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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

#61

Post by gwd »

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 issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out."

But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.

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

#62

Post by rockskon »

dannyobrien wrote: post #4

I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younge…

It can also be explained by there being stuck with the same soul-destroying business model for decades that's slowly taking over everything and making life shittier for everyone except marketers to optimize revenue.

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

#63

Post by KaiserPro »

iamacyborg wrote: post #50
Animats wrote: post #24

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just…

> Even obesity can be cured. Eating less isn’t all that much of a breakthrough, but it certainly highlights how hard it is to get people to do something they don’t want to do.

Amphetamines solved obesity in the 60s (this is from the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obetrol)

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

#64

Post by KaiserPro »

BigJono wrote: post #43
Animats wrote: post #24

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just…

> * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now. How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 year…

> How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side?

Navigating a house requires a level of understanding that we still can't get using a top end GPU and optimal sensors.

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

#65

Post by kredd »

wg0 wrote: post #54
Animats wrote: post #24

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just…

> Self driving works. No it doesn't. Only in San Francisco maybe.

But it works? We only have functional public transit in small amount of cities in NA as well. If we can scale it up, it might be a game changer. I’m as pro-transit as it gets, but unfortunately we don’t have political appetite for it.

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

#66

Post by arathis »

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 security. But not only does that seem unattainable, it's pursuit is considered laziness or opting-out of a social contract whereby 99% of people fight to make 1% rich with the delusion being that maybe it's me that's the 1% and that with the riches I can score I can ride off into the sunset, and get off this foul ride forever.

Makes me sick how far we don fell.

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

#67

Post by imiric »

But this outcome shouldn't be surprising.

In the beginning, the industry was dominated by nerds and hackers who were passionate about tech. Then those with business acumen noticed that this could make them very rich, and swooped in to "help out" those hackers, who, being fair, probably wouldn't be able to run a successful business on their own. But there are also examples of hackers themselves getting business savvy, and business people becoming tech oriented, and many combinations in between.

While the Silicon Valley, VC funded, hypergrowth mentality is incredibly toxic, I think you'll find many examples in the industry across this spectrum. What we're seeing with crypto, AI, etc. is just the usual hype cycle. This will inevitably be flocked by all types of characters, but we've always had these. Remember the buzz around the early web, the "information superhighway", and the inevitable dot-com bubble? Or the video game crash in the 80s? The same will happen with modern tech. We'll eventually reach the plateau of productivity of these technologies, or they will lose our interest and we'll move on to something else.

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

#68

Post by msoad »

Quothling wrote: post #42
gipp wrote: post #3

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

I would completely agree with this if it said "All Cook and no Woz". I say this because I think it is unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's. Jobs actually had a talent for products. Woz and other brilliant engineers may have build these things, but Jobs had a talent for picking the right products, the right packages and the right timing that I don't think anyone else in Tech has e…

exactly! tech needs more Woz+Jobs and less Cooks.

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

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

iamacyborg wrote: post #56
bordercases wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he implied Ozempic.

I assumed that too, but all Ozempic is (as I understand) is an appetite suppressant.

Which is the exact thing that addresses your objection. People, in general, are unable to downregulate their appetite on their own in order to "just eat less". Ozempic does it for them.

Honestly, I question the whole idea that failing to "eat less" is a personal problem. Historically, we jumped into obesity epidemic straight from the time when food was scarce and not very nutrient-rich. Ability to manage caloric intake in times of abundance may not be something humans have in general, as long periods of abundance didn't happen until 100 years ago.

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

#70

Post by DidYaWipe »

Animats wrote: post #24

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just…

Those aren't flying cars. Flying cars can drive on the ground. On wheels. Hence the name.
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