pbadg3r

Author here! It sounds crazy, but poop might be worth a trillion dollars.

Specifically, communities of microbes could return humans to a pre-industrial baseline gut microbiome, treating more than 20 diseases in markets worth more than $500B per year.

Happy to answer questions!

"You don't work at SpaceX - the largest project we're working on right now is a big spreadsheet that is nonetheless six months behind schedule. Sleeping is higher energy than that."

https://dontbuildsaas.com/

Yeah!! Wrote a blog post about this recently: https://startupspeed.substack.com/p/mental-shifts-for-deep-t...

"there is no reason to use overized MCUs/mini computers like the Pi and expensive modules e.g. from Adafruit."

Definitely not for scaling, but for deploying prototypes this approach is awesome! Eg use the Pi to create some prototypes, get user feedback, launch a kickstarter, do what you said. I worked at robotics startup that did this, worked super well for our first robots. Podcast about it: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/erik-schluntz-cobalt-robotics/id1649845905?i=1000584727151

It feels like the best solution here is "Institutional Verification", ie OS makers building verification systems.

Author calls this "fraught with problems, susceptible to abuse, and ultimately impractical."

But it's hard to imagine any other approach working for long. You can try to make your content better than AIs, but as AI models incorporate more details, and get more feedback on how to get positive responses on social media, AI posts will dominate. With institutional verification, you can imagine Apple + other OS makers pushing OS updates that check whether actual keys are being used to write things, and copy-paste gets disabled when posting. Sure, there's new software to build, but it's the only approach that seems practical in a 3-15 year time horizon.

I started SPEED to help founders, and many of the lessons are highly applicable to startup CTOs and early engineers, especially the episodes with founders from Substack, Athelas, Segment, and Astranis.

https://fiftyyears.com/speed

All feedback is welcome! Note: it's less applicable for devs at larger companies.

Calvin, Peter, Ilya, and Ian built the prototype that became Segment in Dec 2012, after 24 months of trying different ideas and spending $500k. Eight years later, @Twilio acquired Segment for $3.2B.

Segment now helps 25,000 companies get customer data into >800 different tools to analyze it. They process roughly a trillion API calls per month.

Hear from Calvin about their founding journey, and some of the great stories illustrating how Segment moves fast. Plus, hear how Calvin thinks about levels of insight in searching for new startup ideas.

Clicks on name: Karma >900.

Moment of destiny

John and Ryan McLinko started Astranis in 2015. Both spent time in traditional aerospace and wanted to use geostationary satellites to deliver internet to billions of people, at a pace that would make traditional companies blush.

Astranis is now worth >$1B and is prepping deployments that will get internet to millions of people in Alaska and Peru. They build 2-7x faster than traditional companies, shipping a first prototype satellite in 3 months, and getting to space a year later.

This podcast dives into what makes Astranis move fast, including John's thoughts on when to go slow, and examples of scrappiness and hustle, like building their own clean room and using an SF park for satellite testing.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4JmXZnJxQ6zx3Sjxh1Ns7c Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/john-gedmark-astranis/...

Shameless plug! Erik and I recorded a podcast on the early days of Cobalt, including the first fundraise. Check it out! https://open.spotify.com/episode/45mdsE71r7wNHtEQyz13wl

Would love to support you on this journey! I'm on the team at Fifty Years, we've backed teams like Noya (carbon removal) and Solugen (Carbon negative chemical manufacturing). Would love to chat! Feel free to email me at peregrine at 50y.com

You may enjoy http://www.technovelgy.com/

With a name like generator2 it's hard to know who to believe.

In all seriousness, I think it's been fairly well optimized to generate outrage and get people clicking the article, whereby many readers will reach the conclusions you mention.

Wow this is fascinating, GINI for wealth inequality is definitely not talked about enough

Has anyone seen research linking dream content to the causes of the dream? What I'm imagining is dream journals like the ones on the website, accompanied by things that are happening in the patient's life that might explain the dream.

E.g. Dream: I saw my mom and gave her a hug.

Posited cause: I've been thinking about my mom a lot recently because her birthday was last week and I really miss her.

