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Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

ianbetteridge.com

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

#171

Post by coffeefirst »

jmathai wrote: post #6
gipp wrote: post #3

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

My hypothesis is that it reflects the shift away from consumer and SMB products to Silicon Valley mostly funding enterprise software. 101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software. That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about. And enterprise software is t…

I think you're onto something. Even the consumer facing stuff seems more interested in chasing OKRs than putting out a compelling product.

When I'm thinking who's putting out excellent work, the software that's actually great to use, the list is almost exclusively solo projects (Overcast—arguably the greatest mobile app of all time) or scrappy underdogs (Kagi—seriously, Kagi rocks).

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

#172

Post by rglullis »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #165
rglullis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For grains, fruits, vegetables? I am not so sure. Is manual labor the limiting factor to have more diverse cultures? It would be nice if we could get rid of factory farming though, but I doubt we are close to a point where we can have free range cattle being tended mostly by robots.

For fruits, manual labour is a large factor but not the only limiting factor. We Could see fragile fruits drop in price with good robotics, but not below other more mass-harvestable fruits such as oranges or nuts (that can be shaken from trees with tractors) Robotics within farming is often more about improving what is already being done in a more sustainable way. The primary benefit of monocropping is easier automat…

Another way to "solve" the problem for fragile fruits: stop trying to make them at scale. Let people them grow by themselves on their home gardens, or have community gardens/greenhouses that are jointly managed by a school/library...

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

#173

Post by rglullis »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #169
rglullis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of AIDS, none of the items on your list are things we really need but just a naive attempt of masking the problems of modern society life. Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.

You deserve mass downvotes for implying that a cure for diabetes or obesity isn’t “needed”. Techno optimism will always refer to Star Trek (realistically the ds9 version), not whatever crap Anderson tried to make up with that term.

> a cure for diabetes or obesity isn't "needed"

A pill that people need to take forever and whose formula is patented and can not be produced without bringing profits to any of the pharma labs that developed it is not a "cure".

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

#174

Post by jessekv »

rglullis wrote: post #172
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For fruits, manual labour is a large factor but not the only limiting factor. We Could see fragile fruits drop in price with good robotics, but not below other more mass-harvestable fruits such as oranges or nuts (that can be shaken from trees with tractors) Robotics within farming is often more about improving what is already being done in a more sustainable way. The primary benefit of monocropping is easier automat…

Another way to "solve" the problem for fragile fruits: stop trying to make them at scale. Let people them grow by themselves on their home gardens, or have community gardens/greenhouses that are jointly managed by a school/library...

From experience, a moderately-sized back yard can certainly produce a year's supply of raspberries with very little tending :)

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

#175

Post by steveBK123 »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #168
alephnerd wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> devs more interested in hopping on the latest framework they heard about at a conference than in actually solving users problems. The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this. These are old complaints. My dad worked in the tech industry since the pre-Mosaic days, and even then you'd hear the same arguments…

I think the point wasn't against upgrading or refactoring to something better, it was about the youthful inclination to do that for its own sake. Us older heads know how often it goes wrong, and know that without a tangible user benefit or commercially positive outcome... It's just busy work.

What's fascinating, and probably points to how young&naive IT org management also tends to be is ... how many let themselves be sold on these solutions.

Oh you are going to rewrite established solution X in Y in 2 years with 5 devs, and it's going to solve all of the problems we have in X, awesome!

Ignoring that solution Y is so new that the guy proposing it has never actually delivered an enterprise solution in it. And since they just got hired, they have no idea what the user facing problems X is actually exhibiting. Often the problems with X are organizational, managerial, and prioritizing. Switching tech doesn't magically change the decision makers.

Invariably hiring a guy who has a string of 18-24 month jobs on his resume, which, uncannily, is the typical runway of a Greenfield re-write project before heads roll.

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

#176

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

arathis wrote: post #66

To me, the boredom comes from seeing technology inevitably get corrupted. Self-driving cars turn into self-driving ads, and AI is used to displace jobs or track people. Everything we’re promised eventually falls apart, and I’m tired of where it all leads. The utopia would be an equitable society, where we work far less than our ancestors did, allowing us to focus on pursuing our interests and desires—not just buying…

Companies are, by their very nature, designed to maximize profit (fiduciary duty laws), not benefit humanity. Governments are what we're meant to guide this in the right direction, but globalization and unfathomable wealth broke the system.

