- Duolingo
- Chess apps (My favorite is Really Bad Chess, where everyone is given the same randomized board and tries to beat the computer once a day)
- Wordle and variations (my favorite is Tradle, given the export data, guess the country)
- BeReal (the only social media I enjoy)
- Niche review apps (I like HappyCow for reviewing restaurants with vegan/veg options)
Basically, since wordle came out, I've realized that the only way I can limit myself on my phone is deleting overly addictive apps like Twitter and try to stick to apps where there is a daily goal, and once those are solved I can put the phone down and read a book or go outside. I do use the Twitter web app with iOS app limits set to 15 min for each social media app, so I'm not completely cut off, but it's short enough to not get sucked in.
Startup creation / funding is closely correlated with near-zero interest rates. When money is cheap, venture capital is more lucrative. This correlates closely with the early 2000s bubble, the 2008 crash that dropped interest rates and allowed for extreme amounts of venture capital, and the 2020-2021 surge in startup investment. Venture capital in theory becomes a far less lucrative choice in a high-inflation, rising interest rate market. While we’ve definitely seen a bit of a pullback in VC funding over the last 6 months, it remains to be seen whether that was another temporary dip like in Feb/March 2020 or a larger shift in the market.
Personally, I think the entire economy has shifted to focus on SaaS revenue growth above all else, and it will be impossible to “pull back” from venture capital because of that inertia, but in theory based on historical trends there should be a pull-back.
Anecdotal evidence, but I hear similar complaints from friends, and I think that the "netflixy" feel is going to be the single biggest downfall for the company. Netflix requires all original content must be filmed with a true 4K UHD sensor, and because these productions are all using the same powerful digital camera, these shows are all filmed with cheap low lighting setups, since these powerful new cameras require a lot less light to capture a scene (think of the newer iphone cameras and how they perform much better in low light). Whereas older non-netflix shows filmed on different cameras with much more powerful stage lighting setups.
The result is that all these new netflix-produced shows like Ozarks all look super flat and similar. Most scenes are very poorly lit, which leads to a really poor experience when watching on a laptop or tablet. I don't think all viewers are consciously realizing it, but I think this is why many people are getting "bored" of netflix shows.
What about standing desk with a treadmill or a home gym? Do you have a yard you can walk in, natural trails within walking distance or is it literally impossible to walk outside your front door? Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious what the layout of your community is like.
I have to assume the goal is to collect a vast amount of biometric data and then be bought out by someone who wants that data. Here's everything they're collecting:
- Images of users’ body, face, and eyes, including users’ irises (visible, near infrared and far infrared spectrum)
- Three-dimensional mapping of users’ body and face
I'm not at all dismissive of crypto. I actually think there's a ton of opportunity to build a decentralized version of the large cloud providers like AWS and GCP as their pricing continues to increase. For example, I'm interested in seeing how [the Graph](https://thegraph.com/en/) develops. The current implementation isn't a totally decentralized GraphQL service, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
One the other hand, Worldcoin is just another layer-2 coin built on top of Ethereum, and a regular CRUD app and database to upload/verify a hash of someone's retina scan. I just don't see anything novel about what they're doing, besides having a large VC capital infusion. It's just another crypto coin giveaway.
Hilarious that the "eyeball hash" is stored in a normal database, not the blockchain. And Worldcoin is already at a billion dollar valuation.
I don't mean to turn this into a personal attack or flame-war, but I used to respect Sam Altman a lot. It was very hard to watch him transition OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit company, and now it's even harder to watch him jump into the crypto-scam game. I can understand why a young founder would pitch this- "Imagine, everyone on the planet will eventually become a user! Unlimited growth!" But someone like Sam Altman surely has made enough money at this point, so why get in on this? Genuinely asking, because I don't understand the point of this.
Rowing. I used to think that I had really bad back issues from poor ergonomics, but in reality my back muscles were just almost nonexistent. I've been rowing almost daily for years now and never have back issues, and I use a cheap Amazon chair.
Congrats on building something great. I've dealt with teams in the past that got very strict with cloud costs, and I wish I had a tool like infracost when I was on those teams. In fact, I started building an MVP for a very similar tool before I heard about infracost.
How difficult was it to build your pricing pipeline in the beginning? When I was building my tool, just getting and organizing the cloud prices from the major cloud providers was the biggest hurdle that prevented me from moving forward. I can't imagine what it was like for your team to build the MVP. It's unbelievable how opaque these providers make a lot of their pricing.
At my current company we write a proposal for any new project/service (outlining 3 different paths for building a new service, or the option to "do nothing"). Then, once an async discussion happens on the google doc between the team and stakeholders, we settle on moving forward with one of the proposals (or "doing nothing"), and write a 10-20 page design doc outlining the entire service, architecture, etc. Then another round of async feedback between stakeholders on the proposal. Edits to the design doc are made based on feedback, and the design doc is then available for reference for anyone.
