It might be a bit unorthodox and I would possibly get flagged for writing this but I found the ideas of Kaczynski on impact of technology on us very profound and thought-provoking[0]. I try to separate the "art" from the "artist" and do not condone his violent actions thereafter. But this idea has been around in various shapes where people debate if its true that techonology is evolving at a much faster rate than our minds can evolve to cope with its impacts.

It was very insightful for me to do an introspection of how I interact with techonology and broadly with consumerism and change some aspects of it to focus on what is really meaningful to me.

[0] http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf [1] audiobook: https://youtu.be/n5ITyifcYy8

> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.)

As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and which one is the fake trend?

By way of interpreting sentences in a normal way, I would assume "used a lot by a small number of people" is the real trend and "used a little by a lot of people" is the fake trend (going by order of mentions in both sentences).

However, I struggle with this a bit. Dapps were used a lot by a small number of people as of a few years ago (think the cryptokitties trend), but it didn't exactly pan out as a real trend IMO. In other cases, yes, when early adopters love a product and use it a lot, that tends to become a real trend. On the other hand, Facebook apps in 2008 (when they were smaller apps like Superwall and such, before games took over) were somewhat "used a little by a lot of people" at the beginning. I think it wasn't until games took over where the "used a lot" (by a large number of people in that case) really took off.

I rejected a Google offer in 2012, and they've been bothering me ever since. They seemed really surprised that I didn't feel all warm and fuzzy about their lowball offer. I ended up going to Blizzard and then SpaceX, and I don't regret anything. My big thing is that while the money might have been better at a FAANG, I've done a lot more interesting work I can talk about (and some I can't). But at Google, and Microsoft where I worked for about 10 years, there are frankly so many people (many quite talented) that it's hard to get something interesting or useful to work on. It's just a lot of politics and empire building. Also, the mobility especially for women is pretty bad. We always joked the best way to get a raise was to leave and come back. It was funny because it was so true.

Ok, assume I'm bought into this idea - where would I even begin?

What are some companies working on these kind of fundamental building things problems? I know of the Boring Company, though haven't really heard anything from them since the flamethrowers a few years back. Sidewalk labs was doing some cool things in Toronto, but I think they've been running into big regulatory issues too and it one point it sounded like their plans were completely on hold. The YC New Cities idea sounded intriguing, but as far as I know they never talked about a single thing to come out of that program and it's now been shut down.

I really haven't heard of very many companies at all doing these kinds of things (which is Marc's whole point), and the ones that I have been casually following, I check back 5 years later and they don't seem to have made any tangible progress. Is there just no way to iterate quickly at all in the physical world?

Then of course there would be the challenge of trying to actually get a job at one of these places, I'm not sure what experience would even be required for this kind of work. Maybe a Civil or Mechanical Engineering degree? As a software developer I'm not sure how I'd even get my foot in the door.

I guess that would leave trying to start something myself, but there too I really have no clue where to even begin. It doesn't seem like you can just start tinkering on construction innovations with minimal upfront investment on your nights and weekends like you can with building an app. On this front someone like Marc Andreesen could offer a ton of advice, I'd love to see him follow up on this post with more thoughts about this. Or even announce a program to fund new companies focused on this type of fundamental building.

Anyway, I'd be really curious to hear if anyone knows of either 1. more examples of companies working these spaces to look into or 2. resources to even just learn more about the problem space and which areas might be ripe for innovation.