sirspacey (u/sirspacey)

sirspacey commented on LinkedIn is loud, and corporate is hell ramones.dev/posts/linkedi... · Posted by u/austinallegro

I've benefited a lot from my specialist area (energy industry) in which consultants and analysts will post genuinely informative and thought-provoking articles. It works to enhance their technical reputation and give them publicity, and it can be very informative for me.

But to achieve any usefulness from the platform I have to aggressively prune, by blocking every contact who ever posts something I don't find interesting. My block list is vast, and my threshold for blocking is incredibly low.

Ultimately, it's probably only a community of about 100 experts that post informatively on the energy industry.

So long as you don't mind doing the work, I find LinkedIn's algorithm to be the best of the main platforms at respecting my choices of who I want to hear from (although admittedly I should probably be using Bluesky instead).

I've also had tens of people tell me they really enjoy my posts on LinkedIn - I tend to post slightly against the mainstream opinions in my industry, and with humour, so I may not have developed a particularly professional reputation, but I've gained more publicity than anyone else in my company outside of the Exec level.

sirspacey · 22 days ago

I’ve learned this is the way to get the value from any social network, great suggestion.

sirspacey commented on I want to build the next Silicon Valley in northern Mexico, can you help? · Posted by u/inodeman

sirspacey · 2 months ago

What I offer may be helpful, but you likely have strong reasons to ignore it:

I have been a part of a dozen “next Silicon Valley” projects across the US, with friends who have done it internationally.

I’d suggest studying how it happened in Paris/France and also how Portgual lost it.

The only thing that works is founders helping founders. Everyone else responds to the signal they generate.

If you try to send that signal with investors/vendors, you will attract a lot of people who will not build much value.

One formula I’ve see work is to faciliate college student talent interest in startups meeting with founder/CEOs who built very successful companies. It gets a fly wheel going.

When I was on the ground floor of the NYC startup scene, it took ten years to build up to a viable startup scene.

Your effort will likely take longer.

So the best help I can give you is this - don’t waste your life.

If you are willing to contribute a generational effort towards this goal, find every founder from N Mexico and meet them. Ask for their advice on your vision. Do what they recommend.

If not, save yourself the dissapointment. There are literally 1,000s of attempts that have failed. Venture studios do not work. Angel investments from people who are not in the industry of your startups do not work.

It takes a lifetime to build a network in an industry. That is what early stage founders need access to, from people who understand how to succeed in them.

EDIT: typos & grammar

sirspacey commented on Researchers find a way to make the HIV virus visible within white blood cells theguardian.com/global-de... · Posted by u/colinprince

w10-1 · 6 months ago

Here's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60001-2

To be clear: they deliver the HIV TAT protein which activates latent cells to transcribe HIV (ultimately possibly producing viable HIV virions).

Activating-to-kill has been pursued with other agents, but none have proven effective at depleting the reservoir. (The latent reservoir requires HIV anti-retroviral therapy to be lifelong, making one of the top three most expensive diseases in the US).

This may be more of a proof for the method, of encapsulating a fragile mRNA in a protective lipid layer, but one which will be incorporated into cells. I'd expect it to be used outside attempts to cure HIV (having consumed some HIV funding).

sirspacey · 6 months ago

thank you for this, very interesting

sirspacey commented on Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia direct.mit.edu/isec/artic... · Posted by u/paulpauper

sirspacey · 7 months ago

Religion + State = Violence

sirspacey commented on Living beings emit a faint light that extinguishes upon death, study phys.org/news/2025-05-emi... · Posted by u/pseudolus

Waterluvian · 7 months ago

> UPE varied depending on exposure to stress factors like temperature changes, injury and chemical treatments

I haven’t read the study but I studied remote sensing in undergrad and one thing we worked on was how to detect the stress of an agricultural crop from multispectral satellite data. You can quite clearly detect how plants are handling temperature, pest damage, drought conditions, largely based on their near- and middle-infrared responses. On the surface this sounds a lot like that, which I think is neat.

sirspacey · 7 months ago

I would watch that YT video and share it with everyone I knew. That it cool.

sirspacey commented on Dow futures sink 1,300 points after Trump defends tariffs as 'medicine' to fix fortune.com/2025/04/06/st... · Posted by u/SMAAART

kjellsbells · 8 months ago

I could imagine, maybe, that if tariffs were 100% here to stay, that then, after some period of pain, lasting a few years, investors would have built replacement infrastructure domestically. (The word 'maybe' is doing a lot of work here, but let's roll with it, for the sake of argument.)

