sirspacey

There’s a blind spot in this argument that seems to be beyond the reach of intelligent people to recognize.

Humanity has almost never been prepared for anything and almost never successfully prepared when it has chosen to.

almost all progress has been in reaction to change that has already happened.

while on its face this piece is a logical, reasonable stance, it is more likely to become a political foil than deliver anything tangible.

we can either have superintelligence or others will have it and we will not. guns, germs, and steel and all that.

it is bizarre how convinced we are that we can take coordinated action in advance of a threat as a body politic or a species.

RIP Roku. Built our whole streaming life around it, guess that’s on a clock now.

i thought so too. but now we are onboarding project managers in non-tech fields to Claude Code and they are crushing it. on a terminal. vs code. the first thirty min is the hard part, after that the feedback loop kicks in. they ask for what they really want, they get it.

all day every day and never going back

was thinking about starting a community for ops people going claude code because you 100% can and should do it

because that pretty much is the state of any kind of speach it could apply to. either we operate from it as a first principle/“sacred text” or its scope shrinks as modern life loses any literal comparison to life in the late 1700s

this is a really great example of how badly the people who designed your tool screwed up

try doing your own version of this for a non-work related company & give it this feedback in Claude

it will improve

you’ve landed on the core of politics

the shape of how things actually work is what’s left when constant churn (and now budget blocking) is a fact of life

I’ve learned this is the way to get the value from any social network, great suggestion.

What I offer may be helpful, but you likely have strong reasons to ignore it:

I have been a part of a dozen “next Silicon Valley” projects across the US, with friends who have done it internationally.

I’d suggest studying how it happened in Paris/France and also how Portgual lost it.

The only thing that works is founders helping founders. Everyone else responds to the signal they generate.

If you try to send that signal with investors/vendors, you will attract a lot of people who will not build much value.

One formula I’ve see work is to faciliate college student talent interest in startups meeting with founder/CEOs who built very successful companies. It gets a fly wheel going.

When I was on the ground floor of the NYC startup scene, it took ten years to build up to a viable startup scene.

Your effort will likely take longer.

So the best help I can give you is this - don’t waste your life.

If you are willing to contribute a generational effort towards this goal, find every founder from N Mexico and meet them. Ask for their advice on your vision. Do what they recommend.

If not, save yourself the dissapointment. There are literally 1,000s of attempts that have failed. Venture studios do not work. Angel investments from people who are not in the industry of your startups do not work.

It takes a lifetime to build a network in an industry. That is what early stage founders need access to, from people who understand how to succeed in them.

EDIT: typos & grammar

thank you for this, very interesting

Religion + State = Violence

I would watch that YT video and share it with everyone I knew. That it cool.

There wouldn’t be any safety for that anyway.

A tariff as a negotiating tactic wouldn’t be worth much if it was known to be temporary.

I’ll be one to raise my hand and say this has been dramatically not the case for anyone I’ve introduced AI to or myself.

Significantly more informed and reasoned.

If you haven’t worked in the federal government, this is an unserious take.

Experience and context matters. Especially this one.

What changed is the audience

Founders are in private group chats now

Man I miss it being real here instead of Reddit Jr

Grateful for those of you who still hang out

That’s how it is today, but that was also the case at the birth of e-commerce. Amazon was a large eCom store but many others were successful and switching for price was common. Not so much anymore.

Defaults are powerful over time.

Because that is not their motivation and no amount of spin casting changes it.

There’s a simple counter-factual for people with this level of ability:

“Making money” can be easily pursued at BlackRock or any number of PE firms.

Creating historic technology, of unknown difficulty and scale of impact, is not something pure capitalism can or is designed to deliver. What would investors or customers buy at the start of OpenAI?

While OpenAI may end up a corporation like any other, it would not have achieved what it had as one.

Then we should also jail the shareholders who profited and the activist shareholders who pushed for it

CEOs, especially of large companies, are glorified management

Film is such a nascent art form. The 90s as “peak blockbuster action” is a valid stance on taste but hard to defend as superior to all that came after. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight is leagues aways from the 90s Batman, as an auteur friendly and obvious comparison. Pixar another on the animation front.

There have been great films made in every era, but the trend towards tighter writing, more legible and compelling action, and emotionally impactful story telling is strongly trending upwards overall.

And nothing will ever top the merchandising mania of the 80s!

Could be summarized, from a tech POV as:

The concept that the customer is the expert on requirements and it is the job of the tech vendor to implement them as failed, wholesale, and the failure is growing non-linearly in a relatively short period of time.

It’s time to abandon the fiction that SWEs are order takers.

We need engineers to redesign operations, not merely implement what aging employees know how to do.

What a snapshot of history

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is almost every company becomes the symbol of it’s anti-mission

Root cause almost always seems to be trying to design PM performance around metrics

Metrics are a poor framework for values

There’s a fair case to be made that it delivered on that, the thesis that increasing connectedness diminished violence over time

Is your null hypothesis that human run decision making systems don’t have these flaws?

A stunningly powerful lesson that one never really win a lawsuit. The best you can do is survive.

You seem to believe that getting credit for the idea would net you something.

I’m curious what that would be? Why do you believe your org would do it?

Some orgs reward ingenuity. Many do not.

It’s working out for many of the gifted kids I meet because it pushes their parents to put them in charter/private/montessori

There really isn’t a “gifted” program in a public school setting. Mostly it’s just more volume of work, not acceleration of learning. Head Start is certainly one of the better programs, but it’s not great compared to a Montessori or Project-Based Learning approach.

Another factor: in public school kids are generally punished socially for doing significantly above average. They learn to isolate their emotional selves from everyone and become a “success object” for the school.

It’s so critical for all children, including our best and brightest, to experience being valued as a person distinct from their performance. As Paul G has often said, following your interest is how to maximize your potential for impact.

Public schools for a long time fought to hang on to top performing students to improve outcomes. I think the push against outcome-based approached is necessary, if misguided in this case. Outcome based policies have failed, wholesale, across the globe. They create strange, unproductive learning environments where signals of learning become the only thing children work on. “Most Likely to Succeed” is a phenomenal book on why outcomes-based learning is a farce and what the better way is.

You are asserting quite a lot here.

Have you spoken with SWAT team members?

The few I know would find this attitude of “killing is fine because we won’t be sued” abhorrent

An airman I know shared that it cost $10M + to train a pilot by the time they can run missions, which matches the sources Perplexity found on the question. (1)

The number of years the military gets to keep a trained pilot is limited, so that’s also a factor.

The more significant one is that so few people prove to be capable and willing to be fighter pilots. Replacement is not a given.

1 https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-much-does-it-cost-the-a...

No. A legion of edtech companies have been born and died who solve the underlying pedagogical issues but die.

Some of the reasons they die are:

- students don’t control the budget for their spending, so their voice/progress has almost no impact on budgets

- parents in the US spend a tiny fraction of their deposable income on education (and also have almost no say in budgets)

- teachers have almost no say in budgets. In public schools, it’s none. In others, it’s performative if at all most of the time.

- administrators get promoted by doing a very specific set of small things, none of which include improving outcomes through addressing pedagogical innovation

This all adds up to: you can create an edtech startup that radically improves student outcomes and still run out of cash