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The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

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Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#101

Post by voidspark »

arnaudsm wrote: post #32
HKH2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear if you mean #1 in quality or popularity. I'll assume you mean the latter. Is Windows really that unstable?

I meant popularity. My brand new Win11 laptop freezes or crashes all the time. My relatives laptops too. It's slower every year, even on high-end hardware.

Maybe a hardware defect.

I’ve been running windows 11 on a couple of pcs for at least a year and never seen it crash once.

Recommend using an AME Wizard playbook to decrapify it

https://revi.cc/

https://atlasos.net/

based on AME Wizard

https://ameliorated.io/

"AME 11 Official Ameliorated Playbook for Windows 11. Cutting the tumor out of your OS."

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#102

Post by groby_b »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #66
masfuerte wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.

Even being able to type in a comment box is a privilege, as is life.

Meanwhile, you're missing the wider point: You don't get to claim "everybody can do this from nothing" if the "nothing" is actually a substantial amount of implicit access to resources.

Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#103

Post by jlos »

Why is James Damore listed alongside Andreesen and Zuckerberg? Andreesen and Zuckerberg have hundreds of billions at their disposal and Damore was an employee fired for giving feedback on a company diversity program.

I mean I know why, but the antipathy underlying the article undermines an otherwise interesting point.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#104

Post by an0malous »

alchemyzach wrote: post #69

The idea that success often depends on luck, right place/time, and other circumstances often outside one's control, is definitely true. Not sure how this validates the DEI movement though? Still a largely toxic and unserious movement that has good intentions but ultimately harms institutions and wastes time and resources.

I think the OP’s idea is that DEI is a scapegoat for diminishing growth, and the real cause is just that the low hanging fruit is gone

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#105

Post by stuxnet79 »

dzink wrote: post #91

Some potential causes of the scarcity of breakthroughs in the last 10 years: 1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs. 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction e…

> 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.

Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering.

Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term.

But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#106

Post by ryandrake »

mbrumlow wrote: post #76
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.

Sure. But I think the notion is that a huge group of people also had that same level funding and privilege, but did nothing with it. Like why did these guys neighbors not end up billionaire. Or the other people in their class or school. While they may have had some money it’s not like they took fathers 500 billion and turned it in to a nice 200 billion for them self. They clearly did something different out of the ve…

> They clearly did something different

Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper?

There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they founded the world's first $100T company. Who is it? If we knew it was deterministic and that some "thing they did" caused success, we would all just do that thing.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#108

Post by threatofrain »

ryandrake wrote: post #54
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.

From the immigrant perspective that was true for many, coming from another country where any status in the US is better. They may be privileged from the perspective of others who couldn't make it out, but from the US perspective it's something different.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#109

Post by groby_b »

tough wrote: post #63
4ndrewl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yeah, but Uber promised us self-driving taxis, but only found profit by delivering takeaways. Meta and Twitter - adverts, and all on the foundation of a zirp economy.

Most of the big unicorns of the past cycle, uber, airbnb, etc, where mostly plays on -we can do illegal shit- and grow faster than laws close us up

The problem any realistic assessment will have to struggle with is that they did illegal shit, exploited existing loopholes and created a better experience.

Taxis before Uber were a shit show. The worst Uber drive you had would still be aboce median for the pre-Uber taxi experience.

Same goes for finding a place to stay before AirBnB if you wanted anything outside a chain hotel.

That doesn't justify all they did, but it also points out that the market was stuck in a local minimum. Breaking out of that is a successful achievement. (We can debate if it was worth the costs. We can debate if the costs needed to be as high as they are, or if that was an outflow of using VC money. There are many debates to be had).

But "all because illegal" is intellectually irresponsible reductionism.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#110

Post by mandevil »

avg_dev wrote: post #25

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.
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