I really love this process, as a new member of the team I can go back and read the design doc for any of our systems and understand not only the architecture, but also why certain decisions were made. The caveat is that this a remote-first company with a strong asynchronous culture, which forces a lot of these discussions to take place in a google doc vs a conference room with no record.
I agree, the metagame is your career, and if you're playing the metagame you're incentivized to take projects that look good on your resume, leverage experience for the highest possible offer at the next job, etc. But "gamification" of your tasks at work is not a fun experience and is not a good way to manage a team. It leads to tracking "gamified" metrics that probably aren't closely tied to the success of the business/product.
No part of your job should be gamified, or employees start optimizing to win the game and compete with each other instead of collaborating to create a better product/company. However, bug bounties and crypto bounties are a great way to "gamify" work that cannot be done by traditional employees.
Just set up a spreadsheet to track interviews. Take 5 min after every interview to write down their answers to your questions, next steps, etc. in the spreadsheet. Use it to track where you are in the interview pipeline for each company. Don't bother writing down jobs you applied to. Only start a record if you hear back from them and they want to set up an interview.
Not personally excited for this, but I think the next big thing will be the internet and computers becoming "hyper-transactional" through crypto. I believe this is what companies like Facebook are really pushing toward when they talk about Web 3.0 and the metaverse. It will still, for the most part, be the same internet accessed through phones and computers, but videogame-style micro-transactions powered by crypto will become part of most websites to access content. Since every site having micro-transactions would probably piss off a lot of the general population, I think there will also be an explosion of new ways to earn very small amounts of crypto online, by doing mechanical turk style tasks, playing a new game, creating a bit of content for someone, etc. Average consumers will earn these small amounts of crypto, then immediately spend them on the content they want.
Honestly, you sound very burnt out. You went straight through 3 failed startups and then a masters program with the goal of getting into a FAANG? I have to imagine you were only grinding to get into a FAANG for the money, but you already solved that issue. And master's programs can be quite demanding. Take a semester break from your grad program immediately and do some traveling. Don't look at a computer for anything non-essential for that break. Your motivation will come back. You've just been grinding for way too long, and it paid off. Just not the way you expected. After a semester spent recovering you'll naturally get back into working out and eating right. You just need to stop staring at a computer for a bit :)
Sure, maybe a better word would’ve been we have “circumstantial” evidence of UAPs. Of course the current evidence is not enough to definitively state what these UAP are, or even enough to convince most people on here that UAP are even “real”. However, I would argue there is enough there that further scientific research is worthwhile. Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project costs less than $2 million, and if we can capture evidence of UAP then we can begin to better understand whether these are some sort of craft, or an unknown natural atmospheric phenomena. It’s frustrating to see other scientists against this type of research.
“For starters, looking for alien tech on Earth is probably a waste of time. ‘It’s a geologically active place, and, on top of that, life destroys everything quickly here,’ says Wright.” That’s a pretty harsh reaction for someone interested in evidence of alien life. We have good evidence of UAPs (UFOs) that are non-human technology flying around our own atmosphere. I do hope the search for technosignatures finds evidence, but I think that Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project will end up finding incontrovertible evidence soon.
The the brain is the most complex object we know of. Therefore, throughout history, it’s always been compared to the most complex technology of each historical era. “ Descartes thought that the brain was a kind of hydraulic pump, propelling the spirits of the nervous system through the body. Freud compared the brain to a steam engine.” And today we have computational neuroscience. That doesn’t mean that these models aren’t useful. Many discoveries came about from thinking about the brain as an engine, and now as a computer. But these models are just models. They are refined and become closer to the reality that we observe in the brain, but we still have massive gaps in our understanding of the brain. Like the misconception with amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s that was only realized in the past few years. And now with glial cells, which likely make up 80% of the brain (but we’re not even sure). https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/know-your-ne...
Glial cells were largely ignored, and thought to only protect neurons with myelin, but we’re now realizing how important they actually are for cognition and memory. And computational models and neural networks don’t even take glial cells into account when forming models.
2020 was an anxious blur that broke me.
2021 I took my mental and physical health much more seriously, found a great psychiatrist and began medication, found a much higher paying job at a fully remote company, and am now the fittest I’ve ever been in my life.
No one cares. I majored in Neuroscience, and I’m usually never even asked about what I studied in college in interviews. Within the job, I work with plenty of people who majored in something else, or didn’t even go to college, and they’re not taken any less seriously. The hard part is just getting your first software engineering job, since there’s way more competition for entry level software engineering.