pbrum

A catastrophe is, to use a tired analogy, the tip of the iceberg. The larger truth is that the Spanish rail system, along with most if not all European rail systems, is collapsing due to excess demand and underinvestment. Any random train ride in Europe at any time in the past few years has been an exercise in patience. Delays, cancellations, and other incidents are constant. A tragedy like this happens on top of a big pile of decay

Expand, I'm interested in this take

Tell that to the relatives of the dead. What you said was true and today is true. But will it be true tomorrow?

East Asia: top-tier infrastructure, well maintained Europe: second-best-tier infrastructure, rapidly decaying and overwhelmed USA: Third World-equivalent infrastructure

This is what posting is all about

Strongly recommend the short novel Kentukis by Samanta Schweblin!

Nonstarter without YouTube and WhatsApp access

Don't know if you're referring to the headline or the body (which is paywalled). The current headline reads "OpenAI says it has overtaken Anthropic with its latest AI model". Which makes me wonder whether FT itself changed a headline along the lines of what you wrote in the past few minutes?

"it brings up painful memories of when Oreo Coke (actually good, unlike Coke Oreo)"

Epic

The author is a superb writer. Actually made me lol:

"I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached."

Fantastic work by the compiler/author, and lovely work by all those developers and designers through the years. Great contribution to HN

Awesome article. This being HN there must be a quibble right?:

Missed opportunity to entitle it "Elevator Action"

You cannot possibly be a full-time academic and your last name be "Papernot"!

I was going to say this too. And since we're at it: does anyone know how many launch pads the Chinese private space companies have, combined?

Not long ago I was looking at my favorite games of decades past. Unreal Tournament figured very prominently, made of course by Epic. So I wondered: why did they stop making Unreal games? I looked at their game chronology. On one hand, they made Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive that never interested me. And the other one? Oh, right: Fortnite. That's where Unreal Tournament went. They made tons of money for sure. But no company, including Epic, has made a competitive FPS + CTF game as solid as UT, UT2003, or UT2004 since that era

Update: Microsoft has taken the page down. But posterity being what it is...

https://archive.is/D9vEN

Loved the anecdote, very nicely CRAFTED

I resolutely approve of this comment. Bravo.

This is key

We are close to landing our first customer - an enterprise-level one at that! We're Geneva Business Messaging, a tool to centralize, persist, and if necessary escalate critical interactions between large companies and their partners. For actual collaborative cross-company work in fields like engineering, logistics, or security - not spam, marketing, sales, or the other frequent purposes of B2B apps.

We're at genevabm.com if you want to check it out!

Got a little something to say here because my startup is all about this. Worked at 2 $100b market cap enterprises and saw a lot of friction specifically in B2B. For internal collaboration Slack/Teams is pretty much consolidated, but for critical B2B interactions everybody falls back to email (and only secondarily to things like LinkedIn DMs or WhatsApp messages). And here's where the problems with email pile up:

No read receipts Need to know exact address to write to Trees/branches problem discussed by others (CCd late in the game? Good luck making sense of things and no chance to grab attachments) Highly vulnerable to phishing and social engineering (anyone can email you) Grab bag: important messages and unimportant newsletters or notifications are all mixed together Emails with precious/sensitive data can be forwarded to anyone (and everyone) in the planet with two clicks

I could continue but you get the picture. As an early Internet user I still have a soft spot for email but specifically for B2B work I think there's a lot of work to be done, similar to what Slack did for internal collab. My startup is genevabm.com for those who are interested, go check us out!

I found your comment very moving. Thank you for sharing that remarkable portrait of your father

I've always wondered about those grimy palm reading or fortune telling shops you'll find across major streets in Manhattan or New York. How are they making rent, even during the retail apocalypse?

What if superintelligence isn't even a thing? I was watching an interview with a Chinese-American specialist the other day (I'm sure it's been shared here on HN at some point) and she explained in the Chinese AI community they don't operate under the assumption that something such as AGI or superintelligence exists, and therefore don't work toward that goal. I'm sure people in this community can comment to a much more informed extent on this than I though

Seconded

Great comment - it reminded me of Seveneves

This stuff is hard. Today was the first time my little startup started sending out little videos of demo features to the group of about 20+ people (all friends/family/close colleagues) I'd interviewed in round 1 of customer work. How did it go? Ok, but not great. The disappointment in there is not from any negative reactions, but rather to the large amount of non-reactions (simple things like "oh cool" and nothing else from someone who knows full well how important this is to me).

But that's ok! I know maybe they'll have more time later. If not, I will nudge them. And I have other people to ping and later will move on to cold pitching anyway. And I've read in countless founder books, testimonials, etc about how hard and laborious this is. Keep a firm mindset, be systematic about going through all the steps, never skip a day of work, meet your own deadlines, have a bulletproof work ethic. Rome wasn't built in a day!

My team and I are building a web app that enables any business to chat with any other business in any language. Details:

It's B2B only - can't register with a free email provider, gotta own a real domain -Therefore identities are collective - companies, not company employees --Therefore all interactions are persisted at the org level rather than assigned to individual inboxes

-It allows you not just to talk but also to work together on contracts. We built a contract parser that turns contract clauses into smart, plain language objects

We're calling it Geneva and doing a friends/family/acquaintances exploratory release as I type this.

http://genevabm.com http://x.com/genevab2b https://www.linkedin.com/company/genevabm/

My company is building something in the messaging/comms space, but focused on B2B rather than internal team chat like Slack/Teams. Seeing all the dislike for those two makes me wonder if we should enable intra-team messaging as a (free?) bonus feature.

As for PerfectWiki: fantastic hyper-targeted product and writeup. Congrats to Ilia

A tool to address friction in B2B interactions (mostly between large companies) I've seen in my career. Main innovations are in comms and contract management. Leaning in on some hardcore dev talent in the team for the stack: there's Rust and Gemini in the mix. I'd say we're past the halfway point of MVP development