When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with when it was smaller. Everyone has. There was something to it. But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company.
As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it.
Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does.
In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.
I wonder if we really will be talking about Woz vs. Jobs in 50 years? It has already been about 50 years. I don’t think that many people still talk about Rockefeller vs. Carnegie. Really the way Carnegie is still talked about is for his philanthropy and building 2500 libraries, etc. Those things remain.
“everyone overindexing on everything” is the kind of glib linguistic failure mode that gives powerful nerds a bad name: people who read it got dumber thereby because it’s got a hip sound and some pseudo-technical vibe and means nothing. And deploying that to hand-wave over the difference between Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman is pretty offensive to anything like the better angels of hacker culture.
One of those people actually died directly downstream of an act of civil disobedience with the issue being the commons of scientific knowledge. One of those people is on the shortest of lists around blurring the line between train and validation sets for personal financial gain so callously and so effectively that we’ll be years if not decades recovering.
People listen to you. I listen to you.
Aaron Swartz is nothing to do with this perverse contemporary thing. Far more recently than intuitive, our role models would sacrifice everything they have to take a stand. Today influential people take a stand on their own narrow self-interest even if it requires the sacrifice of what everyone has.
It’s broadcasting that Y Combinator is a founder friendly investor. That comes with costs, e.g. if LPs think YC would have doubled down on the next Neumann or Bankman-Fried, or that its leadership is going full Ackman. But it will work at the margins for deal-finding partners, particularly with young founders.
The hilarious part is this obviously wasn’t a message they trusted their partners to deliver. An army with precision weapons and intelligence doesn’t carpet bomb; YC is carpet bombing.
You mean the Graham post, right? Sure; I mean, I don't think it was a calculated move to market YC --- for one thing, YC more or less sets the industry standard for founder-friendliness --- but I could see how the ABNB talk may have rhymed with something Graham believes is a strength of YC.
My thing here is with this particular Ian Betteridge post. I don't think it says anything. It feels like it exists just to connect the "founder mode" meme to a cast of prefab heroes and villains, Swarz and Srinavasan, Woz and Jobs. I have a couple problems with that:
* While I don't think the "founder mode" post is aging well, I don't think it's at all about promoting the mythology of Jobs or marca or sama. Like I said in my addled previous comment, I think the "founder mode" post describes a very real phenomenon that people who build companies run into all the time and talk about all the time.
* I don't think "heroes and villains" is a useful frame with which to understand the technology industry, and they're especially not useful for understand what does and doesn't work when building a company. It's irritating that the post sort of implicitly asks us to think about whether Swartz or Altman are better (or worse, or something?) at managing companies.
* It is very weird to me to try to build in 2024 an argument around the idea that Graham is unfamiliar with what does and doesn't constitute effective management.
* I am past tired of people casting Steve Wozniak as the soul of what's good about Apple, and Jobs as a manifestation of what's fake about it. Like Steve Arlo said in Zero Effect: there are no good guys and bad guys; it's just a bunch of guys.
Sorry, some of this isn't really a response to you so much as an attempt to salvage what I was trying to say with my preceding comment. It was our last block party of the year. I was apparently in a state.
> But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company.
Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better."
Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out."
But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.
I think a lot of people are taking Paul way too seriously. I mean he listened to the AirBnB talk, wrote his version of it on his blog and tweeted that he did. That's about it. Otherwise he leads a mostly retired life in England and is not really the evil genius controlling silicon valley.
I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younger.
I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42.
This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.
It can also be explained by there being stuck with the same soul-destroying business model for decades that's slowly taking over everything and making life shittier for everyone except marketers to optimize revenue.
Getting older is indeed a factor and I am surprised tha author didn't reflect on that himself.
While it might be the case, there's definitely something else going on which I would describe as tech "globalisation" or "unification". The industry that looked like an archipelago of islands with their own ecosystems, philosophies and values increasingly looks like monoculture fields replicated zillion times (yc-style startups and "big tech co" being the two most popular breeds). Of course, the reality is more subtle than this - but the alternative voices and perspectives are completely overpowered by the mainstream narratives - to the point of being barely detectable.
As an older person in tech I see ageism alive and well in tech. The young ones don't understand why we oldies roll our eyes at hearing the 13th iteration of "this is ground breaking new idea" or when we gently interrupt a personnel or strategy discussion with a few use cases from the past to illustrate the pending shit-storm being proposed.
