Viewing profile — crwalker

As a San Franciscan, I am so happy to see this. SF needs negative feedback on the poor choices it makes, and so far the tech boom has somewhat obscured the consequences.

Start and then sell a financial services company. Then build the space company.

I am hardly a fan of Gerard but this is a well written summary of the guidance. The only thing I would add to clarify money transmission as "transmitting value that substitutes for…

I would say ... they folded.

One-star reviews are the best signal I can find for product quality. They will let you know if there is a repeatable issue with trustworthy incentives. If there are more 2 star rev…

Yes on negative connotations: the title "Turbotax for Bankruptcy" made me think this would be a hit piece on an unscrupulous vendor.

Jira also has the least consistent UX of any SaaS product I've used (Skype may be a close second).

Fused filament fabrication (FFF) is fighting against physics in the same way that O(n) vs O(n^2) vs O(n!) algorithms have wildly different performance at scale. It's a point soluti…

This seems really observant. If the true goal is "building beautiful tech" then shipping an actual product usually takes one (far) away from that goal. Those who appear to self-sab…

I keep suggesting that folks name their next child Ashurbanipal, Shalmaneser, or Tiglath-Pileser. So far nobody has taken up the offer ... but think of the excellent nicknames: "ti…

This sounds like a preeminently practical strategy.

Fair enough: I am most critical of the hype cycle itself, and haven't looked through the longer publications in detail.

Yes, I think it's more about signaling and CYA than fact-finding.

I've found the Gartner hype cycle paradigm to be vastly overrated after experiencing real hype cycles in several industries. If you examine their hype cycle charts over about a dec…

Is the tin from a conflict-free source? How can you be sure without a blockchain to ensure provenance? (This is an even poorer joke)

Both views could be correct: Taleb's point is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I haven't read Sapiens, and I hope Harari is correct, but I'm not tracking the se…

> Thankfully, we seem to have left the world of total war. Deaths in armed conflict form a fat-tailed distribution. Extreme events dominate, and the absence of any world wars for s…

I thought I was going to hate this essay but it was wonderful. He discusses the graph structure of a city: it should be a semi-lattice and not a tree, and there we agree entirely. …

With an attitude like this, SF will be the next Detroit. Exponential economic curves always turn out to be sigmoids, and when the sigmoid flattens and the economy is carrying treme…

It's a simple way to express the difference between probabilities for an ensemble of game players and probabilities for a particular player over time. If the player is ruined, the …

Weak. SoftBank has always seemed suspiciously large and cavalier. I expect there's a venture analog to the expression "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there ar…

Current US zoning creates vast swathes of single-family-housing-only areas. This segregation prevents a lifestyle of walking. In order to preserve the value of single-family houses…

There are big potential downsides. Blockchains are chains. They don't forgive. They don't forget. But I still think it's a worthwhile endeavor.