(edited for formatting)

Load small things into the dishwasher: Do you want an internet-connected device that can pick up a butcher knife and move it at waist level, that has a human watching its camera to back it up when it fails? This objection applies to a bunch of your feature requests, since knives don't weigh that much :/

Open the front door: You can do this with a $5k investment in some IoT + automated door opener

Get the mail: Curious what subtasks you imagine here (e.g. outdoor vs indoor, pick up packages, climb stairs, etc)

Put shoes where they need to be, pick up socks: This could totally work today if you don't need to open doors and you don't mind organization on piles in the floor, but I think the use case isn't compelling enough on it's own to create sufficient demand.

Dust/mop/broom: lots of people have robots for floors, but higher surfaces are hard to make work. Despite this, some teams have worked on bathroom-cleaning robots with this capability.

Mow the lawn: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers

Fold towels: Not that hard, but small market

Fold clean clothes from a basket: Super hard if you never want to destroy the clothes, and hard even if you can destroy some clothes.

Clean toilets, replace toilet paper: People are trying! Not going to be in homes for 5+ years though.

Scoop out kitty poops: products like this exist, but you still have to manually unload them to a trash can.

Make the bed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzNZrFhBeoY haha

There are lots of ~$150 meters on Amazon. (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/GZAIR-Temperature-Relative-Humidity-0...) I've used some of these meters and the quality you can get for $150 is surprising! I've basically just held meters near filters, windows, and fans to understand air quality.

Thank you for the wiki link! What's crazy is the migrants per capita numbers. Idaho is 3x Texas!

If you're wealthy maybe you're also savvy enough to deal with the system. When a few second opinions with doctor friends are only a phone call away it's not hard to imagine better outcomes better. I recall an article on HN where a dev quit his job to do cancer research when he was diagnosed, and spent the next year getting to top 1% level in cancer analysis for his subtype. That's disposable income in action.

Fatal opioid use is less common with wealthy folks, and great diet + exercise + friends (easier if you're rich) are all good prevention mechanisms against antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Debt tends to be hard for super new companies, even with orders in hand. If you are developing a new product and don't have cash up front, there's a good chance you never deliver, and both lenders and potential customers know that. Also looks unattractive in future VC rounds, but in this case probably secondary to my first point.

Check out represent.US . The fundamental issue in much (not all) of American politics is the "company -> lobbying -> legislation -> company" feedback loop, and Represent.US is taking steps to address it. They're running pro-voting campaigns ahead of this election, and have had 114 wins across cities and states over the last few years. You can get involved by volunteering (https://represent.us/volunteer/) or by donating. I don't work there, just love their work.

I wonder how much you'd have to pay someone in severance to make it worth it. If there's typically a 20% yearly salary piece for a recruiter, paying 10% direct to the employee in severance if their 3 months doesn't work out might make it work for a subset of people.

So encouraging to see people promoting represent.us here!! Thank you!

This reminds me of https://pagedraw.io/

Cobalt | Frontend, Fullstack, Linux, Security, Designer | Palo Alto, CA | Onsite

Cobalt builds autonomous security robots that keep buildings secure by combining the reliability of machines and the friendly face of human-in-the-loop “pilots”. Security costs US companies $33B / year, and is a very difficult task for humans to perform because of long monotonous hours. We’re a team of 12 and are raising our Series A.

We have robots deployed to customers throughout San Francisco and are an incredibly fast moving team - we went from nothing to shipping our first robots in 12 months! We're looking for folks who know more than us and can bring their expertise to the team.

————Three Reasons to Join Cobalt————

We ship complex products - fast! We went from nothing to paid robot deployments in 12 months, and do over-the-air updates to our robots every two weeks. Our team hails from Google[X], SpaceX, MIT, Harvard, and Georgia Tech. Both founders have deep experience in Robotics and have previously started YCombinator backed companies. We are collaborative, respectful and fun-loving, and want to hire folks who feel the same way.

Frontend Engineer: Lead development of control interfaces and dashboards to help humans and machines work together.

Full-stack Web Engineer: Build out React + Django stack to provide intelligence, resiliency, and monitoring to the Cobalt fleet.

Systems Engineer: Improve Linux systems to increase reliability and performance wherever our system touches the OS.

Security Engineer: Protect our cloud infrastructure, our client interfaces, and our robots from network or physical threats.

Designer: Shape the visual style of our web designs, robot control interfaces, dashboards, and marketing materials.

Interested? Email careers at cobaltrobotics dot com with a link to your Github and your resume.

These are all great points. In some cases, ballot initiatives offer some hope. Check out Represent.US - they're using ballot initiatives to push for things voters support but elected leaders often don't.