lordgeek

brilliant!

if only we had BillG apointed as COVID czar at the beginning...

from what i heard over 50% of Tor nodes in Iran run by the government to track dissidents. I can only imagine what that number is in Russia where every sever is essentially hosted in government-controlled building.

great story, thanks for finding this!

Notice the similarity with today Russia:

- Run by an eternal Emperor adored by population at large (not counting few remaining intellectuals he murders every year)

- Extremely religious-jingoistic national ideology as “strong spiritual braces of Russians”. Quite similar to militaristic Japan “warrior spirit of master race”.

- Already invaded and conquered few smaller neighbors in the wars of conquest

- On of top sources of toxic influence in every field in the modern world

Countries who blindingly follow some two bit God-Emperor aggressive trash should not be surprised to eat Gamma rays for breakfast one fine morning.

As far as I recall, this was written in the specific historical context almost a decade ago. Back then "Lean Startup" and "4 Steps to Epiphany" were all the rage in Silicon Valley. Shitty copy cats of YC were springing up left and right in the Valley and other locations. A number of people (with a lot of financial self-interest at stake) were pushing hard the narrative that creating new unicorn can be industrialized like a factory and they already figured out the magic formula - no risk, all reward - just sign here under the dotted line and give me your funds.

The essay publication was quite impactful in middle of that insanity. It uses Gödel analogy to demonstrate that no amount of formalization (that helps reduce human/team/org risks) will in any meaningful way reduce the systemic risk of a new startup. It placed Gödel formalism straight on the path of hustler/carpetbaggers who were trying to launch new funds and incubators at that time "well, go ahead and prove to your LPs you have Gödel-like formalism that detects great startups at an early stage and you do it better than YC".

Right now most of the essay conclusions are self-evident, "lean startup" is an insult, so it does seem like the author spending a lot of pages and energy on proving something plain obvious.

That wasn't that clear and that obvious many years ago when it was written.

Love the concept, but definitely needs browser extensions to be practical. Also consider using NaCl relay so you can add password sync between machines as second must have.