cactus2093
I would expect someone who "strikes gold" like this in a solo endeaver to raise money, start a company, hire a team. Then they have to solve the always challenging problem of how to monetize an open-source tool. Look at a company like Docker, they've been successful but they didn't capture more than a small fraction of the commercial revenue that the entire industry has paid to host the product they developed and maintain. Their peak valuation was over a billion dollars, but who knows by the time all is said and done what they'll be worth when they sell or IPO.
So if you invent something that is transformative to the industry you might work really hard for a decade and if you're lucky the company is worth $500M, if you can hang onto 20% of the company maybe it's worth $100M.
Or, you skip the decade in the trenches and get acqui-hired by a frontier lab who allegedly give out $100M signing bonuses to top talent. No idea if he got a comparable offer to a top researcher, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. Even a $10M package to skip a decade of risky & grueling work if all you really want to do is see the product succeed is a great trade.
Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.
So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.
Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
> I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content
This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.
What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem.
There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something.
I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way.
Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.
Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?
Who would want to? There are a lot of jobs in the real world that do work this way, and they are generally not the most desirable jobs. E.g. data entry or picking fruit or customer support or working on an assembly line.
The ability to improve, scale your work, and over time make a bigger impact with less effort is one of the key things that makes any kind of work interesting.
Not to mention a lot of the the most desirable jobs, like, say, professional athlete or movie star, tend to work very differently than what you're describing. Many people work very hard in those fields and never succeed, it's the combination of hard work and skill and a little bit of luck/randomness that makes it interesting.
> the reward could evaporate at any moment
Wait a minute, is the reward the fact that the community exists? That's not going to evaporate overnight when Reddit replaces a mod. Your work will live on and hopefully influence the future moderators decisions.
The fear of your reward evaporating sounds a lot more like this work is driven by ego and the desire for control.
That's an interesting idea. It gets me thinking, in the history of computing have patents on hardware and data protocols overall been a net positive or negative?
I normally tend towards being a supporter of market-based solutions and typically patents are seen as an important part of that. But things like the MFi program, mp3s, all the different video formats, various Dolby formats have all been quite annoying for consumers and set back a lot of products. If these things had never been patentable, then maybe companies would have invested less research into them and the protocols we would have ended up with in their places would have been marginally less efficient. But I think open source efforts could have done a good enough job in their place and the upside of more interoperability and more competition built on top of these things would have vastly outweighed the downsides.
But you also have lenses that are stretching out the screen to cover your periphery where it can be much less sharp so it's not exactly comparable.
As a frequent Reddit user I don't agree with that. The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.
As a user if I don't like something about a certain subreddit including how it's moderated, the more realistic option is just to not participate in that subject matter on Reddit. I can still use Reddit for other topics but I feel like there's very rarely an alternative subreddit on the same topic which is anywhere near as active as the main one.
So, no offense to Reddit mods, but I really don't think these are all highly skilled, irreplaceable individuals. There's no competition that incentivizes the best people to rise to the top, these are just average folks that volunteered at the right time and now they're mods. There is apparently even a lot of cronyism among the mod community and I have heard that it can be hard to break into for first time mods.
If Reddit forces some of them out, there will be many people willing to step in who can do just as good of a job. It might even be a net positive thing to get new people involved.
I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?
From what I've seen the common advice for monitors is that 5k is the ideal resolution for a 27" screen and 4k is a little bit less sharp if you're looking closely.
It's much easier to believe that this is being driven by college administrators who know that the way to advance their careers in the current climate is by passing radical social justice changes, and this particular idea is simply an organically popular fad among social justice influencers so it's the one they've latched onto.
As a software engineer, basically all the skills I use to do my job on a day to day basis are things I've learned from experience, or informal mentorship from other engineers, or reading blog posts on programming practices and then applying those things and seeing what works and what doesn't.
But to an economist none of this counts. A 24 year old that just started their first job after getting a masters degree in CS is considered objectively more skilled than someone with an undergrad degree and 10 years of experience.
Because after Covid it sure seems like whatever it is, there are a lot of much lower hanging fruit as far as detection, early testing, contact tracing infrastructure, understanding what air is, etc that would do a lot more to prepare for the next pandemic.
I can barely tell what you're going for here, I feel like you couldn't have picked two worse examples. Road deaths are an everyday occurrence that we've all just accepted as normal so those barely make the news, and bicycles get even less attention than cars. And the "collapse of civilization" is the kind of thing people are shouting about literally every day and it's always an exaggeration and pure opinion.
