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Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
101–110 of 134 posts
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#102I would like $100k to work on the Collatz conjecture for 6 months. I have an idea that will probably fail, but if I had that money I would quit my job work my ass off for six months to flesh it out. But I have no credentials, no way to write a grant proposal, and even I wouldn't invest in myself. ....and yet if we did this sort of experiment 10000 times over, humanity might make some big breakthroughs because some of…
Unfortunately, availability of money for an speculative work results in emergence of entire industry of scammers, whose only competence is getting grants to do that speculative work. For example, various European Union programmes are overtaken by such people.
Also, this is the reason why VCs, after funding a startup, generallly prefer to be breathing down the CEO's neck (instead of a hands-off approach) - they know that the temptation do just burn through someone else's money while doing a half-assed attempt is too strong for many. In other words, people in general are took weak morally for your idea to produce good results.
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 'run' my own micro arts fund providing support for people in MH communities that would like supplies or tools to help as part of their ongoing rehab or change of career as a way of getting back into a life that means something. The answer really is if you expect a measurable outcome from small-scale investing in people then don't do it, you're in the wrong space. If you view your investment as a path to the outcome…
I put this together as a concept. There are so many tiers of "low bar", I think a lot of people just need a very basic safety net. There is so much real estate sitting essentially empty and the boomer generation is starting to downsize to smaller places because their homes feel empty and have become unrewarding to own. After my parents died when I was young I would have killed for a middle class teen/twenties life. h…
That has to be one of the most uplifting things I've seen in a long time!
The common answer to the world's problems these days is more along the way of "just have an idea, then fund it, then sell it and then I'll be happy for you if it solves my problems first".
Civilization is a group endeavor, so called Democracy even more so.
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#104I would love to work on open source, well designed, free software to control distributed energy resources and building load. Currently I've worked for several companies doing this, but I think that closed source, non free software will never allow us to truly reach the full electrification and decarbonization we need, and the power grid, both generation and transmission, is only getting more complex to manage with th…
I've been working on https://concise-encoding.org/ for the past 3 years part time, and the worst part is being aware of all of the time I could have spent on it but couldn't because I need to put food on the table. And I've got a ton of other technologies in the works, many of which will never see the light of day because I don't have enough years to make it happen working on them part-time...
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have tried that, but people online don't really have an open mind. I'll tell you right now... I feel like there is a way to model the 3n+1 system of equations (or really any such generalized system) using Godel numbering as a representation of each operation, as a prime number based programming language of nature, and then try to glean something from the output primes to see if there is something that predicts the…
I'm not sure I follow what you're proposing, but in case it is tangentially related to a project I work on, I'll describe what I did. Write down every quantitative expression in Mathematical Physics. Assign a unique numerical ID to each expression. Identify the relations between each of the expressions to create a graph. Does that graph feature any patterns? Is there a path from any expression to every other expressi…
And, did you find something?
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#106That's commendable, I love it.
As other commenters said, I'd absolutely love to break my back working on improving the status quo [through free open source] but I am not paid for it. Like damn, I couldn't even convince some colleagues to use `just` as opposed to `make` and the migration path is trivial for most normal development cases (not talking about old Linux libraries or the kernel, of course). Takes literally 15 minutes, once, to rewrite your task file and you're done and you can write much less and have your stuff done predictably. But no, "I don't want to learn a new tool". Coming from a 25-year old.
If I can't even do the above, while clearly demonstrating the benefits to productivity and less mistakes due to the hundreds of footguns of the legacy technology... then what hope do we even have to, say, finally start working on a completely new shell without the limitations of the current ones? What hope do we have to finally fix the entire X.org / Wayland mess on Linux and have a unified ecosystem?
Practically zero. Because apparently there are people who would defend any idiosyncratic technology with their fists, it turns out.
I'd go on a limb and say that 95% of the best of the best programmers out there are trapped in lucrative jobs where they have almost zero creative freedom. I hate it as well but we have to ensure our own survival first, and that's a constant grind in this civilization. Hence you can spend your ENTIRE career dreaming of doing something else and never actually do it. Hold that thought for a moment, it's a very good reality check.
Initiatives like in the OP give me hope that at least some generous people would take a look and say "hey, that makes it easier for me to donate / fund efforts"... but I am not holding my breath. Our current society does not optimize for any of this.