Technology has become so powerful and integrated into our society that the companies that drive it have become as powerful as governments, and our political systems cannot keep up.

I see this in how the EU suddenly is stepping up to regulate American tech companies, something it was never designed or meant to do. They are suddenly the only organization with enough regulatory power to do so properly, as the American government seems to have given up trying themselves.

I don't think this is unsolvable. I'd love to see "fiduciary duty laws" disbanded for one, and America being less of a pushover for lobbying would go a long way as well. By time, we will figure out what works and what doesn't.

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

#177

Post by tim333 »

gwd wrote: post #61
tptacek wrote: post #26

When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with whe…

> But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company. Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better." Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar…

I think a lot of people are taking Paul way too seriously. I mean he listened to the AirBnB talk, wrote his version of it on his blog and tweeted that he did. That's about it. Otherwise he leads a mostly retired life in England and is not really the evil genius controlling silicon valley.

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

#178

Post by Apocryphon »

imiric wrote: post #136
rpgbr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then he went on to create one of the most powerful VC firms in the industry, which in turn funded some of the most successful companies. Funding crypto nonsense, “apocalyptical” AI, and questionable politics. Meanwhile, writing “manifestos” that complain people don't recognize how great he and their peers are. I mean, thanks for Netscape and all, but Andreessen is as bad as the rotting VC culture can get.

So you only approve of VCs that fund companies you like? Or do you disapprove of the VC culture in general? It's kind of ironic we're discussing this here, considering YC is following the same model, and has made similar investments. And yet both firms have also funded many companies outside of the sectors you dislike. Invoking ad hominems doesn't change the impact that both YC and a16z have had on the industry.

VC, YC, and pg get roasted here all of the time. This site itself and its community gets criticized. If it hadn’t displaced slashdot, we’d be doing that over there.

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

#179

Post by jessekv »

rglullis wrote: post #161
jessekv wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations I expect this one to be a big one. Food production is not yet a solved problem. Imagine if robotics could scale "food forest"-style organic farming to the size of our current mono-crop farms.

For grains, fruits, vegetables? I am not so sure. Is manual labor the limiting factor to have more diverse cultures? It would be nice if we could get rid of factory farming though, but I doubt we are close to a point where we can have free range cattle being tended mostly by robots.

Monocultures exist mainly to facilitate our current state-of-the-art mechanisation, so the short answer to your question is "yes", with the possible exception of grains (who grow naturally in clumps).

But as the sibling comment pointed out, sufficiently advanced robotics will be prohibitively expensive for a long time ahead. I'd like to think that one day in the distant future a team of robotic "monkeys" can go out and harvest only the perfectly ripe oranges from a plot of diverse mixed vegetation. We are already starting to see this for tomato harvesting in greenhouses, so it's not completely unfounded.

As for cattle, the good news is even the free range ones are surprisingly quite automated already. The dairy cows can milk themselves with robots, and the cow fitbits are quite effective at identifying the ones who need vet attention.

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

#180

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

jessekv wrote: post #174
rglullis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to "solve" the problem for fragile fruits: stop trying to make them at scale. Let people them grow by themselves on their home gardens, or have community gardens/greenhouses that are jointly managed by a school/library...

From experience, a moderately-sized back yard can certainly produce a year's supply of raspberries with very little tending :)

Blueberries: Blueberries (or as we northern Europeans call them, American blueberries) are planted once and yield a sizable, easily harvestable, 0-maintenance crop each year. We have 12 bushes in a 4x4-meter corner of our garden. At their peak season, they yield almost a litre of berries each day for a week.

Raspberries: My grandad used to have a vast number of raspberry bushes mindfully nurtured to give unfathomable harvests each year, but they are a bit more maintenance. He had 20 or more bushes, if I recall.

Strawberries: Strawberries are a massive pain. They are difficult to weed and need to be replanted with the seedlings each second year for an optimal crop.

Plums: Fun on paper... But it can be too productive to the point of absurdity. 20 plums... tasty. 20 buckets of plums and mushy sugar water in the whole yard? Less fun.

Cherries: Banger pie and jam... but I think 20 pies is a tad excessive. We mabie pluck 5% of the yield each year; the rest is left to birds to and replant in our neighbour's bushes.

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