21–30 of 119 posts
His graph conveniently stops in the 1980s. Since then, there have been many new US car companies, mostly in the electric of self-driving spaces. Lots of little city cars, new imports from China, too.
Thats a very bold claim, that goes against Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis tech is accelerating. Maybe (unlikely) that cloud/mobiles is the end game for silicon. But what about quantum? What about biological? What about Nano? What about AI? Literally there are a ton of potential generational changes in the making that could turn everything on its head again
I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very well known and makes a compelling argument that tech progress has been accelerating since the Stone age.
I agree Kurzweil's hypothesis is well known... within techie/Silicon Valley circles, somewhat like the Singularity -- a related concept -- is common in those circles as well. Regardless, there's no particular weight to Kurzweil's hypothesis, tantalizing as it may seem, and it's not reasonable in my opinion to use it as a measuring stick of other hypotheses as if Kurzweil was a proven and acknowledged authority on thi…
I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, the network effect in tech can be leapfrogged due to the zero marginal cost (as shown in this post). I.e. what network effect do you get from doing ML inference in the cloud? The case for big tech today is still the economy of scale and not network effects (maybe facebook have those, but it exists only if the interface to facebook does not change). The big tech players have economy of scale, due to their abi…
Did you actually read the post? > The case for big tech today is still the economy of scale and not network effects (maybe facebook have those, but it exists only if the interface to facebook does not change). This is only true if you believe that the greatest cost of developing software is running hardware. The greatest cost of developing software is developing software. Not only are economies of scale in compute ma…
Thats a very bold claim, that goes against Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis tech is accelerating. Maybe (unlikely) that cloud/mobiles is the end game for silicon. But what about quantum? What about biological? What about Nano? What about AI? Literally there are a ton of potential generational changes in the making that could turn everything on its head again
I don't think the claim is technology in general, but non quantum based computing.
Competition is important, but to drive efficiency - weed out bad ideas and bring down costs of already created innovations. But the thing that usually drives monoliths out of business is... new monoliths.
The somewhat contrarian takeaway is that some (keyword) amount of consolidation is good.
By definition, doesn't it always seem like this?
Jim Barksdale (Netscape) said there are 2 ways to make money - bundling and unbundling. What can be unbundled from the incumbent bundles, in order to be offered in a more fit-for-purpose way, or with a better experience?
How might that answer change if the world's political structure changes? How might that answer change if processing, storage and networking continue their march towards ubiquitous availability?
I've been thinking along the same line, albeit on a more personal take as a software engineer. Basically, starting around 15 years ago, there's the proliferation of bootcamps teaching fullstack development, because software startups were the new hot thing, and they desperately need generalist engineers that were capable of spinning up web app quickly. Rails was the hot thing those days because of this as well. Hence…