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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#301

Post by mellosouls »

But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm.

This sounds like the sort of nonsense used by scientific crackpots to attack their critics for "not understanding" them.

Sure, your idea may be revolutionary and actually upend everything, but the overwhelming likelihood is it won't and you need to go through the same evaluation process as everybody else and not be so salty about that.

Incidentally, I find the MightyApp concept interesting and wish it well in forging a new market, but this sort of rationalisation as the "main" driver behind reasonable scepticsm is a very poor defence.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#302

Post by vaylian »

arua442 wrote: post #148

I don't like how Paul's writing always gets hundreds of likes just because it's by him. Not everything he writes is amazing. I wish there wasn't such a cult around him.

Upvotes don't mean that something is perfect or worthy of worship. It means that something is interesting or (partially) insightful.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#303

Post by stephc_int13 »

aboodman wrote: post #300
stephc_int13 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you'll simply have to wait a few months. They didn't reveal their true business model or pricing yet. The $50 subscription is a way to simply not flood their servers while beta-testing them, and also getting a bit of money from rich/dumb early adopters.

If that were the case you’d expect them to reply to the several beta test requests this rich/dumb early adopter has sent over the last year+.

Maybe the tech was not yet ready?

Fake it until you make it is still a thing in Silicon Valley.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#304

Post by OhNoMyqueen »

tw04 wrote: post #177

>The reason is that everyone is too conservative. Everyone isn't too conservative: veterans in a field are conservative because they have earned the war wounds they carry. Which is why you tend to see "disruptive apps" targeting younger people. They don't have the life experience to understand, at first glance, why an idea may be extremely dangerous. I'm young enough to remember being that way myself: Who cares if so…

It's not necessarily true. Some people are conservative and have forgotten the reason why.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#305

Post by roymurdock »

_ot4t wrote: post #222

This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app. To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app. I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope. It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it nove…

The VCs are just following the money. We're at the tail end of the economic boom brought on by computers. Until we have another paradigm-shifting scientific discovery, computers will be used to more efficiently match up existing assets (AirBnB) while serving ads and content that decays our social bonds/infrastructure (Facebook).

If there was less money in the system a lot of these quasi-innovative companies would die, or not even get off the ground. But there is tons and it is leading to the misallocation of a great amount of time, energy, and intelligence - at the cost of future generation's standard of living.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#306

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

qshaman wrote: post #237

He is an investor on this “crazy new idea” , I don’t believe him, he is just hustling his audience and trying to create hype about a product that is neither new nor competitive. People like Guido van Rossum , James Gosling , Bjarne Stroustrup , just to mention a few, have contributed way more to the field and have earned the respect of millions , you don’t see them hyping crappy startups for a few bucks (billions* )…

> he is just hustling his audience

And doing an extremely effective job of it. Getting readers to feel something is the whole game. Paul and Suhail know the default reaction to this idea is “well that’s dumb”. Encouraging and exploiting heated conversation around that is a smart move.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#307

Post by heipei »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, bu…

I lost a decent amount of respect for pg due to how he keeps portraying Mighty like it's gonna change how we use the Internet and computers in general. Like, really?

I don't mind Mighty as a product, I don't mind their team, their pricing or their slick marketing website. But please, call it what it is: A nice and slick Remote Browsing product, one of multiple ones. Cloudflare recently launched an RBI product with much more humble and honest marketing about where it will be useful.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#308

Post by tsimionescu »

razorfen wrote: post #241
bsedlm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like they don't understand that (seemingly) forgotten archiectural principle of the internet which says that the "intelligence" goes in the ends: i.e. the leaves are smart, the nodes are as dumb as pipes. Thus they insist on making the nodes (the servers) smart and the clients (leaves) dumb.

It’s the first I’d heard of this axiom. Can you give an example of that in a real architecture? I think about a central server with multiple terminals on a network. There the node is the beefy boi and the terminals are just I/O devices. Kind of similar to what MightyApp is doing - except with fewer privacy concerns :)

But no one uses that architecture anymore. To the extent that you have a terminal on a remote server, you use it to configure the server, from your own thick client.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#309

Post by mumblemumble »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #276
dunkelheit wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. I think this is a general and important point (and sadly not at all discussed in his post). When an expert publicly says something that seems wrong, my default explanation is that they have a vested interest that consciously or unconsciously forces them to consider the implications of what they say and alter the message accordingly. Re…

>>"Recent case in point: public health authorities telling the public that masks are useless and even harmful during the pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and then reversing their stance when masks became abundant." I agree with your general point, but my interpretation of those events has additional axis: 1. Masks are in shortage, and may not protect you, and public doesn't know how to use them and will proba…

And then, when they finally got around to actually applying some science to the question, the message became, "Surgical and (decent) cloth masks will protect others from yourself, and may also protect you."

I can't track down papers atm, but, on a more anecdotal level, there have been quite a few case studies of superspreader events where the people who were wearing masks were much less likely to contract the illness than people who weren't. Given the specific details at play, it's hard to explain how that could happen if cloth or surgical masks don't protect oneself as well.

The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet transmission seems to be the better model.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#310

Post by username90 »

elbasti wrote: post #204
bestinterest wrote: post #4

Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

I am actually in Mighty's market if it cost ~$10usd per month, not $50. At our startup we have a small org of customer service reps. They basically live in four tools: Notion, Slack, Chrome, and Front. These four tools have one thing in common: they are all Electron apps. They SUCK. On any windows computer slower than a $1.5K lenovo, our reps can't have more than ~10 tabs open before their computer starts to stutter.…

Can't you buy a decent desktop and have them chromote into it? A desktop should be more than enough to run the apps of many people.

Edit: Although, I'm not sure it supports multiple separate logins.

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