jppope

There are many ways to create "sticky" products, even commodity products (e.g. coca cola, starbucks, etc). Network effects are just one.

Regarding Price to Earnings... I'm not sure everyone fully fleshed out the end game for the frontier companies. It appears the pitch is that this current phase is a stepping stone to Artificial General Intelligence or Super Intelligence. I can understand the perspective of investors though... If you can get half of the world on these products at some point you will find something you can sell them even if its not the core product (i.e. loss leader).

I wrote a related article here: https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/good-soldiers-find-wars/

There will always be new, hard problems to work on. AI will not, and can not eliminate that.

Agreed, but we should be honest, the internet today is far from healthy

Audiobooks are just a different medium. I don't think people should pretend that an audiobook is a book. You process the two in completely different ways. This doesn't imply one is better than the other either.

For me I don't like audiobooks because its very slow and spoken stories should have a different cadence, velocity, set of dynamics, and diction than a book should (check out "the moth" to see what I'm talking about). I hold nothing against people who don't like to read or people who like audiobooks, or people who like slow things - Suum cuique.

Totally depends.

Lots of people assume that the valuable thing is the direct business, but a business can be a lot more than that. A competitor may buy you for your engineers or sales team or patents, or assets, or whatever (e.g. Siri, Motorola, etc)... and just toss the rest of the business or sell that stuff off after they have what they want. In other industries they may just buy companies for their assets. Also you never know what will happen with a pivot (e.g. twitter, slack, etc).

The bleak reality is if you can keep growing (making more money than you spend) that alone is usually desirable enough for people to keep giving you money and eventually provide an exit. Why? because it's really hard to do. Its a skill.

yeah, the production lines are in Reno, NV

definitely cool. nice work peterdemin whoever you are

I like postgres. I use it for lots of projects. I like other databases too. I think thats okay.

Here's Malcom Gladwell discussing spagetti sauce which feels oddly relevant: https://youtu.be/iIiAAhUeR6Y?si=UJUUiF6H0j6IY3lL

thanks I'm going to have to check whats going on with my setup then

Is there something wrong with their certificate? Chromium is saying https isn't valid

No, this is 100% battle tested. I can't drop numbers but we just did a study at work comparing referrals to non-referrals... its night and day. Referrals are out performing across the board. the only problem is that eventually you run out of referrals

Yes. Figure out who your top performers are ask them for referrals. Some people will recommend "meh" people, but more often than not your top performers hang out with other top performers because they appreciate the same things.

well, thank you for kicking ass and doing great work!

Eric, really interested in how you pick the things you work on. I'm a really big fan of the concept of the Long Term Stock Exchange, but projects like that seem to me at times like paddling a canoe upstream using a spoon.

Whats your criteria? Is there an analytical component? Are you willing to work on something even if "success" is unlikely? And with all of this going on how do you have time to work on books!

thank you for your work by the way. It continues to be useful year after year to me and people around me!

  - shrimp scampi
  - Old Adage
  - chai tea
  - Naan Bread
  - Rio Grande River
  - Lake Tahoe
  - PIN/ VIN number
  - ATM machine
  - GPS system
  - Panini sandwich

Correct. We actually don't play "football" properly as a street sport either though... its typically a flag style football (two hand touch, etc) but the main sports are (generally separated by season during school) football, hockey/basketball, baseball.

The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.

Yes, Code Monkey jobs are gone... I can assure you though that there are plenty of hard problems that reduce human suffering which still need humans to solve them.

Stuff like that is risk tolerance... its not strictly codified and its more akin to probability. Different companies at different stages, in different industries will all interpret their risk differently... how will a smarter model improve that?

It was made famous by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Incerto.

I don't really see that many ads to be honest. I'm not on social media (except HN), I use Adblock, plus I just don't consume a lot of the media that the general population does.

I totally understand what the article is about though... I went on to my wife's instagram and her ad load is unbelievable. She probably has to look at 1 ad for ever 3 reels or images or whatever the hell they call them. I couldn't imagine having to see that many ads.

