napoleoncomplex (u/napoleoncomplex)

napoleoncomplex commented on Finnish City Inaugurates 1 MW/100 MWh Sand Battery cleantechnica.com/2025/08... · Posted by u/erwinmatijsen

napoleoncomplex · 4 months ago

For anyone interested in a breakdown of the basic logic, this recent blogpost that trended on HN is probably the best: https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html

Really interested in seeing how it fares in reality, almost sounds too good to be true.

napoleoncomplex commented on · Posted by u/ivewonyoung

napoleoncomplex · 8 months ago

"In response, Lord Watts added that young people “are not stupid”, explaining that if they assume they will “earn low incomes and there’s no future”, then youths will likely lower their aspirations as a result."

There's probably a lot more interesting info hiding behind that statement. If housing is massively unaffordable (as it in the UK), social mobility is rather low, why go out there and destroy yourself in low wage jobs?

Not saying there's no spoiled youth waiting for their lottery ticket that will never come, but there's a rational aspect to it as well.

napoleoncomplex commented on YC Alumni is copying us with $2.3M funding · Posted by u/jpctan

napoleoncomplex · a year ago

You're on the right track in channeling this negative energy into productive work on the company.

There are a few things to keep in mind, some of them you've already argued yourself. One, Engage is a common word, so that's on you, and two, more importantly, in today's SEO/ASO/other algorithmic wars, if you truly are the leader in this space, people will copy as much of your name/branding as possible to steal your customers' attention.

You are absolutely not in a unique position in this regard, if you want evidence, look at this top 50 generative AI mobile apps ranking: https://isarta.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-6-1.... Count the amount of Chat + "something" names, and the amount of practically identical logos as ChatGPT in addition. That's the game these days, if you are successful, you will be copied relentlessly.

And the copycats might not even be copycats in the sense you're thinking. Automated customer engagement, LinkedIn or otherwise, is probably among the top 3 ideas that came to mind to anyone working in the sales/CRM space as soon as LLMs became convincingly human in conversation. So it's just thousands of people realizing the same opportunity at roughly the same time, going out to build it, maybe checking if there's a significant player in the space already, learning from their mistakes, copying the parts that made sense, and firing on all cylinders to become the leader in the space.

Yes, someone with more money might even beat you to the #1 spot, and the people who you think are your competitors right now might not even be relevant in a year, when various CRM companies build this functionality into their systems as a feature. In an even worse scenario, companies like Persana might be acquired with way worse numbers than you have, because of the network, the budget, the lower risk due to being ex-LinkedIn, etc.

None of this is particularly "fair" in the school playground sense of the word, but rarely anything is in business. If you have a true competitive advantage in terms of product, you have better odds than most, but maybe someone is going to beat you on distribution, pricing, marketing, targeting, to the point that product will barely matter.

It's on you to figure out what you want to focus on, and what outcome you will be happy with. If you have the metrics, you can probably fundraise easily. You might not want to, because you want to bootstrap, but then stop wasting energy on thinking about competitors who are doing it differently. Whatever choices you make, make them, and focus on your own path.

napoleoncomplex commented on Geoffrey Hinton said machine learning would outperform radiologists by now newrepublic.com/article/1... · Posted by u/Hard_Space

napoleoncomplex · a year ago

There is a tremendous share of medicine specialties facing shortages, and fear of AI is not a relevant trend causing it. Even the link explaining shortages in the above article is pretty clear on that.

I do agree with the article's author's other premise, radiology was one of those fields that a lot of people (me included) have been expecting to be largely automated, or at least the easy parts, as the author mentions, and that the timelines are moving slower than expected. After all, pigeons perform similarly well to radiologists: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4651348/ (not really, but it is basically obligatory to post this article in any radiology themed discussion if you have radiology friends).

Knowing medicine, even when the tech does become "good enough", it will take another decade or two before it becomes the main way of doing things.

napoleoncomplex commented on TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro' tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/WithinReason

wil421 · a year ago

Just like robo-taxis are supposed to be driving us around or self driving cars. Not to mention the non-fiat currency everyone can easily use to buy goods nowadays.

napoleoncomplex · a year ago

Waymo was providing 10,000 weekly autonomous rides in August 2023, 50,000 in June 2024, and 100,000 in August 2024.

Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming.

Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.

napoleoncomplex commented on Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's suicide subtledigressions.substac... · Posted by u/Curiositry

stavros · a year ago

Why do people mention Confederacy of Dunces here? I'm not sure how it relates to the song.

napoleoncomplex · a year ago

Half of the linked article is about the story behind Confederacy of Dunces.

napoleoncomplex commented on 2M users but no money in the bank exercism.org/blog/septemb... · Posted by u/leandot

napoleoncomplex · a year ago

Maybe this will be helpful to the author (partially already mentioned):

- Nonprofit business model does not equal "everything is free for the user forever", I'm guessing you already know that, but the wording on why you don't believe in nonprofit business models explicitly mentioned keeping everything free as the reason. You can earn revenue from users in a nonprofit business.

- You have a big audience with good engagement for the segment, there are multiple ways to make money without abandoning the core mission (job boards, screencast upsells for advanced courses, premium content, whatever else, look at how Remoteok.com makes money, copy-paste as the founder is super open on his process)

- Being a for-profit business and fundraising, will temporarily solve your issue of having funds to run a business. It will not solve the issue of not knowing how to/being afraid to charge users or other parties for the value they get out of your product. You could already be solving this problem today, and you have a 2million audience pipeline built in to solve that issue.

I'm not dismissing the challenge of some business segments being extremely difficult to make money in despite the value being meaningful, I work in healthcare, so I know, but since your new business will effectively be in the same segment, do focus on the revenue aspect much sooner and much than you think you'll need to, because you already know what happens if you don't.

And big respect for what you've built in a super crowded space, you obviously have the product and user empathy chops needed, wishing you the best of luck on nailing the business chops!

napoleoncomplex commented on Unlock Articles with Paywallskip paywallskip.com/... · Posted by u/francocanzani

holistio · a year ago

I think the original question has some logic.

If the content is untruthful, it isn't in analogy with a fruit that you don't like, it's in analogy with a rotten fruit.

I expect a refund if a rotten fruit is delivered.

Really hard to implement with content.

napoleoncomplex · a year ago

Perhaps a simpler analogy, you see a new bag/flavour of chips in the store, "super crunchy" "delicious", you buy it, go home, tastes horrible, barely crunchy, do you get to take it back and get your money back?

napoleoncomplex commented on Unlock Articles with Paywallskip paywallskip.com/... · Posted by u/francocanzani

m000 · a year ago

Can I get my money back if it turns out that some NYT article was outright lies, probably already paid for by some undisclosed shady entity?

napoleoncomplex · a year ago

Do you get your money back if you go to the store and buy some new food/fruit/snack you don't like the taste of?

No, you throw it away, and probably won't buy it again. If you don't like NYT, don't buy from them.

If NYT is like an avocado for you, sometimes ripe and delicious, sometimes unripe, sometimes rotten, you get to decide how often you're gonna buy avocados, or if you'll develop your own methods of avocado testing before buying to increase your odds. In no case do you get to take the avocado skin back to the store asking for a refund.

napoleoncomplex commented on Marketing to Engineers (2001) bly.com/Pages/documents/S... · Posted by u/herbertl

napoleoncomplex · a year ago

Very much agreed on a lot of the points there, and on that note, how new frameworks market to developers is probably a great lesson in that. Pieter Levels (of nomadlist.com and similar fame) recently talked about it on a podcast, how he basically sticks to PHP and jQuery, and how often he sees developers jumping on a new framework, not realizing it's likely a marketing tactic that's pulling them in.

Time-stamped to that part of the podcast, roughly 2 minutes of relevant answer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg&t=2613

The part that feels most like the advice above: "And same thing what happens with nutrition and fitness or something, same thing happens in developing. They pay this influencer to promote this stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it, and then a lot of people are like, “Wow, use this.” And I started noticing this, because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, “What are you using?” I would say, “Just PHP, jQuery. Why does it matter?”

And people would start attacking me like, “Why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing?”