dzink

Feedback accepted and acted upon by those in power is what any country really needs. Uncertainty for those in power means they would take feedack. Democracy give each person over a certain age a vote and a stake in the outcome. Populism promises anything, including the impossible to draw in votes. Fascism herds the voters by scaring them away from the opposition - an easy benchmark is to check if you know anyone directly who has been impacted by the "scares" they promote. Autocrats accept feedback by only those who pay them with political or financial favors. They may use any of the above methods to gain power and then use violence and complete control of media to retain it.

A test of who is paying attention :) and #2

Some potential causes of the scarcity of breakthroughs in the last 10 years:

1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs.

2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.

3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out.

4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with.

7. Hackers at hackathons are not dealing with problems most people deal with. A number of hackathons I've participated in had very similar solutions pitched - you could name the categories, and see them all over again in each hackathon years apart. Usually catering to the tech or the sponsors instead of actual products anyone wanted to use.

An idea is tarpit until someone, or some new tech, or regulation cracks it.

YC has a rare opportunity and it squanders it. It is a hub that gathers most problems and approaches to them in each discipline and many many failures on them at least once a quarter and all of that goes down the drain, instead of being published and explored publicly. The energy of bright new founders is not spent re-hashing the old but exploring the new. YC can still evolve into a science hub for things people want with much more impact than it does now. New founders want to protect IP and hold back competition, so publish the failed ideas and approaches - make it a competition. Show the full length and breadth of tarpit zones and any time they may be cracking. This way new energy goes towards better VC returns instead of falling into old cracks. Build a Yelp of things people want that need to be built or solved.

The plot lines are dead. Hollywood has zero originality in plots lately. They think consumers go to theaters to see special effects on a big screen, but the reality is the more special effects a movie has the more dull to non-existent the plot is.

I’ve been dissecting stock market data with code to see how dark pool and automated trading behaviors are evolving and impacting the market. The market is the most adverse possible brain battle where actors constantly try to outsmart and make money off of each-other. Greed and fear playing out and conditions changing constantly. AI is also used but it gets funny when the market adapts and plays against past behavior to take advantage of AI traders as well.

If their page was written by the AI model, that doesn’t bode well. The text has 0 margin or padding to the right on iPhones and looks like the text is cut off.

That would create a horrible perverse incentive to kill children for money.

If you’re driving a self-driving car, you can’t blame it on the car.

I thought the people who look up your profile show in the friend suggestions section.

The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people, until the resources really needed are blown out. In capitalism, companies specialize on human needs and if a need goes away, investments can go down rapidly, unless the feedback loop is guarded by some government regulation. But when government is doing the investing, the whims or corruption of politicians has no feedback loop.

It’s a feature. Less white collar workers are needed because of AI. Instead of trying to fit in where culture is designed for attrition, find out what humans need and build something you own, using AI if you have to.

The produce you buy at safeway comes from all over the place and spraying sometimes is done with a a crop-dusting air plane.

Nobody claims they are contained in food. Just possibly less absorbable than via lungs.

Big nope - pesticides are there to repel or kill bugs. A lot of times the recommendation is to wash fruit before eating it to remove pesticides or lead from fuel burned by cars in the vicinity, etc.

The eaten one goes through your stomach acid and can be flushed out naturally through the system. The inhaled particles may get stuck in your lungs or worse: absorbed. Lungs are not a through channel. Things absorbed there go to the brain, blood stream, a lot faster. The stuff you spray on plants is usually meant to kill or repel bugs and critters. So won’t be friendly to lung or brain tissue. Possible cancerous too.

Brain work for me is like muscles for others - if I don’t squeeze out every ounce of energy from my brain with problems all day, I feel like I haven’t lived a full day. Many people prefer good workouts instead, if they don’t their body is punitive with restlessness and sleeplessness. Code is my infinite playground but others won’t touch it - despite me trying to convince them for years. They would rather work in the sun, or with other people, or in a busy environment.

People filter themselves into jobs they would rather do, when they have awareness of the possibilities. With social media that awareness is increasing.

I’ve had friends who had the definition of blue collar standing job and chose to transition to nursing, which is another standing job.

Immigration status and lack of language skills may tie you to standing jobs, but if people want to learn and grow out of them, in the US there are pathways. If someone curates a course on career pathways via youtube and spreads them through immigration centers and schools and social programs that will help even more people find their way.

I find healthcare workers to be an interesting mix in this discussion. Their work is extremely physical and mental, and emotionally draining. Demand for it will only go up. Compensation for it will likely go up. Who picks up the jobs will be enlightening. Yes you have the bottleneck for doctor and nurse training, but CNA and PA are not as limited. Doctor liability is an extreme source of stress, but that somehow doesn’t apply to nurses as much, so even doctors recommend their kids become nurses.

Nope. Look at Israel - their Kibbutz system allows for communal raising of children and that means women have the ability to do more than be stuck at homes. They serve in the IDF, have careers, and population growth is 3 children per woman. Israel has the right model - governments who figure out how to support their mothers with proper childcare and education for the kids will get a developed society with proper population growth.

Shift workers deserve more hazard pay and or health care coverage.

Chrome data may be feeding Search Results based on how long people stay at different pages and where they go. Thus removing Chrome may remove a substantial data advantage for search.

This test was on PC. How about the new M4 Macs?

