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Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

ianbetteridge.com

41–50 of 235 posts

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#41
I do like the point about lack of experience hiring leading to bad hires.

In "Endurance", there's a short note on how shackleton hired crew members for his expedition. Seemingly on a whim and a 5 minute chat. I interpreted that as deep experience of his area combined with a keen sense of judging people. They combined to work magic. That kind of thing takes a lot of time.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#42
post #3

> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.

I would completely agree with this if it said "All Cook and no Woz". I say this because I think it is unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's. Jobs actually had a talent for products. Woz and other brilliant engineers may have build these things, but Jobs had a talent for picking the right products, the right packages and the right timing that I don't think anyone else in Tech has ever really been capable of copying. I think that tech will always be full of Woz type people, but without Jobs it's going to be hard to get those products out there. I see a lot of it in Solar energy and Farming tech where a lot of brilliant things are being build, but a lot of it remains relatively small scale because nobody knows how to sell it.

I think you could also make the case for saying that the industry is full of Zuckerbergs (maybe Sam Altmans in a few years), but I'm not sure the advertisement industry is really all that related to tech. I know it may not be the most popular thing to say, but is there really that much of a difference between selling Tobacco, Coca Cola, Search Engines or Social Media? All are popular products which haven't really changed the world for the better.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#43
post #24

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just…

> * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.

How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since.

Seems to me like an area that could make use the sensor/3d tech from self driving, but wouldn't need to be anywhere near as reliable to still be a useful product. You could probably charge Apple margins if you cracked it first. I'd pay $5-10k for something that would last a few years and could passively clean a bathroom or kitchen to a reasonable degree.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#44
My main criticism of this article and the article it references is that it refers to Marc Andreessen as a “not-so-bright billionaire” who “doesn’t build shit”. Do people forgot that he built the first popular web browser (mosaic) and then built Netscape? He is much more part of “hacker” culture than other names mentioned.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#46
post #3

> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.

No, tech has become no Woz and no Jobs either. You don’t get enshittification with Jobs, but the opposite. Also he would abhorre modern day process driven product management: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#48
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electric cars. For new car sales … 50% in China. This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1] [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-marke...

OK, "Plug-in vehicles". I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.

This is where the US is the outlier. A very small percentage of people I know in Europe and elsewhere in the developed world drive more than that on a regular workday. Perhaps the hybrid car's batteries just need to be bigger.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#49

From a post I saw in another thread, I don't know how to link to the direct comment: > "Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders o…

You're onto it. Basically the wealthy freeze technological growth until they can understand how to make profit from it. Results are science and tech slowed to a glacial pace. We may not even be able to outengineer our problems due to this one thing.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#50
post #24

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just…

> Even obesity can be cured.

Eating less isn’t all that much of a breakthrough, but it certainly highlights how hard it is to get people to do something they don’t want to do.

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