Time for the world realise this tech stuff and programming has been around about 100 years! Let that settle in. A century of code. So the tech population is now clever and curious 8 year olds all the way through to 80+ curious and seasoned Algol programmers. And we ALL have value.
Sure, ageism is bad. I'm in my 50s too and I've seen my share of hype cycles. But I think there is a danger of overreacting to the unbridled enthusiasm of younger people.
Every new cyle comes with ideas that are similar to what we have seen before. Sometimes I find myself thinking, OK, been there, done that, doesn't work. But I suspect that there is a sort of experience bias that lets me see the similarities far more clearly than what's new and different.
In every cycle people claim that it's nothing new and yet, with hindsight, we often find that small differences were important enough to change the world unpredictable ways.
I think it has value for older folks to contribute arguments and perspectives, but let's not be too self-righteous about it. Similar ideas can lead to very different outcomes in a different context.
> The young ones don't understand why we oldies roll our eyes at hearing the 13th iteration of "this is ground breaking new idea"
Why not constructively contribute by explaining what could be different for the idea to work this time? Or if you hate innovation (i.e. retrying age old ideas slightly differently - hoping this time it will work), why don't you pick another industry?
While it seems clear that general vibe is trending to the negative, it's interesting to me that everyone has their own slant on it. My personal issue with Graham is that his writings are all trite common sense-isms dressed up as complicated analogies or profound insight. Like the way people claim Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field", as if the term "charisma" wasn't coined for good reason a billion years ago...
I mean, at least Andreessen communicates directly, even if he's out of touch and tone deaf.
Anyway, we all have our gripes, and I think this article is poorly written, and the original article it links to is even worse. Doing no service to the fact that the people currently orbiting our little hovel of geekdom leave a lot to be desired. Or maybe you think this rant is poorly written and misses the mark...
> Like the way people claim Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field", as if the term "charisma" wasn't coined for good reason
Back in the day that was called 'being charming', not 'charismatic', and it was an offense: you're being intentionally dishonest and manipulative. Now it just means it's cute. Language changes...
> Like the way people claim Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field", as if the term "charisma" wasn't coined for good reason a billion years ago...
Charisma is active - as in, the charismatic leader talks you into believing their bullshit. Reality distortion field is passive - as in, you hang out too much around the leader, or people hanging out around the leader, and you end up believing their bullshit.
A lot of "tech" is mature now. People whine "where's the innovation" in phones, for example. At this point, WTF do you want them to do? Where's the "innovation" in spreadsheets or word processors?
It IS kinda boring. And it's not going to get better when it's a bunch of recycled pablum shat out by "AI."
I'd say the same about microprocessors. They haven't changed _that_ much now in about 15 years. You could put a Core2 Quad on the same playfield as the latest and greatest Zen or Intel "14th Gen" - they're recognisably the same in ways that, say, a 1996 Pentium Pro and a 1981 8088 just aren't.
At the same time, I wouldn't write off machine learning models so quickly. Applied in tight focus, they're unlocking a bunch of capabilities, even if consumer-grade Dall-E, ChatGPT etc are mostly automated bullshit generators.
You're being downvoted possibly because of the tone, but there's something to what you're saying. People keep creating toil because they want to re-invent databases or distributed systems when we already know how to do them properly.
I blame greed. It was all the people coming into the field for the money and trying to entertain themselves at work because they don't like tech, they like feeling smart.
> it’s difficult to look at people like Graham — people who aren’t as bright as they think they are
Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though.
The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.
We should also be honest how much of it is due to HN itself (as in the existence of the website). Before it I never associated start-ups with hacking, if anything, due to free software ideology, I always thought it flirted with anti-capitalism really. But today, the hacker world seems to be centred in sf and it's likely due to reddit and HN.
The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is.
There are interesting things going on:
* Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top.
* Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.
* Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind.
* Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities.
* Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard.
At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US.
* Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated.
* Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.
> * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.
How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since.
Seems to me like an area that could make use the sensor/3d tech from self driving, but wouldn't need to be anywhere near as reliable to still be a useful product. You could probably charge Apple margins if you cracked it first. I'd pay $5-10k for something that would last a few years and could passively clean a bathroom or kitchen to a reasonable degree.
> How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since.
This is a great example of "short term improvements are overestimated, long-term underestimated". As someone who jumped from a top-of-the-line robot vacuum in 2014 (not a Roomba - they were already slightly behind) to a high-quality-but-average one this year - those incremental improvements have added up to almost an entirely different product. That's not even counting the experiments out there like SwitchBot's plans (looks like the humidifier is out, but I don't see the dehumidifier on their site).