Apple sees themselves as a storefront not a payment processor, so maybe the idea is to make things look more consistent as you're scrolling through or comparing multiple apps.
I'm not necessarily a big fan of Tailwind, but this is a total strawman. Nobody would advocate having one big file with thousands of repeated classes or something. Just like it would be a strawman against the use of css variables to say that you'll end up with a bunch of global variables used in thousands of places that become impossible to change because you can't be sure you won't break something unintentionally. And in the extreme cases where it does happen, the latter scenario is often much worse of a problem IMO than having too much repetition, you can always get clever with find and replace to get through repetition.
Tailwind works when you use it with a component framework, you're not getting rid of all abstractions completely you're just moving them all to a single layer within the component class.
But both approaches still make it possible to shoot yourself in the foot and end up with a mess of unmaintainable code if you don't abstract things well.
The crypto/dapp/defi/etc spaces have supposedly been "moving incredibly fast" and "all the smartest people are working on it" for ~5 years now. That's a long time to be moving really fast without really getting anywhere. Where's the payoff?
To me this space feels like a solution without a real problem. The decentralized part is a neat trick, but on the margin a centralized authority to mediate financial platforms is more good than bad.
For the average person healthy food usually means food with fewer calories and more micro-nutrients, like eating more broccoli and less white bread.
This study is about malnourished patients who need more calories than they can even digest from an average meal so they need specialized high-calorie foods that are customized for their own metabolism. It's essentially exactly the opposite of what "healthy food" means in any other context.
So it has nothing to do with any narrative about cost cutting and the quality of ingredients used in hospital cafeterias.
The daylight savings time bugs I've run into at pretty much every company I've ever worked at would beg to differ.
Some people might find that they have a hard time not over-eating with processed foods, and maybe for them their preferred diet is just to avoid all processed foods. But it's useful to treat that as a means to an end, rather than saying that avoiding processed foods always needs to be the end goal.
For one thing I don't think most people would even agree on what foods count as processed and are bad. Some people are talking about everything except fresh vegetables, some people are talking about specifically industrially-processed food but would say the exact same recipe followed at home (minus a couple of preservatives) is perfectly fine, some people are specifically against fast food but might think canned foods are fine.
Large blood sugar spikes after a meal are what is bad for you, but this a more nuanced equation of things like glycemic load of the food (which is as much a factor of quantity eaten as it is glycemic index), genetics, and level of exercise. It's not as simple as just saying all processed food is always bad, for instance after a hard workout simple carbohydrates are not just ok but actively good for you, and ideally most people should be doing a hard workout multiple times per week. Some other components of processed food like excessive salt can be bad, as is the fact that they often push out more micronutrient-rich foods from your diet.
But it kind of strikes me as the abstinence-only approach to dietary advice. People love the taste of processed foods, I think we'd do better to encourage eating responsibly overall than insisting on avoiding processed foods altogether. And it's possible to be very healthy while eating a significant amount of processed foods.
Also, just curious, how long ago was this that you were preparing for the SAT? It might have been non-obvious to study for it then, but I can't imagine that any kid today who is driven enough to want to get into a good college wouldn't just google this and find a bunch of practice resources.
1. As OSS software, some users will want to edit the code and add features, and knowing what language it’s written in is a pre-requisite to doing that.
2. The developer community is an important factor in making OSS projects successful. If I’m going to take a chance on a young project, I want to know that it is set up to have a strong community and continue to be improved over time. If it was hand-written in binary or assembly as you suggest, there is no chance it would grow a popular community of developer contributions.
3. Like it or not, different programming language communities have developed around different values in how to build software. The Rust community generally promotes strong type safety that makes entire classes of bugs much less likely which is a plus to me as a user.
4. With editors in particular, the language it’s written in often leaks into the user experience. E.g. Emacs is written and configured in Lisp, Vim has a ton of legacy cruft in the C and vimscript codebase that can make it annoying to compile/install, annoying to build plugins for, and has made modern features like asynchronous tasks difficult to add, which was the whole reason for neovim existing. VSCode has plugins written in JavaScript. Knowing this project is written in Rust gives me some hints that it probably won’t share any of these similarities with these other editors.
I would flip it around and say that historically AWS has had extremely inconsistent architecture and IAM policy design that can make it very hard, sometimes impossible, to do it the "right way".
The nice thing about using separate accounts is you don't have to get into as many of the hairy weeds and the permissions you end up might end up being much simpler to create and then also to maintain down the road, since everything is isolated by default and then you allowlist only the things you need.
I don't see why you would frame this as "you fucked up" in your design.