practicalpants

Er, as much as I love fun/interesting software things, the quality of these products are terrible for any real world use.

Solving conversational intelligence is the same as solving general intelligence (AGI), so unless google has solved the latter I would expect any chatbot system to still be pretty annoying for any nuanced or real world conversation.

Not sure disclosing all this helps their image, if people now understand they're capable of faking any sort of public appearance of anyone they need to.

their biggest worry is a new class of people getting richer than them fast

You can read a lot of Western political history since the industrial revolution, when the new class of mega rich Rockefeller types shocked the established orders, as filled with attempts/policies to prevent new Rockefeller like classes of entrepreneurs from happening. Perhaps counter intuitively, real free market capitalism is a great threat to the established political order since it produces the levels of wealth in new people that can actually change said political order.

Many in congress literally use shell companies to obtain payments discretely so yeah, shell company laws aren't getting passed anytime soon.

At risk of sounding belittling to those spend their life giving their labor to someone else, I think we can't go on indefinitely because we aspire to get something better out of our lives, and somewhere perhaps deep in our minds or hearts we know we need better.

After all this whole concept of spending a career at someone else's company only started in the late 20th C when the industrial rev created the modern corporation.

Do you have money? Quit your job, go travel, go entrepreneurial pursuing something that moves you.

Living in some San Francisco apartment, building a career at tech companies making 6 figures a year is, once you have some money, a pretty crappy wheel-spinning way to live life, by some opinions.

I don't understand why the author casually says Basecamp "burned it all down". Basecamp took action to set a culture they believed would help them succeed long term. Is having a tough conversation with employees that risks offending some of them burning it all down?

I'd recommend starting out with a landing page first before you build the app. Like a really nice, well-designed one, that captures your vision and core points. Just copy some startup landing page you like and tweak it. Create from scratch or use webpage builder.

Gives you advantages: something you can share with others, a developed/implemented vision, something you can actually launch at any time without the underlying product for testing reasons, and something that will psychologically motivate you.

I used to build out backends first because it was easier for me, but many projects just didn't get launched. The landing page first is actually harder in my opinion, but psychologically having something presentable makes the project feel real.

The same arguments could made against Btc and Eth just a couple years ago. I did lose an embarrassing amount betting on them circa 2018. Even today, Btc could suffer a 51% hash power takeover that would for all intents ruin Btc. Betting on Doge is not any more risky than the average crypto project.

Given the mainstream's reaction to crpyto, Doge, being cast as a refreshing, non pretentious alternative to Btc, might as well eclipse it in the coming future, I really wouldn't mind if it did, why not.

This is false information. There is definitely an active development team and the yearly new coin caps are pretty controlled with a decreasing inflation rate that will reach zero eventually.

It's absolutely built to be a real crypto at this point.

Had a cold water realization a few days ago that Doge, which has all the functions of Btc, in being non elitist, populist, and easily marketable because it's entertaining might very well be on its way to replacing Btc in market cap. Wall Street doesn't care about the underlying currency just returns; main street is going to like Doge more than Btc because it's not elitist. What's stopping it from dethroning Btc?

That is what folks have been saying for at least 3 months since I've been following.

I think you underestimate how the mainstream views cryptos as elitist silicon valley stuff, while dogecoin positions itself as "the peoples" currency. I think there's some bigger forces too that want to embarrass bitcoin and said elitist elements.

I'd actually be willing to bet 10k USD with you that by end of August Doge will still be over $1.00.

Elon is not the only high profile figure championing dogecoin, e.g. Mark Cuban, who arguably has a larger fan base.

The name is a clear satire/parody, they would be fine at least under US law.

Yes, Dogecoin's inflation rate decreases with time and eventually hits zero. The crypto community thinks Dogecoin embarrasses them and it's become cringey watching them react so severely to it. It's a fun thing no more risky or silly than NFTs.

Wealthy people minus a few eccentrics are most certainly not parking their money in NFTs. The crazy $69MM Beeple headline was actually a purchase by an NFT related company from what I understand.

Not withstanding unoccupied real estate investments are a problem in every major city. It's usually wealthy foreign investors living far away in particular...e.g. Russia -> London, China -> Singapore/Vancouver, etc. really seems like non-occupied real estate purchases by foreign capital ought to be restricted a bit legally

I don't think Feynman was that different in this masculine or promiscuous respect from many of that era's greats... Schrödinger, von Neumann, Einstein, to name a few.

Feynman at least writes extensively about his deceased wife.

I imagine you would not enjoy reading history too much as the 21st C Western first world attitudes on these topics are pretty unique compared to any other time.

Not sure it’s about cynicism as much as about understanding what's going on.

The amount of CO2 sequestered is about 80 cars/year worth, and I’m not sure if that accounts for the thermal decomposition reactions, transport, or other steps involved with bio oil production. (Worth noting the “bio oil” is not a usable product, as Charmful says on their website it’s a waste product they’re burying in the ground.)

Say they had 1MM Stripes, operating at 10^6 scale, e.g. 80,000,000 cars worth, it would still actually make no difference, reducing yearly global CO2 output on the rough magnitude of .000001%.

