61–70 of 139 posts
"Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are opposites.
There's a difference. The first is getting market feedback. The second is just getting opinions.
> I have seen way too many startup founders delude themselves into building more and more for months without a single conversation with a real user This has been a problem since the beginning of tech startups. I worked in a dot-com in the late 1990s. Lots of investor money. New offices. Hundreds of employees. The product was well thought out, fairly well built, and it worked. But they had no customers. It's even in t…
So you have two options, be good at making people want to spend money on something. This is pretty hard and a rare capability.
The other is to watch trends and catch what people want now, and be ready to deliver a product that does that....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store. dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me
And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences? The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done. Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just t…
Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.
This was true a while ago. Today we are replacing decades old sloppy production code with 100% verified better code through tests written by AI, code written by AI. This is not looking functional but drop in functional replacement with measurable improvements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store. dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me
And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences? The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done. Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just t…
Saying, "Experiencing some friction is good for building character" is not equivalent to saying "We should demolish all technology and force babies to survive on their own in the woods."
That the extreme position is wrong does not strictly imply that the moderate position is too.
Reminds me of a politician in India who would ask elders in his family to slap him hard before he starts out on the election campaigns. He says that the slaps are meant to keep him alert and honest.
I’ve had this sense about AI for a while now and this articulates that feeling far better than I’ve been able to.
No this isn't punching yourself in the face. Not for swes. What's written above is self confirmation that you are better than AI and that you will always have a job because you are better because AI can't build something that works. That stuff about convincing yourself you're building something useful is actually the easy question. Punching yourself in the face involves telling truths that are incredibly hard to stom…
/usr/bin/vim on my machine begs to differ.