Territoriality in code has been a very male pattern that seems bizarre, given the type of work we do. In purely anecdotal experience: A small team hires its first female developer in a team of several. The senior developer on the team recommends against hiring her, but management prevails. In their separate projects everyone in the team is a top performer - they finish the work for a fraction of the estimated time, the female developer knows the languages they work with so well she can identify bugs and future browser quirks even when reading code on paper. Everyone is detail oriented and keep their code meticulous. The team clocks extra hours regularly without complaint.

The senior developer is made manager on the team. He begins to require all javascript code to have C-style curly brackets. (the opening bracket goes below the function declaration, not right next to it). The reason for it: he is the only one on the team with a C background and prefers to read everyone’s code that way. Overnight he goes into all repositories for multiple customer projects that have nothing to do with each other and changes the code to his preference. The next day the individual developers who work on each project, lose hours sifting between meaningful changes and style preferences and adjust their code. The next night he changes everyone’s code again. Control and desire for dominance over the code base when the code is essentially multiple consulting projects for multiple different customers done by multiple developers at the same tech consulting firm. His treatment and outbursts were worst against the female developer. The female developer among others on the team left for more senior roles elsewhere soon after.

The female software engineers I have worked with have been diligent and thoughtful and often more skilled than male peers, but the treatment of them has always been different in one way or another. I am not surprised if most hide the fact that they are female in open source code contributions. One of the perks of crafting software is you don’t need permission to make stuff, and you certainly don’t need to tolerate bad behavior distracting from the work. The easiest way for teams to lose female developers is to let an insecure bully chase them out.

Every social network: you make something for your friends and end up with viral growth immediately or after years of nothing. You spend the rest of your days policing trolls, spammers, and scammers trying to abuse or hijack the network. You or someone in marketing send out too many spammy notifications abusing user trust and users block your notifications. Nobody shows up anymore and network dies.

Every rom-com: Boy meets girl and they have good times. Somebody messes up. They have a fight. The get back together again.

Every Hallmark movie: Big city girl ends up in small town by coincidence. While decorating for Christmas she falls for the small town guy and decides to stay. (The productions get cheaper by the year, so where they had scenery you now see people talking in front of a blurry background for 90% of the plot. )

This event feels like Tesla has lost its product sense completely. A two seater taxi? Seriously? What about families with kids? Doors that open out and up - what about all the right spaces in cities where you need to open a car door? Look at minivans or London cabs for taxi design, not two seaters.

Then there is the whole: any tesla can be a part of the fleet, then only extra paid FSD teslas can be part of the fleet, and now no-wheel nobody-wants-this-mobiles bait and switch. Investors ought to be upset. This was a shot from the hip instead of proper innovation.

I’m an immigrant from Eastern Europe who moved to the US decades ago. Eastern Europeans are direct - you speak your mind, so there are no assumptions or miss-understandings. Families live close to where they were born in sparser areas and relationships matter, but there is also forgiveness.

I have friends who come from Welsh and Swiss backgrounds and would have layers of internal inhibition before saying something out of fear of embarrassment or multitude of other concerns. A lot of time that leads to them assuming and assumptions can be wrong. They do a lot less verbal or video contact with family members, almost intentionally so, but would still get together in person (broader context i suspect). A lot of relationships on that side degrade quickly when contact is not made for a while - assumptions upon assumptions of offense or who knows what seems to erode the relationship. So when you meet again it’s almost like you have to earn the friendship again.

Politics in this country involves those two mixes of people and waaaay more. The cultural spread, the political spectrum spread, forms a matrix too big to navigate in 99.9 % of conversations The in-person interactions are not long enough to peel all layers of the political onion and the relationship trust onion before you get to the core that you both agree on. Instead there are often unsaid assumptions, experiences, trauma that won’t fit in a tweet and if they do, nobody has time to read it. The more complicated things get and the lower the attention span, the harder it is to invest time and get a favorable relationship outcome if you discuss politics, so you’re better off not even trying.

Nuclear and Solar, at least for ours.

VC relies on you growing enough to attract bigger investors in the future at a higher valuation, including going public. PE bets on you having a really reliable cash flow that they could strap a bunch of debt on to extract the cash in a tax-favored government-subsidized fashion.

This reads like it was written by generative AI. Private equity is often the vulture a company is sold to when the founders can’t take it public or find a symbiotic merger first. In a traditional LBO it loads the company with debt, based on a steady stream of cash flows. The cash flows are key. It’s akin to having a wild stallion which grew up fast and beautiful and then putting a saddle on its back and an ore behind it. In public companies that looks like going from a growth stock to a dividend stock to a high dividend stock that people only buy for tax purposes because the dividend is less than the devaluation in stock price over time. You can look at the financial statements of companies or the details in any stock app and you can see where they are at in this maturation curve. Then invest your time and money accordingly.

The Powerwall 3 has a thick metal shell and the front is glass sealed with o-rings and screws that are single use because of water-tight silicone sealant as well. The metal shell can rust quickly (I’ve seen one with tape on it rust under the tape within days of first rain after water got under the wrinkled tape.) If Musk is smart he will try to one-up the Chinese EV company that is running videos of one of their EV Land Rover wannabes roaming around a lake and make the Teslas and batteries waterproof in the next iteration or even this one. The hurricane will dampen their sales in the south fast otherwise.

Facebook has become full of generic name accounts posting generic AI generated content. Despite all flagging it is incessant, which tells me it’s likely sanction or even created by the company to fill content gaps. I’d say 30-50% or content that shows for me is suspicious.

Fantastic idea! The detection doesn’t seem very actuate through - most of it is noise with no actual music playing in the background. I don’t know how the algorithm assumes it’s a song.