Last quick note - part of the reason why I avoid that kind of media, and use the tech to block it. I had a professor in college who pointed out that the purpose of ads is not to sell something, its actually to make you unhappy.

Beautiful poem. Well said and hard cutting

Ask for better. Find a way to make things better. Find a way to make things better for others.

... but appreciate what you have too

My Dad used to cover a territory in the Northeast where he was on the road for up to 2 weeks at a time. Sometimes we'd see him just long enough for him to grab a haircut and remember everyone's names in the right order. Everyday he showed up to work he needed to be in a full suit and tie. Everyone did. If those suits weren't in good shape, and you weren't on time they were probably picking a different guy for promotion.

The expectation for him was to work 50-60 hours a week, not including commute, getting ready for work, and corporate social events. Time off was strictly 2 weeks until you hit a certain level and then you'd get 3 weeks. He didn't get sick often but if he was he still went to work.

Dad had it good. I used to jump on landscaping crews during the summer in SoCal and watch 60 year old guys break their backs for 12 hours to get ~$250 a day. I'd do it on the weekends for spending money.

I enjoyed the article but reading through all of the comments in this thread I'm genuinely surprised by the lack of appreciation for how good we have it. There's a "demographic" on HN and I'm pretty confident it aint the guys doing concrete work or running vampire hours at the local 7-11.

Moving around some 1s and 0s in between some coffee and meetings even at the bad companies isn't that rough in the grand scheme of things. I get what the article is trying to say - with all the productivity improvements when do the grunts get a little bit of those gains back?Unfortunately thats not how it works. It's "Red Queen Theory"... when something new changes the game you adapt or die - "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

this is the key fact. If a wealth tax were enacted and a responsible group were endowed with the money we might reap some value from a wealth tax. Giving American Politicians more tax money is like giving a heroine addict more heroine.

intentionally obscuring the fact that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax or unintentionally forgetting that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax.

I consider this fine, because proponents of a wealth tax consistently omit that it will ultimately be the middle class who pays the tax... the ultra-wealthy and wealthy can afford sophisticated strategies to render a wealth tax ineffective against them, and if that doesn't work they can just move somewhere else. Income tax was the same.

Just going to put this here to open up discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

The wealth tax argument actually is because our current 2 party political system is set up to where politicians effectively "pay" their corporate constituency with their discretionary spending, which has increased the national debt substantially.

The only way this system can continue is if we increase the receipts (aka tax revenue).

The political class has very wisely targeted "the wealthy," who are capable of tactically avoiding taxes, but as always it will eventually include the middle class who will ultimately be paying the tax. From their standpoint they will popularize this tactic because it will work

This is being sold as class warfare, but its really the evolution of our political system into an unsustainable system of patronage with public funds.

We have plenty of other problems like "buy, borrow, die" (discussed elsewhere in this thread), but ultimately the wealth tax stems from needing more public funds, which stems from politicians spending all of our money.

Wealth accumulates with no input once established.

This is incorrect, historically you'll pay a ~2%-3% loss via inflation if you keep your money in cash. If you invest (making it capital) in bonds or securities then you will see accumulation, but thats actually a risk premium.

Additionally, wealthy people can use securities as collateral for near zero interest lifetime loans which also bypass having to pay income tax.

This is true, its typically called "Buy, Borrow, Die" but the reality is that it is only available to a very small percent of wealthy individuals and exists because of the way inheritance is handled ("stepped-up basis"). Even reasonably (not fabulously) wealthy people will still pay retail rates on the loans making the tactic basically ineffective. Last I heard you needed something like 100M+ liquid for lenders to even consider it (presumably, because they will make more off of some other deal with you)

Can you substantiate why that would work in this case? From a fundamental perspective it looks like the AI companies (and Spacex) are looking to take advantage of the fact that no one is paying attention to increase the price of the stock during the IPO. Its likely that the public will pay higher prices without knowing because the price won't have stabilized.