81–90 of 162 posts
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What technology has come out in the last decade that isn't an increment or miniaturization?
GPT! We are in a transformative moment right now with GPT3 onwards, as great as anything in the computer era.
I'm not convinced.
'Halt and Catch Fire' (Fictional but good) 'Sillicon Valley' (Fictional and comedy but also good) 'The Playlist' (About Spotify, which isn't failure)
Silcon valley was brilliant, although they blended the stories of several companys fatal errors into one company, turning it into a Hans in Luck
I'll have to check out this Halt and Catch Fire everyone is talking about!
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Since 2006? That’s a long time to not be profitable, right?
Yeah, I agree, I have no idea why people keep investing in companies that don't turn a profit, or companies that seemingly don't care about being profitable. It doesn't seem like most startups are interested in being sustainable, they're just interested in reaching the next funding stage, and eventually getting a big payout.
'Halt and Catch Fire' (Fictional but good) 'Sillicon Valley' (Fictional and comedy but also good) 'The Playlist' (About Spotify, which isn't failure)
> About Spotify, which isn't failure Is that true? They are still losing money after, what, 10 years? I like Spotify but I don’t think they are out of the woods yet. Just like I wouldn’t call WeWork (isn’t a failure) in 2018.
Losing $22B is a pretty insane failure.
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The iPhone is 15 years old, so it wasn't in the last decade.
No. But ubiquity and smartphones being just part of the fabric of everyday life comes pretty close to squeezing into the last decade. I didn't have one until probably 2011 (iPhone 3GS) and I'm not really a technology laggard.
Maybe (maybe) ChatGPT will do something similarly transformative (I’m sus as the kids say).
The Profit* is pretty interesting. It's like the shows where Gordon Ramsay goes into failing restaurants and tries to turn them around, except here the show's host tries to fix all kinds of local businesses. It's not about tech startups per se, but you still see a lot of common issues through the lens of local businesses: founder disputes, poor unit economics, bad marketing, etc. It's a little cheesy, but pretty good…
'Halt and Catch Fire' (Fictional but good) 'Sillicon Valley' (Fictional and comedy but also good) 'The Playlist' (About Spotify, which isn't failure)
HaCF has an amazing line in it: "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." (1) I still think abut it frequently. It's true. It's a statement about systems - often the utility is what they enable, not thing "thing in itself". Even deep into software development, this is true. e.. I really appreciate git and github, but I don't need to focus on becoming a "git maestro" , I just need to g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HaCF has an amazing line in it: "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." (1) I still think abut it frequently. It's true. It's a statement about systems - often the utility is what they enable, not thing "thing in itself". Even deep into software development, this is true. e.. I really appreciate git and github, but I don't need to focus on becoming a "git maestro" , I just need to g…
I use that quote similarly. It's about knowing where you stand, where the value is, and of course not chasing the shiny new thing.... Perhaps Its pragmatic humility. That's how I see it.
The thing is that in that scene, Joe (Lee Pace) is being the salesman to Gordon the engineer, and is just starting to grasp that there is a shiny new thing about to be born, that building computers is going to enable something much bigger than just "we'll sell some hardware, and make some money"; that change is coming, it's going to be for a wider audience than just computer enthusiasts; computers would be the way to get there, but are not the thing itself.
Now we call that thing "the internet", "the huge software industry", "being online all the time", "social media" etc, but then they were not sure what it would look like.
He is totally chasing the shiny new thing that the others don't even see yet. Even as they bring it about.