I think there's a real argument to be made that the attempts by corporate america to stifle and limit the internet could prevent the amazing future internet of 2044 from looking much different than what we have now. Latency, bandwidth, reliability, data transfer caps have all been problems for decades, and ISPs are actively fighting to keep them as problems or even to make them worse (pay us extra to access netflix).
You Are Not Late
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: You Are Not Late
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presumed it was a reference to employees of Facebook/Google/etc? I.e. some of the most talented engineers aspire to work for companies whose purpose is to become the dominant ad distribution network.
Most of the employees of those companies do not work on those problems. This seriously underappreciates all of the amazing products, open source work, and research that these companies have provided - and that is what the vast majority of their employees work on.
Well, agreed that they don't directly work on those problems, but as far as I'm aware, these companies make no profits from "products, open source work, and research" - it's practically all from the advertising which can be integrated with, or come as a result of, those ventures.
I'm not looking to discredit the work of talented individuals at those companies - just pointing out that the driving force behind where innovative efforts are focused by senior management is likely to be what can generate the most ad revenue.
That was my interpretation of the quote - so not a literal "they all spend most of their time thinking about ads", but "they're employed by a company whose success is driven by how many ads get clicked".
Re: You Are Not Late
#43The Internet is not just a technical innovation; the Internet is perhaps the greatest social innovation of all-time. For the first time in human history almost everyone on earth is instantly connected. This changes everything . Sometimes I'll just sit and think for hours about how different this makes the world we live in. We're playing by a completely new set of rules -- we're playing a completely new game, and even…
very true.
PG articulates the "obviuosness" in his essay http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Founders tend to live in future and build the missing things.
Hence these holes appear obvious to them.
Re: You Are Not Late
#44If only I had the benefit of the perspective that a "2044 greybeard" presumably will have.
At least don't write the code in an assembly of your times :).
Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really hurting. :)
What you want to avoid is writing 2014 COBOL, and that's what typical enterprise Java is. There'll be jobs maintaining that stuff for a while... But little mobility into anything more exciting.
Re: You Are Not Late
#45What I learned in my 20s is that I'm not an island. I may be a +4 or +5 sigma "visionary" (not to say that I am one) but if I refuse to learn the people-hacking skills necessary to make people like and trust me (and for a long time I thought that game was "dishonest", which was defensive rejection) then it doesn't matter. Strong teams beat brilliant individuals, so if you're the latter you still have to understand the needs of the former (including how to build great teams in the first place).
The problem is that I see tons of opportunity. OP is right. Anyone who thinks the important problems are all solved has no creativity and no clue.
That said, I'm not a 50x people-hacker, nor am I a 125x money-haver. The confluence of excellent people-hacking, resources, and visionary creativity almost never happens. So we have people like me trying to make people click ads, and an startup industry founded around the sale of techie cantrips to creatively crippled conglomerates.
Re: You Are Not Late
#46I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and published papers on most of this…
> Here's an opportunity to think about. Replace Facebook, and all the various messaging services and streaming video services, with a pay service that costs about $1 a month, with no ads.
Whatsapp did a tiny sliver of that - they got acquired by Facebook. It's a trap.
The social network needs to be run by a non-profit.
Re: You Are Not Late
#47The difference now is that it's much harder. The overall competence and just general knowledge level is higher. Sorta like physics - essentially no one is going to make a discovery today just sitting around and thinking, unlike hundreds of years ago. Even comp sci: look at the algorithms that are named, coming from the 60s or 70s. You could invent them just by thinking about a problem. (I did exactly this. I spent a…
Sure, in some areas it is much harder - but those aren't the areas where you're going to succeed. Look at Pebble - when they first started in 2008, no one was doing wearables. The founder hacked a Nokia screen with an Arduino - that was the first prototype.
You just have to find the areas that are still new enough that an amateur can be an expert. Nate Silver refers to this as finding "where the water level is low".
Re: You Are Not Late
#48The difference now is that it's much harder. The overall competence and just general knowledge level is higher. Sorta like physics - essentially no one is going to make a discovery today just sitting around and thinking, unlike hundreds of years ago. Even comp sci: look at the algorithms that are named, coming from the 60s or 70s. You could invent them just by thinking about a problem. (I did exactly this. I spent a…
That's only really the case in mature fields (e.g. compsci), but the article pointed out several newly emerged fields, where yes, you could well create a significant discovery just by sitting and thinking about it (providing you have a decently broad background knowledge).
This finally has really hit home for me while getting neck-deep in the crypto-currency world, and in particular the realms of "smart contracts" and "DACs". In that world, even the most straightforward things have yet to actually be built. We haven't even solved the easy problems yet, much less the hard ones. I'm honestly more worried about being too early than too late.
The problem is that most people haven't even heard of these fields, and the ones that have generally aren't that interested. And they very well may be right to not care. In retrospect, it's obvious that the internet was a huge deal, but in the 80s it was entirely possible to be skeptical of whether the average person had much use for accessing other people's computers.
My recommendation is therefore to research the various things happening at the fringe of modern technology, and see what catches your eye. There are great strides to be made in a variety of fields, and one or more of them might turn out to be important. At the very least, it'll be fun.
Re: You Are Not Late
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might have to print this out and paste on a wall in the office. Awesome Unfortunately, a lot of young kids are wired to look for the next Yo and or spend their energy and talents on things that don't really matter. It's crazy out there - the whole "make an app, get users and cash out quickly" mindset. It's very bad and is a major reason why we see so many crap companies and apps launching all the time. But this won't…
I see a bunch of startup listing services springing up, e.g., Product Hunt and at least three others that have landed in my mailbox in the past couple weeks, which send out a daily list of new / newly discovered startups. It's kind of amazing that these services can find 30 or 40 new startups every single day -- a thousand per month, 12,000 per year -- and, even more amazingly, I suspect they're only capturing a smal…
> they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends
But those aren't the viable alternatives! These aren't typically wealthy people with time on their hands, they're people trying to find a good place for themselves in the economy by working on something that they think people will like. The real alternative is working for a bigger company, in which their marginal contribution may or may not be more useful to themselves and society, depending on the company, and on their role in it. It's possible to do something useful either as a big cog in a small machine or a small cog in a big machine, but there's no guarantee either way.
What I'd really like to see would be more "small businesses" and fewer "startups", but the economics of the software industry at the moment don't seem to encourage that.
Re: You Are Not Late
#50Yes! We need More brains to focus on solving real problems: clean water, education, internet access, transparency, and less "Uber for X", candycrush, Rovios, facevook, etcetera.