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Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

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Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#221

Post by throwaway2037 »

onethought wrote: post #129
no_wizard wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its fair to say that they're growing for sure, as the government and corporations have been investing there. What I feel makes Silicon Valley unique (backed by the history as I understand it) is the proximity of things - The foundational organizations and proximity to an intense congregation of early innovation orgs, many of which started in Silicon Valley, or always had a large presence from the early days -…

I’m guessing you haven’t been to Shenzhen. Where everything you mentioned is, and growing.

> Proximity to a delta of good universities

What good unis are in Guangdong (GD) province? The most famous ones I know are in Shanghai and Beijing. From my limited experience with hiring in Shenzhen, almost no one was from GD, nor went to uni in GD. Most went to uni in Shanghai or Beijing.

> The foundational organizations

I think the OP is referring to big gov't research (DARPA, etc.) that is the backbone of technologies behind the Internet and integrated circuits. Do similar orgs (and history) exist in Shenzhen? Again, my impression is that most of those orgs exist in Shanghai and Beijing.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#222

Post by ssivark »

underdeserver wrote: post #210
purple-again wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very real and so is the immense value it’s capable of granting us...HOWEVER it’s really only in a narrow category of problems and people don’t want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from blockchain. That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of…

Seriously? A narrow category of problems? ML has been used and is being used to significantly advance image processing, video processing, image classification, speech-to-text, natural language understanding, medical imaging interpretation, medical notes and differential diagnosis, warehouse management, shipping and delivery, transportation, networking, agriculture, biomedical research, insurance, law practice (docume…

That list is flag planting of the first order — like a dog claiming territory as a kingdom after a few stray golden showers here and there.

Yes, ML has been applied to all those topics, but to narrow/superficial applications & with limited success (in most of those areas, any how). The applications have also been explored in relatively ad-hoc ways, with little improvement in systematic understanding/knowledge of any of those fields.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#223

Post by ghaff »

drawkbox wrote: post #138
shinkim0914 wrote: post #26

There is no place like Silicon Valley where taking a career risk to quit a job and start a company is normalized, understood, and encouraged.

Additionally, California is one of the only states that doesn't recognize non-competes [1], that is key for innovation and competitors coming up including small/medium competitors. This part is always overlooked. > A few states, such as California, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, totally ban non-compete agreements for employees, or prohibit all non-compete agreements except in limited circumstances. [1] There is…

Tons of companies that aren't in California don't have non-competes or have very limited ones. I've never had a meaningful non-compete in the course of my career. (Had a very narrow one when one company was acquired.)

I'm certainly not a fan of non-competes but note that, even in California, a company can drag you into an expensive court battle over non-solicitation clauses, NDAs, etc. It's also a matter of non-competes not being enforceable in general. A small company may still choose not to hire you if they think there's a possibility they may need to go to court.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#224

Post by ghaff »

astrange wrote: post #151
onethought wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans don’t like contactless payment? Or (more Likely), unlike their Chinese counterparts, American banks are way more conservative with adopting new technologies. Hence why y’all still get paid with paper cheques :)

We have contactless payment with EMVpay/Apple Pay. There are some QR code systems like Venmo but I don't know what the value add of scanning a code is supposed to be. Nobody gets paid with paper checks unless they want to, although if you're poor and have been blacklisted by the bank system you might take it so you can use a check cashing service.

People have their habits. I do increasingly use my Apple Watch (or a contactless credit card) to pay but my observation on the outskirts of a large East Coast metro is that effectively no one does.

I still use checks for service people and some other purposes, e.g. when there's a fee for online payment.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#225

Post by pdimitar »

SV is a bubble and it will be defended by those who benefit from that status quo for quite a while still.

I do agree with the article decrying humanity's chronic inability to act on preventable crises. But it seems (a) most of humanity is much more inert and passive than we are inclined to think and (b) the vested interests and/or the powers-that-be are really that powerful so as to prevent the action of everybody else.

At the same time the article is overly optimistic: it claims that the consumer internet and social media are coming to an end.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#226

Post by ghaff »

sradman wrote: post #189

> as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered. This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said: > Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple microfluidic tests could produce…

They focused on the people because they were either scammers or well-known people with no domain knowledge.

The basic idea was very straightforward. I can come up with lots of great ideas if I ignore whether there's any reasonable path to a solution. Hey! Let's have a Star Trek medical tricorder implemented in a watch. Let me know when you're done implementing it. I'll be at the beach.