Not sure what else to say.

I do not know what textbooks you read or economic history lectures you took to reach your conclusion. This is the second half of the 19th C, the US was absolutely dominating the industrial revolution in the era that produced the Carnegies Rockefellers JP Morgans and dozens of others of similar stature. Entire new industries and processes like interchangeable parts, telegraph, petroleum products, railraods, rise of malls/retail, electricity, meat packing, industrial farming, investment banking etc. was all either originating from or reaching heights in the US, which also had the highest patents per capita rate, and an international reputation for a general population that was technically competent for the industrial rev.

(Not to mention the gov was essentially giving away 160 acre plots to anyone who wanted to settle elsewhere, which created intense pressure to mechanize due to menial labor shortages, not to mention a broader based prosperity.)

This is a general misconception you hear that America's dominance in the world (and universities) was due to the "old world" imploding in WWII. It obviously helped the US but already in the early second half of the 19th C America was dominating the industrial revolution, by a wide margin, and had cemented it's place as top GDP (overall and per capita), top global talent magnet, and top overall technical education levels.

IMO America has been the center of innovation with top universities because it is the top place where talent, globally, wants to go to make their fortune. This has been going on for more than a century.

Whatever country is the top magnet for global talent is going to have the top university systems as well as be the center of the world scene long term. E.g. if another country, say China, wants to succeed into this role it must be the top destination for global talent.

A coding camp is the opposite of hustling

Right on. I'm self taught before bootcamps were a thing. I learned by doing by launching a bunch of startup prototypes. Then I ran out of money so I started interviewing, went 1 for 1 and got a good 6 figure Rails job at a big corporation (skipping junior level), all with less than 1 year experience.

Many people getting into coding I talk to think this path is too hard and that a bootcamp somehow looks good on a resume and is therefore safe.

The same arguments can be made for startup accelerators. You really don't need one if you're a hustler who can build businesses. Thus they also attract some percentage of people who want a "safe" approach for their resume.

Intriguing that the motivation for coinbase was:

"Credit card fees are too high. In the next five years merchants are going to start moving away from..."

I think it's fair to say he was actually wrong. But succeeded nonetheless because everyone now wants to get rich speculating on cryptos, which is the dominant reason they are so popular.

A missing piece of this discussion is how American wealth got there in the first place: 19th century industrialization.

In that era you're either a farmer or an entrepreneur. America had a literal explosion of engineering, innovation, and entrepreneurship such that by Lincoln's death America was already the top global economy GDP (including per capita) and spearheading the industrial revolution.

This was much due to generally high edu levels especially technical education, specific regions of innovation (e.g. CT river valley creating interchangeable parts), and a lot of openness and mobility in the culture (and probably the general cultural obsession with commerce).

America doesn't exist like this anymore however it's a blueprint how inequality could be lowered... bring back a radical culture of entrepreneurship and innovation (not "go have a career at someone's company"), bring back widespread technical education, and bring back a whole lot more of our former industrial-manufacturing economy (which was like 80% of our economy in 1950 to like 10% today; "knowledge economy" is not going to get us there).

Heroku is supposed to be easy for launching prototypes yet it's a PITA for Django, one of the most popular prototyping frameworks, since they never bothered to build native static file support (their "whitenoise" suggestion creates really crappy performance, so you're forced to setup a whole new static server). Heroku basically exploded in popularity for support of beginner programmers, so idk why they are intent on alienating that group.

Thought this was sarcasm at first :)

Yeah similar age and similar thoughts over recent years. My suggestion is go entrepreneurial. It doesn't have to be IT related or VC backed. In fact you might have an easier time if it isn't.

Spend some months researching spaces. There's opportunity everywhere and I think anyone smart enough to do programming is smart enough to dive into other spaces too. Short list some ideas and put some stakes in one or two.

Maybe helpful to you or others: I have a similar startup architecture, Django apps on K8, and found that AWS Fargate extracted a lot of the madness away. Still not a walk in the park but it does a lot of crap for you. Been $300/month servicing light traffic.

I've been in this position many times. The only things I know how to are...

- post in relevant online forums

- targeted advertising (throw 1k or 2k at it and see what happens)

- targeted reach outs on linkedin sales

- cold email campaigns at scale (better follow best practices here so you don't get your domain ruined)

- spam your personal/community connections

- reach out to "non techy businesses who want tech" or other people who sit in your customer acquisition channels about partnerships

Yeah that's kind of it. It's not pretty stuff, you have to have thick skin and be ok getting rejected and annoying people.

Always in awe to read about assemblies of great minds like at Princeton's IAS.

Does another such assembly exist today? I don't think it does but want to know if others can point to one.

Did it happen then because the discoveries were "low hanging" enough that they would be found eventually, such that today we've basically exhausted the major discoverable parts of nature given human limitations, like a depleting orebody where what's left are marginally economic residuals? Or was there something in particular about Western societies a century or two ago that produced such brilliance (or even specifically the Habsburgs's HRE where von Neumann was from), which perhaps we can learn from to steer things today?