Cost vs. utilization is a big issue. About ten years ago, there were Foldmate and Laundroid, robotic laundry folding machines. They worked, but cost too much for home use. Industrial-strength machines which do such jobs exist.[1] They work fine, but you need a hotel or hospital sized laundry operation to keep that machinery busy.
> Electric cars. For new car sales … 50% in China.
This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1]
I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.
Except of AIDS, none of the items on your list are things we really need but just a naive attempt of masking the problems of modern society life.
Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.
I expect this one to be a big one. Food production is not yet a solved problem. Imagine if robotics could scale "food forest"-style organic farming to the size of our current mono-crop farms.
A key element is that Norway has some of the highest taxes on cars in the world, and one of highest VAT/sales tax rates, which created a very politically palatable opportunity for very significant tax breaks, with a perfect confluence of overlap between those who wanted an environmentally friendly policy, and those who wanted less tax.
There are a few companies working on actual flying cars. But they are lousy cars and lousy airplanes typically. And to quote doc Brown: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” Or cars.
That's a nitpick on the order of "LLMs are a dead end because they can't reconsider their output before writing it". Duh, run it in a loop. Duh, attach wheels to the "scaled up drone flying cars". If that's the standard, then every plane in existence meets it.
Noise, energy profile, safety profile, level of automation.
If they solve those well enough, it means a lot of the operational restrictions that make helicopters very limited in scope (few landing sites, insanely high operating costs due to needing very specialised, highly trained pilots and maintenance crew etc.) could be somewhat lifted.
Fairly big "if" though. Rotary wings are inherently high energy, and heavier-than-air flight has much, much tighter safety and reliability requirements than cars for a good reason.
Not having sugar AND salt in every food helps. To lose weight, a trip to the old continent where fruits are cheaper than processed food, does a better job than any diet.
But it works? We only have functional public transit in small amount of cities in NA as well. If we can scale it up, it might be a game changer. I’m as pro-transit as it gets, but unfortunately we don’t have political appetite for it.
San Francisco isn't a purpose-built lab, it's a real city that grew organically over centuries, like every other city. So if it works only in San Francisco now, it means it's 99% to working everywhere else on the planet.
>Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.
Would disagree, we have possibly regressed. We have more gizmos (like diabetes monitors) and diagnostics, but no real cures and a significantly more sick people.
I have MS and an MS diagnosis in 1994, 2004, 2014, and 2024 are all wildly different experiences. A lot of progress has been made in this area very quickly, to the point where you can see the stratification/differences in progression based on diagnosis year very clearly in support groups and neurology practices.
I'm about 10 years post diagnosis and in those 10 years a ton of progress has been made. It's to the point where I've moved from considering MS a probably lifelong incurable disease to 'if I can hold on for ~20 more years without significant relapses, it can probably be cured or controlled.'
Counterpoint: " mRNA vaccines " took less than three years to adapt to a new pandemic and scale up to mass production to cover a whole planet's worth of people. The tech and progress within medicine are insane. CRISPR and genetic engineering allow modified bacteria, algae, and yeasts to produce any biological molecule we want in mass. Computer algorithms allow new medicines to be tested and perfected without real medical trials.
As for the public healthcare and hospital industry in a few key industrialized countries, going through a bit of a ... "downward spiral" is a separate issue from the technology itself. (USA)
As for more sick people... diabetes is going up, and people aren't exercising. I cannot refute that. Perhaps a healthier work culture where people have more time to cook proper food and take care of their health will do wonders, but "who is gonna pay for the loss of productivity" always gets in the way.
I'm having a hard time putting this into words. Apologies if this isn't terribly clear.
As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped.
Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts.
Tech news is all jobs.
I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.
> If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager.
> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.
If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers?
It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not blaming employees for doing what's best for them, but it feels naive and unempathetic to put the blame of aligning incentives to founders, when the problems are systemic.
Actually, as a hacker, I find I have less need for the Jobs types these since I can do more myself.
VC have a distorted view of the world because they look for unicorns in a world where most companies just aren't. Most companies don't start out using VC money and finance their operations with revenue the company makes. It's easier than ever to get started building a company. All you need is time. And even that is getting better.
The web and cloud removed most of the cost over the last thirty years. And with LLMs we can remove a lot of people and time from the equation as well. It's gotten to the point where you can outsource a lot of things to specialized service providers instead of doing them in house.
