It's indeed not that black and white. Growth and revenue can happen quite early and they are usually seen as signs that a company might eventually become profitable. The whole point of VC funding is to put all available resources in growth, not in profit. Investments in profitable companies aren't really venture capital investments. Different class of investors that do that, generally.
Where the whole thing starts looking like gambling is when companies get huge rounds based on essentially no proof whatsoever that the thing will ever grow or have revenue. And when the idea is basically "we'll pay famous people to send greetings to people" we're in obviously stupid money territory. That was never going to have the revenues to back up the inflated valuation. And somebody still sank a few tens of millions in that to find that out the hard way. That company had a paper valuation of a billion. But it doesn't necessarily mean all those tens of millions were spent and lost. Investors might commit the money but it's usually conditional on growth targets and milestones. When shit goes south, they'll pull the brakes and the money stops flowing. Good investors wouldn't wait until all the money is gone to do that.
The reason these investments happen is that VCs mostly aren't investing their own cash. They are being paid to make investments and to inflate their portfolios. By the time the shit hits the fan, they'll have gotten their payoff. It all looks great until it doesn't. And inflated valuations make them look shit hot even when they are clearly not. This attracts more capital for them to invest.
Of course at some point the shit does hit the fan and the money evaporates. That's when you get acqui-hires and other constructions that are usually portrayed as a successful exit that, again, makes the VCs look like they know what they are doing. This is all about damage control that is about both financials and reputations. Never mind that it's effectively a fire sale at that point. But investors get to swap their bad shares for good shares, and founders get to work in somebody else's company for stock options. And the "buying" company gets some nice people and they stay best buddies with the investors they just bailed out who might typically also be investors in those companies. In the end the madness gets written off against the overall fund performance. It only takes a few good gambles to work out for everybody to come out smelling like roses.
They're bedazzled by a little bit of marketing flair.
Generally I find production-ready images have more synergy and tend to be web-scale. Often they're built from the ground up for AI & are blazing fast, at scale, and empower your team whilst unlocking new possibilities. As my sibling comment suggests, being cloud-native is a crucial factor too.
That’s because MacOS got rid of subpixel antialiasing sometime after launching Retina screens, which makes non-hiDPI screens have quite awful font rendering.
I sometimes switch to a bitmap font like Fixedsys Excelsior or GNU Unifont when using MacOS with a low-resolution monitor to compensate (with antialiasing off so the bitmap font looks crisp).
Also, JetBrains Mono somehow looks good on lowres screens even though it’s not a bitmap font, it seems to not blur as much as other fonts when it gets antialiased.
I took a crack at something like this a couple of weeks ago[0] except using ttyd. It’s been working pretty well since then and I actually really enjoy the setup.
Because it's not a good and it's not a service. It's not enjoyable, not pleasurable, and usually not well-made. It doesn't inspire thought or confidence and it's not actionable. It's my responsibility to be informed and it's a requirement of a free country that we all be informed, but it's not something I'm willing to trade for money because money is valuable and knowledge of current events is just drudgery (pun only intended after the fact).
The second culture is built for politics. There is a neat dividing line - whether questions of truth should be settled by consensus or trial against nature.
The academic STEM culture is a very carefully nurtured group of people who believe (at least to a greater extent) that truth should be decided on by a repeatable, impartial procedure that leverages natural phenomenon. So if two engineers disagree about the minimum conditions for a building to collapse, they are usually the sort of people who will converge on what happens in reality.
The more normal culture is to accept that while there may or may not be an objective truth, what really matters is what most people think. Narrative suddenly becomes important and the truth depends a lot on what you are trying to achieve. Think lawyers and judges. They may accept an objective truth exists in principle, but at the end of the day to them an argument can only be settled by most people agreeing on the truth (including dead people if tradition gets involved).
The first culture is more powerful when dealing with reality (to the shock of nobody). The second is more effective at dealing with groups and generally is more pleasant to work with, except when they lose touch with reality completely and goes berserk with groupthink.
Coincidentally, these dynamics explain why political bodies often choose to drive over the cliff rather than swerve.
When I talk to scientists and engineers and just generally people who value improving their accuracy and reasoning ability in some capacity, I share with them the assumptions that I think can be fairly called the intellectual norms of academia, which are that strong, vague, and unqualified statements not backed by a lot of evidence are likely to be nonsense and people who make a lot of them are unserious. People can admit they don't know things, express uncertainty, make guesses, make assumptions, or have gut feelings, but it is important that these are qualified and labeled as such, and failure to do so lowers your status in this context
However, most people who make hiring decisions outside of academia (and increasingly many inside it) are part of a different culture which assigns status based on the confidence a person projects and their ability to inspire other people to feel strongly about things they say. While there are also people of the former culture making hiring decisions in sufficiently technical fields, it's hard to avoid the pressures of this second culture.
Also, the pressure on knowledge workers is the same as that on workers of any kind: While there are a few stray independently wealthy people or even quasi-independent rags-to-riches successes in the world, by the numbers most people have to dance for their dinner, so they have to either become conversant in this culture of confidence or find people they trust to navigate it for them
I actually don't think the second culture has no value. It's a lot more powerful in building organizations and gaining buy-in from lots of people. I also don't think the first culture completely avoids the failure modes mentioned in this article. Obviously people with what I've called academic norms definitely fall into this article's discussed pattern of trusting people based on their credentials and disproportionately Think They Are Very Smart
That said, since people fluent in the second culture tend to rise to the top of organizations, people in the first culture increasingly need to signal confidence even when it's inappropriate to justify their existence as they move into a professional sphere, which again most people don't really have the option to opt out of
Where the whole thing starts looking like gambling is when companies get huge rounds based on essentially no proof whatsoever that the thing will ever grow or have revenue. And when the idea is basically "we'll pay famous people to send greetings to people" we're in obviously stupid money territory. That was never going to have the revenues to back up the inflated valuation. And somebody still sank a few tens of millions in that to find that out the hard way. That company had a paper valuation of a billion. But it doesn't necessarily mean all those tens of millions were spent and lost. Investors might commit the money but it's usually conditional on growth targets and milestones. When shit goes south, they'll pull the brakes and the money stops flowing. Good investors wouldn't wait until all the money is gone to do that.
The reason these investments happen is that VCs mostly aren't investing their own cash. They are being paid to make investments and to inflate their portfolios. By the time the shit hits the fan, they'll have gotten their payoff. It all looks great until it doesn't. And inflated valuations make them look shit hot even when they are clearly not. This attracts more capital for them to invest.
Of course at some point the shit does hit the fan and the money evaporates. That's when you get acqui-hires and other constructions that are usually portrayed as a successful exit that, again, makes the VCs look like they know what they are doing. This is all about damage control that is about both financials and reputations. Never mind that it's effectively a fire sale at that point. But investors get to swap their bad shares for good shares, and founders get to work in somebody else's company for stock options. And the "buying" company gets some nice people and they stay best buddies with the investors they just bailed out who might typically also be investors in those companies. In the end the madness gets written off against the overall fund performance. It only takes a few good gambles to work out for everybody to come out smelling like roses.