Readit Newsdrewr commented on Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life newyorker.com/culture/inf... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee
They will not rest until humanity has become as depicted in WALL-E: the ultimate brainless consumers. Unable to concentrate or focus or form an original thought. WALL-E might be the most prescient sci-fi movie ever made.
Substitute hover chairs for automobiles and we're already living in it. As a walker and cyclist in your average midsize US city, I often feel like the scene where WALL-E is pursuing EVE through the spaceship narrowly escaping collision.
drewr commented on I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts blog.rongarret.info/2025/... · Posted by u/lisper
Smart Charter. I think that might still be a viable business even today, though I have not really kept up with the industry so I don't know.
Ironically, today I have a part-time consulting gig at a company designing network switches, and I see them wrestling with the exact same problems we were tackling 30 years ago. So FlowNet would be a very close second.
I personally know of one ongoing effort whose founders think it's very much still viable. Well done uncovering and acting on it back in the day, Ron. Too bad about the outcome. I'm grateful you spent the time to write these stories. Thank you as well for being a public champion of lisp, for which I owe a great deal of my own undeserved success.
drewr commented on I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts blog.rongarret.info/2025/... · Posted by u/lisper
OP would have to speak to his experience, but between a Google IPO and the $10M Virgin acquisition I would be surprised if he didn't average >$200k lifetime.
Throughout this thread, it's clear you have an ax to grind. Startups are obviously not for you, but many enjoy them and benefit.
> the $10M Virgin acquisition
I think he wrote that he didn't make anything from that. He held onto the equity because he (unfortunately) thought Virgin would turn it into a success.
> For over a decade, my dopamine (from work) came from a very predictable place: shipping new things. As a manager, those direct rewards will simply disappear, leaving you feeling unfulfilled for weeks (months in my case).
Your job as a manager is still to ship things -- only now it's to ship more than you ever could alone. You get the privilege and responsibility to steward the skills of two or more engineers and shape the entire part of a business. The dopamine is harder won and often more rewarding. Management is difficult and exhausting but it's anything but unfulfilling. Let's not start new managers off telling them what they can't do but what they can do.
Ironically, as a manager of software engineers you should still be very engaged with the team's code. How else will you understand your capacity and understand what gaps you need to fill? Run the test suite, review designs, read PRs, ask questions, give praise for attention to detail. You will keep the bar high on the team and advocate for their work more effectively within the organization.
drewr commented on Waymo One is now open to all in Los Angeles waymo.com/blog/2024/11/wa... · Posted by u/ra7
Well worth to watch 'Not Just Bikes' new video 'How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)':
It's long, but well worth an hour of your time. He even states in the comments that he set out two years ago to make a positive video about AVs:
What was most surprising to me was that when I began researching this video (two years ago!) it was going to be about some of the technical challenges that would need to be overcome in order to make self-driving cars a reality, but the conclusion was going to be that ultimately, AVs would be a good thing.
By the time I was done researching this topic I was absolutely horrified of our future self-driving dystopia.
The future he illustrates seems mostly plausible, except that it depends on all of the technology functioning flawlessly. I have a hard time believing that streets full of high-speed AVs functioning in perfect synchrony is likely.
However, that doesn't change my general agreement with the conclusions he draws in that video and the rest of his channel.
Having a simple syntax might be fine for computers but syntax is mainly designed to be read and written by humans. Having a simple one like lisp then just makes syntactic discussions a semantic problem, just shifting the layers.
And I think an complex syntax is far easier to read and write than a simple syntax with complex semantics. You also get a faster feedback loop in case the syntax of your code is wrong vs the semantics (which might be undiscovered until runtime).
I don't understand your distinction between syntax and semantics. If the semantics are complex, wouldn't that mean the syntax is thus complex?
But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create.
Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results. Search ads is now the most profitable monopoly business of all time.
YouTube is still young, but give it time. Google will eventually kill the golden goose there as well, by trying to harvest too many eggs for themselves.
The same will happen with AI results as well. Companies will be happy to lose money on it for a decade while they fight for dominance. But eventually the call for profits will come and the AI results will require scrolling through mountains of ads to see an answer.
This is the shape of this market. Search driven content in any form is and will always be a yellow pages business. Doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or some future AGI.