I think it is entirely fair to say that there probably isnt just one primary way to run a large organization. That’s really the main takeaway I found useful from Paul Graham’s blog post.
He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.
Readit News
As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it.
Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does.
In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.
One of those people actually died directly downstream of an act of civil disobedience with the issue being the commons of scientific knowledge. One of those people is on the shortest of lists around blurring the line between train and validation sets for personal financial gain so callously and so effectively that we’ll be years if not decades recovering.
People listen to you. I listen to you.
Aaron Swartz is nothing to do with this perverse contemporary thing. Far more recently than intuitive, our role models would sacrifice everything they have to take a stand. Today influential people take a stand on their own narrow self-interest even if it requires the sacrifice of what everyone has.
It’s broadcasting that Y Combinator is a founder friendly investor. That comes with costs, e.g. if LPs think YC would have doubled down on the next Neumann or Bankman-Fried, or that its leadership is going full Ackman. But it will work at the margins for deal-finding partners, particularly with young founders.
The hilarious part is this obviously wasn’t a message they trusted their partners to deliver. An army with precision weapons and intelligence doesn’t carpet bomb; YC is carpet bombing.
My thing here is with this particular Ian Betteridge post. I don't think it says anything. It feels like it exists just to connect the "founder mode" meme to a cast of prefab heroes and villains, Swarz and Srinavasan, Woz and Jobs. I have a couple problems with that:
* While I don't think the "founder mode" post is aging well, I don't think it's at all about promoting the mythology of Jobs or marca or sama. Like I said in my addled previous comment, I think the "founder mode" post describes a very real phenomenon that people who build companies run into all the time and talk about all the time.
* I don't think "heroes and villains" is a useful frame with which to understand the technology industry, and they're especially not useful for understand what does and doesn't work when building a company. It's irritating that the post sort of implicitly asks us to think about whether Swartz or Altman are better (or worse, or something?) at managing companies.
* It is very weird to me to try to build in 2024 an argument around the idea that Graham is unfamiliar with what does and doesn't constitute effective management.
* I am past tired of people casting Steve Wozniak as the soul of what's good about Apple, and Jobs as a manifestation of what's fake about it. Like Steve Arlo said in Zero Effect: there are no good guys and bad guys; it's just a bunch of guys.
Sorry, some of this isn't really a response to you so much as an attempt to salvage what I was trying to say with my preceding comment. It was our last block party of the year. I was apparently in a state.
Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better."
Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out."
But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.
I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42.
This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.
Eventually, people just get tired of doing it the same way.
While it might be the case, there's definitely something else going on which I would describe as tech "globalisation" or "unification". The industry that looked like an archipelago of islands with their own ecosystems, philosophies and values increasingly looks like monoculture fields replicated zillion times (yc-style startups and "big tech co" being the two most popular breeds). Of course, the reality is more subtle than this - but the alternative voices and perspectives are completely overpowered by the mainstream narratives - to the point of being barely detectable.
Time for the world realise this tech stuff and programming has been around about 100 years! Let that settle in. A century of code. So the tech population is now clever and curious 8 year olds all the way through to 80+ curious and seasoned Algol programmers. And we ALL have value.
#endofrant
Every new cyle comes with ideas that are similar to what we have seen before. Sometimes I find myself thinking, OK, been there, done that, doesn't work. But I suspect that there is a sort of experience bias that lets me see the similarities far more clearly than what's new and different.
In every cycle people claim that it's nothing new and yet, with hindsight, we often find that small differences were important enough to change the world unpredictable ways.
I think it has value for older folks to contribute arguments and perspectives, but let's not be too self-righteous about it. Similar ideas can lead to very different outcomes in a different context.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Why not constructively contribute by explaining what could be different for the idea to work this time? Or if you hate innovation (i.e. retrying age old ideas slightly differently - hoping this time it will work), why don't you pick another industry?
I mean, at least Andreessen communicates directly, even if he's out of touch and tone deaf.
Anyway, we all have our gripes, and I think this article is poorly written, and the original article it links to is even worse. Doing no service to the fact that the people currently orbiting our little hovel of geekdom leave a lot to be desired. Or maybe you think this rant is poorly written and misses the mark...
Back in the day that was called 'being charming', not 'charismatic', and it was an offense: you're being intentionally dishonest and manipulative. Now it just means it's cute. Language changes...
