coffeemug

What would a version of YC that doesn't exploit naive founders look like?

How would we know this approach wouldn't have worked without having tried it? The world is much better and more fun with experimentation like this. Also, history of technology is filled with failed approaches that one day start working because some missing ingredient suddenly becomes available. You can't write off failed approaches forever. You have to reconsider them again and again (and again).

Amazing tool, thank you for building this. One piece of feedback: let me pay you without having to fill out a 20 field form. I would have happily bought a license through PayPal, but having to enter all the info really makes me want to press the back button.

I am definitely not making this claim. I was replying to this:

> People assume there's some level of "intelligence" in them, but they're just extremely advanced "forecasting" tools.

My question wasn't meant as a quip. Rather it was literal-- how do you know your intelligence capabilities aren't "just extremely advanced forecasting"? We don't know for sure, and the answer is far from obvious. That doesn't mean humans are advanced LLMs-- we feel emotions, for instance. My comment was restricted to intelligence specifically.

How do you know you’re not an extremely advanced forecasting tool?

If one believes free speech is crucial to human thriving, then from their perspective buying Twitter to remove speech restrictions benefits humanity.

I thought that's really cheap too. Tacking on "wiki" and "reddit" probably accounts for ~50+% of my google searches now. From that perspective $60M annually feels really low-- reddit search is probably a quarter of the value that google search offers me as a consumer.

Being (a) first and (b) good enough is a moat. Nothing stopped people from switching from google to bing all these years other than not having any reason to.

Comparing debt to GDP is mainstream economics, but it's very much different from the analogy of homeowners debts and their salaries. The proper analogy there would be government revenues, not GDP.

I haven’t touched JVM in ages, but there are two things off putting about it.

First it’s viscerally slow. They have a state of the art GC, amazing benchmarks, tons of work going into performance, but it still feels slow and laggy when you develop on it. None of the other ecosystems you mentioned have that problem (including Python).

Second, they have a bad sense of design. The class library comes from a culture of needing three classes to open a file, and that culture permeated through the entire ecosystem. Almost all the software in it feels bloated and over engineered. The modal JVM experience is spending 95% of your time dealing with “enterprise-y” boilerplate that turns out to have nothing to do with the enterprise and everything to do with bad design decisions and the culture downstream from those. C++ has its own flavor of this problem, but certainly not Python or Go.

In a capitalistic society do injured kids mean reduced work force or more money for Big Medicine?

This argument is a classic case of "Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad, Morty."

When you're reading code, it's really really nice to be able to tell if a line of code blocks. Other than that `Thread.new(_ => doIO()).join()` is pretty much the same as `await doIO()`.

<3

People said roughly the same things about TV, video games, and even D&D. This time may be different, but we’d need to explain what specifically about social media+mobile makes it more dangerous than those other categories. I worry about social media effects too, but another part of me wants to apply skepticism.

For the same reason you go to google.com instead of bing.com.

The man saw nearly half a century ahead, and then did something about it. Wish him the best of luck, and, hopefully, full recovery.

Most developers are a 2023 equivalent of 1973 assembly line workers. Very few do creative work.

No because with options you may have to wait for your liquidity event forever.

That's not how this works. People progress through their careers. Some of your coworkers will do really well, some will do ok. Now imagine two universes. You're 45. In Universe A every one of your old coworkers remembers you fondly and would love to work with you again. You've built up ~25 years of good will, and the folks who do really well will keep inviting you to join them. In Universe B they all think "meh" and have forgotten about you. Which of these two universes would you like to be in?

coffeemug@gmail.com

Hmm you're right, I didn't quite explain it well. The idea is that you can think of `3` as a function that makes thing three times bigger, and think of `*` as a function application operator. So `3*x` is equivalent to `three(x)`. I'll think on this more and change the wording to try and make this more clear.

Author here.

The point is to teach it to people who never understood its value but now want to learn, and to do that it helps to relate to their experience.

That's because you have no way to evaluate the efficacy of different GPs. If you knew with certainty there were a superhuman AI that's performing 100x better than human doctors (and costs 100x less), you would absolutely choose the AI doctor over the human one every time. And if you don't, your kids (or grandkids) will.

I would appreciate an invite-- I've been looking for a smaller programming-oriented community. My email is in my profile.

As a spot check I googled "turkey earthquate donations by country". The result is a table with US on top donating $185M, followed by UAE donating $100M, Kuwait $68M, and finally the UN $50M.

And the next few sentences from the link:

> However, the U.S. was not the only high-level giver to drop. In fact, many countries that landed in the top 10 most charitable countries in previous years slid completely out of the top 20. According to Charities Aid Foundation Chief Executive Neil Heslop, these changes are not a sign that people's willingness to donate decreased, but that their opportunity to donate diminished, largely as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns. Charity-based retail stores were forced to close, fundraising events were canceled, and many elderly charity volunteers had to shelter themselves instead of volunteering.

America is the most charitable country in the world[1]. But, as evidenced by the parent's comment, there is no shortage of people willing to spend other people's money, and Americans are justifiably cautious of that.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-char...

We suspend human rights in various circumstances all the time. Society couldn't function without bounded human rights suspensions. It just has to happen under specific conditions (due process, independent judiciary, checks and balances, etc.)

When I use ChatGPT I feel like I'm looking at a different technology than other people. It's supposed to be able to answer every question and teach me anything, but in practice it turns out to be a content-farm-as-a-service (CFaaS?) Copilot is similar, it's usually easier for me to write the code than iterate through it to find the least bad example and then fix the bugs.

That said, AlphaGo went from "hallucinating" bad moves to the best player in the world in a fairly short period of time. If this is at all doable for language models, GPT-x may blow all this out of the water.