organic structure that iteratively improves in response to local knowledge, rather than a centrally planned crystal that assumes perfect foreknowledge of needs.

With an attitude like this, SF will be the next Detroit. Exponential economic curves always turn out to be sigmoids, and when the sigmoid flattens and the economy is carrying tremendous dead weight predicated on future increasing prosperity, the city will be out of options.

It's a simple way to express the difference between probabilities for an ensemble of game players and probabilities for a particular player over time.

If the player is ruined, the game stops for them.

More from Taleb: https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf410...

--edit: added "for them"

Weak. SoftBank has always seemed suspiciously large and cavalier. I expect there's a venture analog to the expression "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." Let's hope they stick the WeWork landing ...

Current US zoning creates vast swathes of single-family-housing-only areas. This segregation prevents a lifestyle of walking. In order to preserve the value of single-family houses, we've chosen to destroy the livability of the city.

There are big potential downsides. Blockchains are chains. They don't forgive. They don't forget.

But I still think it's a worthwhile endeavor.

Yes.

Crypto is a compelling simulacrum of classical liberalism (free individuals engaging in trade and limited governments using precise laws to protect the commons).

This time we are trusting machines and mathematics to preserve individual rights rather than culture.

The problem isn't the specific number, it's the intent behind changing the number and the decades of training the public on a different number.

If the claim that standard 5 second yellow lights were shortened to 3 seconds for traffic cameras is true, Suffolk county officials should be ashamed. This is simply extortion.

Recognize that other startups are rarely the threat. Doing nothing / business as usual is the threat. Care about solving real needs for your customers.

"there's nothing wrong with allowing near-infinite screen time ... it's not the screen that's the problem"

I beg to differ. Humans aren't built to sit and look at screens 1-2 feet from their face all day. There aren't infinite hours to choose from. There are 24 today. Every hour spent on the screen incurs a tremendous opportunity cost: exercise, adventure, socialization, cooking, grooming, sex, sleeping, etc.

Digital and real-world goods are not fungible because humans are embodied.

We need to develop a reflexive (yes, unthinking) ethical response to digital technology, one that's built from common-sense analysis of the long-term side effects, and train it into our kids (and others we care about).

As an analogy, "don't eat that: it's dirty" is not a proposition that's meant to be analyzed on a case by case basis, it's meant to be applied automatically to the entire world excepting a few very clear circumstances. It's a good heuristic.

I don't know what the digital equivalents will be, but would love to hear suggestions.

"Don't follow the likes"

"You're the product"

"Don't post anything unless you want it in the NYT"

"Whose phone is that? (Google's)"

-- edit (spelling)

That’s a great description of the challenge.

To me, some California norms seem a bit like margin trading: loved for their high rewards when times are good, but eschewed by many with a broader historical view due to the potential for ruin.