Charisma is active - as in, the charismatic leader talks you into believing their bullshit. Reality distortion field is passive - as in, you hang out too much around the leader, or people hanging out around the leader, and you end up believing their bullshit.
A lot of "tech" is mature now. People whine "where's the innovation" in phones, for example. At this point, WTF do you want them to do? Where's the "innovation" in spreadsheets or word processors?
It IS kinda boring. And it's not going to get better when it's a bunch of recycled pablum shat out by "AI."
At the same time, I wouldn't write off machine learning models so quickly. Applied in tight focus, they're unlocking a bunch of capabilities, even if consumer-grade Dall-E, ChatGPT etc are mostly automated bullshit generators.
I blame greed. It was all the people coming into the field for the money and trying to entertain themselves at work because they don't like tech, they like feeling smart.
Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though.
The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.
There are interesting things going on:
* Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top.
* Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.
* Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind.
* Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities.
* Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard. At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US.
* Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated.
* Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.
How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since.
Seems to me like an area that could make use the sensor/3d tech from self driving, but wouldn't need to be anywhere near as reliable to still be a useful product. You could probably charge Apple margins if you cracked it first. I'd pay $5-10k for something that would last a few years and could passively clean a bathroom or kitchen to a reasonable degree.
Navigating a house requires a level of understanding that we still can't get using a top end GPU and optimal sensors.
This is a great example of "short term improvements are overestimated, long-term underestimated". As someone who jumped from a top-of-the-line robot vacuum in 2014 (not a Roomba - they were already slightly behind) to a high-quality-but-average one this year - those incremental improvements have added up to almost an entirely different product. That's not even counting the experiments out there like SwitchBot's plans (looks like the humidifier is out, but I don't see the dehumidifier on their site).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491732
This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1]
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-marke...
I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.
Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.
This can be said about practically any technology outside agriculture. It’s wild to pretend the items on that list don’t increase quality of life.
I expect this one to be a big one. Food production is not yet a solved problem. Imagine if robotics could scale "food forest"-style organic farming to the size of our current mono-crop farms.
A cure for type 1 diabetes is very much a thing millions of people really need
Techno optimism and opportunism go hand in hand, of course. But I don't see anyone else inventing the future. To paraphrase Alan Kay.
Techno optimism will always refer to Star Trek (realistically the ds9 version), not whatever crap Anderson tried to make up with that term.
Norway: hold my beer. 94%.
https://electriccarsreport.com/2024/09/norways-ev-sales-set-...
If they solve those well enough, it means a lot of the operational restrictions that make helicopters very limited in scope (few landing sites, insanely high operating costs due to needing very specialised, highly trained pilots and maintenance crew etc.) could be somewhat lifted.
Fairly big "if" though. Rotary wings are inherently high energy, and heavier-than-air flight has much, much tighter safety and reliability requirements than cars for a good reason.
Eating less isn’t all that much of a breakthrough, but it certainly highlights how hard it is to get people to do something they don’t want to do.
Would disagree, we have possibly regressed. We have more gizmos (like diabetes monitors) and diagnostics, but no real cures and a significantly more sick people.
I'm about 10 years post diagnosis and in those 10 years a ton of progress has been made. It's to the point where I've moved from considering MS a probably lifelong incurable disease to 'if I can hold on for ~20 more years without significant relapses, it can probably be cured or controlled.'
As for the public healthcare and hospital industry in a few key industrialized countries, going through a bit of a ... "downward spiral" is a separate issue from the technology itself. (USA)
As for more sick people... diabetes is going up, and people aren't exercising. I cannot refute that. Perhaps a healthier work culture where people have more time to cook proper food and take care of their health will do wonders, but "who is gonna pay for the loss of productivity" always gets in the way.
As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped.
Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts.
Tech news is all jobs.
I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.
If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers?
It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not blaming employees for doing what's best for them, but it feels naive and unempathetic to put the blame of aligning incentives to founders, when the problems are systemic.
VC have a distorted view of the world because they look for unicorns in a world where most companies just aren't. Most companies don't start out using VC money and finance their operations with revenue the company makes. It's easier than ever to get started building a company. All you need is time. And even that is getting better.
The web and cloud removed most of the cost over the last thirty years. And with LLMs we can remove a lot of people and time from the equation as well. It's gotten to the point where you can outsource a lot of things to specialized service providers instead of doing them in house.
He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.
I have no desire to contribute to this whole circus full for fraudsters
yes, non-participation is hardly possible though