Finally, the biggest problem is discoverability. I and many others (to be clear, I am not putting myself in the group of "the best of the best of the programmers" but I am a guy who gets crap done nonetheless) simply are too tired and jaded to go participate in weekend hackathons or any R&D events (if such even exist?) so they end up being full of young inexperienced people whose net worth to the R&D arena is close to zero. :(
Is there even a solution? IMO not until the incentives change, dramatically so. Or you become a millionaire somehow and then all your burnout magically disappears and you ambitiously became a benevolent dictator of several such efforts until you're satisfied the entire thing is a less shaky house of cards. But that doesn't sound like a probable scenario: most people, when they eventually make it, are way too psychologically tired to then actually start doing everything else they wanted in the profession before. They prefer to lie on beaches and boy, do I understand them perfectly.
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who don't really understand the cause and can find employment separate from it likely aren't committed to it. A banker may not have the necessary training to understand what is going on and likely can find employment with someone else who needs paperwork filed. They may be necessary but putting them in charge of the money is a bad idea because they don't have expertise on the things they are deciding and get p…
> the only reason we weren't the ones making money was a lack of capital I understand your point. But all that is just saying “The only reason I am not Batman is my lack of batsuit, mansion and a butler”. Most important, I think “technological insights” are overrated. Insights are valued exactly because among investors tech savviness comes rare. But If you want to play in the same field, you need all the other pieces…
Batman cannot exist in the real world; Batman has to be a fiction. Lack of money is not.
I worked in the company where the owner set up something relatively mathematically trivial and burnt through £500,000 before he started to make a profit. He was born into wealth. I am several thousand pounds in debt to try to develop something which is far more technically sophisticated and generally useful to DB devs (may do a show HN), but getting anybody to notice it is difficult. Just developing it as I go deeper in debt is very difficult.
I tried to use it as a way of getting a job -- "please look at my project, it's neat!". The response? Hard to say, because nobody has asked me to demo it.
Not having easy, sufficient cash makes things incredibly hard. I'm talking from experience. I very much doubt you are.
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you fail to understand is that when you net 200k$, you are rich. There's a moral issue to ask other to fund your rich lifestyle to allow you work on something and on top of that, taking all the fame in case of success. It's ok to be on the top 1% by the benefits of you work. However, it's hard to justify asking others to finance your stay on the top 1% for charity.
I don't disagree with you -- $200k is a lot, especially by global standards. But I encourage you to check the Form 990s filed with the IRS by your favorite 501 charity, and see how much is spent on e.g. executive salaries. This kind of compensation is not uncommon.
$200K is not a lot if you live in a high cost location like SF on NYC, are senior in your IT career, and have a family. In IT it's below average, and the commenter here is saying he'd be taking a pay cut to do this.
He's an expensive grant, but he's probably got more potential to solve a problem than the average PhD student.
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm saying I have no formal credentials in Math specifically, not no professional credentials in any field. 100k for six months would be a pay cut for me, but maybe you're right... Maybe I'm being greedy at the opportunity to make a real contribution. At the end of the day I still need to feed/house a family of five so the 100k is still ballpark, but maybe I can set aside a few more than 6 months. 10? Not that it mat…
In your case I think you would be better served by being able to discuss with a mathematics faculty in a way similar to what happens naturally in academia. I think it's not just money but the ability to more freely go back to school. It is difficult-ish to get the funding for, essentially, self-directed research during the best years of your life, and basically impossible if you don't already have an undergraduate de…
Asking someone with a mature career to formally return to academia seems like a non-starter.
In such a case he'd need to pay more money and spend even more time - when all he wants to do is work on this one particular problem.
Re: Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in
#110I would like $100k to work on the Collatz conjecture for 6 months. I have an idea that will probably fail, but if I had that money I would quit my job work my ass off for six months to flesh it out. But I have no credentials, no way to write a grant proposal, and even I wouldn't invest in myself. ....and yet if we did this sort of experiment 10000 times over, humanity might make some big breakthroughs because some of…
> maybe we should just fund legit grant seeking PhDs. We already do, through the NSF, DARPA, DOJ, NSA, NASA, etc.
Parent commenter doesn't seem like he'd qualify for any of those since he has no math credentials.
To be honest, it's a tough question. He's clearly a successful senior IT professional (assuming everything he said is true), and so he's probably intelligent. Even if we assume he's mature enough to stay well focused for that period and work hard, it's sort of a toss-up as to whether it's worth us funding it over another candidate.
Then again, there is no other platform like this, so if I had the option between contributing $50 to this person vs doing nothing - I'd rather give $50 to him on the off-chance that he solves (or materially advances) the Collatz Conjecture.
...but also, this speaks to a dysfunction in the Math community, in general. There should be a more constructive online forum for people like him to participate in.