Nothing to do with regulator bogeyman.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#227

Post by emptysongglass »

astrange wrote: post #139
qqqwerty wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you are part of the problem? Maybe leaving would be best for both you and SF. I was born and raised in the area, and have watched as friends and family are forced out due to rising costs. These are folks who legitimately loved the area and were actively involved in their communities. And they get replaced by people who seem to only care about big paychecks and spend more time complaining about the area than a…

People are not leaving SF because tech employees are coming in. If nobody moved in, the economy would just get worse, housing wouldn't get any more available. The problem is that your parents go to every community meeting and get all the housing projects shut down to prevent "greedy developers". That's been happening consistently since the 70s.

It's not SF but I did leave Seattle because of tech employees coming in. They destroyed my beloved city of excellent, cheap music played out of our parents' basements and in any of the bars on Capitol Hill and replaced it with shining citadels of emptiness. Seattle was a bright little miracle before Amazon set itself down right in the middle and disgorged its peoples flown in from far and wide.

The knock-on effects of Amazon moving in included a flurry of real estate speculation which directly led to the closing of a restaurant that had been continuously operating for over a decade and close family losing their job there they had worked since its beginning.

I firmly lay the blame of this wanton appropriation at the hands of the tech companies. Amazon didn't need to move directly into the heart of Seattle: they could have done as Microsoft and moved next door to Redmond. But hey, eff the residents who grew up there, right?

I have a great little story of a waiter who had lived in his apartment in the Belltown neighborhood for many years: somebody had come in to look at apartments for all the new tech hires. Person is getting the tour of a unit, pauses to look around at all the other units, "Great, we'll take it!" It was every unit in the building including the occupied. Waiter got the boot.

Seattle had and continues to hold onto the cultural evil of the "Seattle Freeze" but I sure do miss the music and to hear the punky cries of Alice Glass: "Down, down, cities fall down on me."

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#228

Post by helge9210 »

chadash wrote: post #198
helge9210 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Let's drop "cyber" for a second. Suppose some (potentially, foreign state sponsored) actor starts to physically attack/kidnap company employees in company's home country that is starts to affect the bottom line. No one would…

I don’t believe this is true. Wealthy companies that do business in dangerous countries tend to pay quite a bit for security of key employees. If you are a white collar worker of MegaCorp Oil traveling to Iraq for business, you will be provided with security. If you are a local Iraqi working in the oil fields, you can probably expect less security, precisely because your loss won’t affect the bottom line. But even so…

You're right, that's why I deliberately limited the scope of the argument to "home country".

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#229

Post by sradman »

ghaff wrote: post #226
sradman wrote: post #189

> as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered. This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said: > Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple microfluidic tests could produce…

They focused on the people because they were either scammers or well-known people with no domain knowledge. The basic idea was very straightforward. I can come up with lots of great ideas if I ignore whether there's any reasonable path to a solution. Hey! Let's have a Star Trek medical tricorder implemented in a watch. Let me know when you're done implementing it. I'll be at the beach. Nothing to do with regulator bo…

> They focused on the people because they were either scammers

The scamming came after the failure of the core premise of the startup: microfluidic lab-on-a-chip. My point was not to excuse the scamming, it was to switch focus back to the core ideas and not the people sporting black turtlenecks.

I suspect that if the original strategy worked the story would be different. Transparently reporting technical/business failure is an admirable trait but it is a different thing than innovation. Journalists and analysts should have been reporting on the scorecard (strategy/tactics/execution). When the company did a technical pivot why was this not enough to investigate the underlying cause? I'm a potential customer that wants this solution; I feel like I've been cheated by all involved.

QUESTION: if someone else succeeds with a microfluidic lab-on-a-chip can the regulators validate its efficacy?

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#230

Post by rory »

m0llusk wrote: post #219
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Silicon Valley will never die. Over what time period? It’s absurd to say this and mean forever, if you have ever opened a history book. Even America itself will pass out of dominance, as all superpowers have. Rome, Britain, etc. Change is the rule, not the exception. It is the natural way. https://marketcap.com.au/history-world-reserve-currencies/

The research at Los Alamos that Geoffrey West has summarized most recently in his book Scale demonstrates different dynamics are at work. Creatures and companies grow and age and die. Cities are a completely different construct. Rome and Londinium are both still large and influential. Two particularly stark demonstrations of this effect are Hiroshima and Nagasaki both of which were wiped off the map with nukes yet in…

Sure, there is still innovation coming out of Detroit and Cleveland, but I still think if SF/SV became like one of those cities that would qualify as "dying" to a lot of people who currently live there.
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