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I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

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Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#31

Post by macspoofing »

cbanek wrote: post #10

This may be a silly question, but why do we think that SV startup mentality must solve every problem? Like the article states, there are lots of "big" problems, like homelessness, healthcare, and inequality. These are usually the realms of government and non-profits. While some of these are startups or institutions with novel ideas / methods, I'm not sure that entrepreneurship solves everything. I'm just not sure you…

Some of that is the rethoric of startups, which usually inflates the importance of their product. Some people believe it and believe SV can solve anything.

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#32

Post by arcanus »

KirinDave wrote: post #30

One nitpick I have about this: the peninsula tech scene is huge. It leads in all sorts of places outside of what you'll read about on tech crunch. SSF is a massive hub of Biotech (as is the rapidly expanding UCSF-centered campus in Mission Bay). Financial technology is rapidly expanding in the city as well, and only the older players in that space have substantial ties to traditional Uber For _____ startup VC firms.…

Good point, but I'll note that many cities have technology companies that just don't get the press and hype you see for VC backed software companies in SF.

There aren't that many articles about biotechnology in Boston, for instance.

The software paradigm has captured a great deal of mindshare.

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#33

Post by user5994461 »

fjdhcjjenxncnd wrote: post #18
angersock wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, so you're optimizing and not innovating .

Actually no. I'm making the software that did not previously exist. Others down the road can then use it to produce better performing products. Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats".

> Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats".

Actually. By reducing the consumption of oil, it becomes cheaper to travel and people will travel more... increasing the consumption of oil.

Game word in point: You might be having the opposing effect of what you think :D

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#34

Post by arcanus »

fjdhcjjenxncnd wrote: post #28
angersock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, what special sauce do you bring to the table that ANSYS or Solidworks or whatever FEA package people use for optimization studies doesn't already do--and probably do well enough? You dismiss twitter, snapchat clones, whatever when they do deliver actual value to people just because they don't meet some arbitrary feelgood measure of "innovative". A measure that coincidentally happens to somehow make your cute li…

It's still very much a research implementation, but I'm making global black box combinatoric methods which can be used where analytic optimization methods are not available, e.g. multi-objective optimization. >Maybe post under your real account. I have no real account. I always make a new one every few posts partly for privacy reasons, and partly because I enjoy reading posts like your own. :^)

As someone who did numerical optimization for my doctoral thesis (also mechE), this sounds more amenable to publications than a start up.

Are you trying to commercialize?

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#35

Post by candiodari »

M_Grey wrote: post #24
cbanek wrote: post #10

This may be a silly question, but why do we think that SV startup mentality must solve every problem? Like the article states, there are lots of "big" problems, like homelessness, healthcare, and inequality. These are usually the realms of government and non-profits. While some of these are startups or institutions with novel ideas / methods, I'm not sure that entrepreneurship solves everything. I'm just not sure you…

There are plenty of people who think that governments need to be smaller, often for ideological reasons. Those people won't or can't accept the scale of problems which require those governments, and are too involved in their own mythology of "bootstraps" and the like to see beyond that. This is often also the reason why people who in no way stand to benefit from the status quo, deny AGW; the solution is ideologically…

The economic counterargument would be that any solution to a problem that is not a Nash-equilibrium cannot be implemented. Pretending otherwise is popular, expensive, painful, and doomed to failure as consuming all economic resources on the planet (or any finite amount) cannot fix the underlying problem.

But a government can grow, grow, grow while pretending to solve the problem, failing, and "correcting" for the problem that caused them to fail.

The moral counterargument is that people should be allowed to decide for themselves and for their own government what is and is not a problem. If, under those basic conditions, no policy can work, then those policies are still immoral.

And the moral hazard counterargument is that "qui bono" often fits both sides. In this problem, there is certainly merit to the argument that the IPCC, politicians and scientists involved, the governments, and ... stand to benefit as well. Increased budgets, more people, bigger organisations, more experiments, more things to manage, more power to tell others what to do. Worse, this money and power will come at the expense of the "bootstraps" folk.

Bottom line: usually people on both sides of an argument believe what they want to believe. Exceptions exist, but not nearly as much as I thought when I was 16 years old.

This is why science should work in the hard, provable only, way. That any result can be duplicated by anyone who wants to do so, and anyone should be given the tools to convince themselves any given theory works. Climate science is a bit lacking on this front, to put it mildly.

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#36

Post by KirinDave »

arcanus wrote: post #32
KirinDave wrote: post #30

One nitpick I have about this: the peninsula tech scene is huge. It leads in all sorts of places outside of what you'll read about on tech crunch. SSF is a massive hub of Biotech (as is the rapidly expanding UCSF-centered campus in Mission Bay). Financial technology is rapidly expanding in the city as well, and only the older players in that space have substantial ties to traditional Uber For _____ startup VC firms.…

Good point, but I'll note that many cities have technology companies that just don't get the press and hype you see for VC backed software companies in SF. There aren't that many articles about biotechnology in Boston, for instance. The software paradigm has captured a great deal of mindshare.

One I struggle to undo every day!

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#37

Post by M_Grey »

candiodari wrote: post #35
M_Grey wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people who think that governments need to be smaller, often for ideological reasons. Those people won't or can't accept the scale of problems which require those governments, and are too involved in their own mythology of "bootstraps" and the like to see beyond that. This is often also the reason why people who in no way stand to benefit from the status quo, deny AGW; the solution is ideologically…

The economic counterargument would be that any solution to a problem that is not a Nash-equilibrium cannot be implemented. Pretending otherwise is popular, expensive, painful, and doomed to failure as consuming all economic resources on the planet (or any finite amount) cannot fix the underlying problem. But a government can grow, grow, grow while pretending to solve the problem, failing, and "correcting" for the pro…

When I said "people believe what they want to believe" that applied to all people. It is a universal condition.

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#38

Post by grondilu »

> And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change...

Successful people in Silicon Valley are not concerned by these issues. They can afford to pay physicians without relying on public generosity, they can send their kids in private schools if they're not happy with public ones, they're neither homeless nor likely to become so (by hypothesis : they're successful), and they're not poor.

So basically, the subjects that are mentioned are really problems only for people who have a high sense of altruism.

Why are people not as altruistic as the author? I don't know, but it's probably just a fact.

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#39

Post by a13n »

samysaadi wrote: post #7

Let’s not forget that Elon Musk’s first company was a site that made city guides for newspapers. It’s much easier to start companies that solve small less impactful problems first, and then move onto the big important ideas. I think the problem is that a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It’s pretty hard for a CS student out of college to tackle a healthcare problem with no experience in the matter..

Which is why most people shouldn't found companies straight out of college, they should join organizations with impactful missions that align with their goals.

Re: I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

#40

Post by crdb »

M_Grey wrote: post #23
shruubi wrote: post #17

As someone who is outside of SF looking in, to me the whole startup culture there seems utterly insane. To me, it seems as though there is some kind of reality distortion field that convinces us all that no matter what we is being worked on or created, it is in some way world changing or "disruptive", despite how stupid it is, or how viable a market there is for what is being made. The funny thing is, organizations t…

It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing and empty words to facilitate an IPO, selling the company, or hitting that lucky lottery win in some other way. When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.

> It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get

Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth.

A large part of it, at least that I've observed, is the energy, speed of execution, rapid change, the excitement and adventure of the startup world. You willingly give up expected value in exchange for a more interesting life. The stress is part of the fun, the person it moulds you into is something that becomes part of your identity. If the personal risk wasn't real, it wouldn't be fun. The man in the arena etc.

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