But this administration is already using tariffs as a negotiating tool, a cudgel. "If country X does Y, maybe the administration will cut them a break."

That means, as an investor, there is simply no certainty that makes it safe enough to invest in domestic US infrastructure. What if I build a factory and then the tariff evaporates?

sirspacey · 8 months ago

There wouldn’t be any safety for that anyway.

A tariff as a negotiating tactic wouldn’t be worth much if it was known to be temporary.

sirspacey commented on The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI dutchosintguy.com/post/th... · Posted by u/walterbell

Aurornis · 9 months ago

> Participants weren’t lazy. They were experienced professionals.

Assuming these professionals were great critical thinkers until the AI came along and changed that is a big stretch.

In my experience, the people who outsource their thinking to LLMs are the same people who outsourced their thinking to podcasts, news articles, Reddit posts, Twitter rants, TikTok videos, and other such sources. LLMs just came along and offered them opinions on demand that they could confidently repeat.

> The scary part is that many users still believed they were thinking critically, because GenAI made them feel smart

I don’t see much difference between this and someone who devours TikTok videos on a subject until they feel like an expert. Same pattern, different sources. The people who outsource their thinking and collect opinions they want to hear just have an easier way to skip straight to the conclusions they want now.

sirspacey · 8 months ago

I’ll be one to raise my hand and say this has been dramatically not the case for anyone I’ve introduced AI to or myself.

Significantly more informed and reasoned.

sirspacey commented on After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/pmags

jmward01 · 8 months ago

The obvious methodology at work here is 'fire everyone then hopefully re-hire only what is blindingly obviously needed'. There are many, many problems with this approach in a business setting but even more from a governmental setting. The first, and what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy, is that these are real people who's lives are being toyed with. It isn't like you are trying out a new business process. You are literally playing with entire lives here as if they are disposable things. This alone makes what is happening inhumane. Even if it did make things more 'efficient' I would rather a humane government than whatever efficient government they are aiming for here. The second incredibly obvious reason why this is wrong is because this isn't a business. Money isn't the point. Let me repeat this one more time. Money is not the point of a government. I can't understand any argument about government efficiency that only looks at money. It is about total benefit to society, period. If you hire someone that is 'breakeven' in what they produce vs consume from a pure production point of view you could argue that for a business they should go, but from a government point of view you have employed someone and that person is churning the rest of the economy and society has one less drain. In other words all of society is way better off with that breakeven, or even net negative, person employed in government. In other words, an efficient government actually can have what would be considered waste in a corporate world and that is not only OK, but the right answer. I know of several people that are 'employed' but net negatives and society is way better off with that arrangement than having them on the streets. Is there a place for money/efficiency discussions in government? Sure, but if it is the only thing you look at then you really need to re-think things. There are many, many other ways this is morally and economically wrong but those are my top two.

sirspacey · 8 months ago

If you haven’t worked in the federal government, this is an unserious take.

Experience and context matters. Especially this one.

sirspacey commented on Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith vincentschmalbach.com/sta... · Posted by u/vincent_s

sirspacey · a year ago

What changed is the audience

Founders are in private group chats now

Man I miss it being real here instead of Reddit Jr

Grateful for those of you who still hang out

sirspacey commented on OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’ daringfireball.net/2024/1... · Posted by u/ajuhasz

saurik · a year ago

A couple other comments touch on the point I want to make, but I feel they don't nail it hard enough: if today you told me you had a website that was 100% technologically identical to Amazon, but you were willing to make slightly less money, you'd still have no products... as a user I'd have no reason to go there, but then without users there is no reason to sell there, so you have a circular bootstrapping issue. That is a moat.

This is very different from OpenAI: if you show me a product that works just as well as ChatGPT but costs less--or which costs the same but works a bit better--I would use it immediately. Hell: people on this website routinely talk about using multiple such services and debate which one is better for various purposes. They kind of want to try to make a moat out of their tools feature, but that is off the path of how most users use the product, and so isn't a useful defense yet.

sirspacey · a year ago

That’s how it is today, but that was also the case at the birth of e-commerce. Amazon was a large eCom store but many others were successful and switching for price was common. Not so much anymore.

Defaults are powerful over time.