Announcing that they’re leaving now might be good timing for some reason, but there’s no particular reason to think these are snap decisions. They may have been considering it for quite a while without announcing their plans.
> Do that many people even work on AI development?
That's not the relevant figure. It's more about how much capital has been wagered by large tech cos and the major startups & VCs on a near-complete takeover of white-collar work by AI (as that's the only level of payoff that could possibly justify the mind-boggling level of investment).
The whole discourse that has exploded around this phrase, and the amount of self-seriousness and dogma about it in this sites comment sections have been really baffling to me. One overconfident billionaire writes an essay about a phrase some speaker had made up weeks before, and suddenly everyone's acting like the concept of "founder mode" is some metaphysical constant, and it's our job to understand its true nature through theological debate.
Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit.
I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords.
There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.
Yeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wrong in our current system and we need to sort of shift it towards some of these great hackers who are actually doing the work.
This is a completely false equivalence. While the coffee farmers do deserve to get paid more Starbucks is also doing an incredible amount of supply chain management, making sure that the stores work and they are also employing a bunch of more people and they're getting a bunch of things in place for that coffee to be sold.
This isn't always true - dropshipping is being a sharecropper of a manufacturer. Enterprise software that most people will never touch has wildly better margins than consumer software like Spotify.
I understand that line of thought, but I find it similar to "Shakespeare shouldn't get all the credit, what about the manufacturer of the pen he used? he wouldn't have been able to write his plays without the pen."
It's almost too on the nose to do this level of silly mythologizing through a half-baked analogy (a favorite rhetorical handwave of the so-called "founder cult") of Mark Zuckerberg of all people in this particular thread. Excellent poe if true
I feel the same way you do, then I realize how depressing it is, this attitude that the only thing that matters is monetary compensation / ownership of monetizable patents. I guess I was naive, but that's the game and everything else is noise.
I would completely agree with this if it said "All Cook and no Woz". I say this because I think it is unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's. Jobs actually had a talent for products. Woz and other brilliant engineers may have build these things, but Jobs had a talent for picking the right products, the right packages and the right timing that I don't think anyone else in Tech has ever really been capable of copying. I think that tech will always be full of Woz type people, but without Jobs it's going to be hard to get those products out there. I see a lot of it in Solar energy and Farming tech where a lot of brilliant things are being build, but a lot of it remains relatively small scale because nobody knows how to sell it.
I think you could also make the case for saying that the industry is full of Zuckerbergs (maybe Sam Altmans in a few years), but I'm not sure the advertisement industry is really all that related to tech. I know it may not be the most popular thing to say, but is there really that much of a difference between selling Tobacco, Coca Cola, Search Engines or Social Media? All are popular products which haven't really changed the world for the better.
> unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's
I suggest you read the post again. It's not against MBAs as such, its against blowhard "heroes" that go around trying to proxy what Jobs did by copying him being an utter prick, rather than a domain expert.
Jobs was successful despite him being a prick. He was fired for not doing what he was supposed to do, and over stepping his mark.
NeXT Inc. burnt a boat load of cash, and were destined for obscurity had they not been bought by apple.
I personally don't like Zuckerberg, but hes not an altman. Altman has virtually no redeeming qualities apart from being able to make PG think he's jesus.
Zuckerberg has many fucking faults, but he is much much closer to Woz than Jobs. Thats probably part of the reason why he's so hated. Because he's either incapable or unwilling to worry about the public persona.
Altman is in the same class as Adam Neumann, ie a mystery cult with great funding, that happens to be a tech CEO.
My hypothesis is that it reflects the shift away from consumer and SMB products to Silicon Valley mostly funding enterprise software.
101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software.
That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about.
And enterprise software is truly boring. And that an understatement. I got very bored and disenchanted with software because it all sort of sucked.
My other hypothesis is that there will be a resurgence of indie consumer and SMB software that’s not so soulless. And I hate to mention AI but I think it’s the enabler of these apps being viable for very small teams to not go after funding and keep their soul.
I think you're onto something. Even the consumer facing stuff seems more interested in chasing OKRs than putting out a compelling product.
When I'm thinking who's putting out excellent work, the software that's actually great to use, the list is almost exclusively solo projects (Overcast—arguably the greatest mobile app of all time) or scrappy underdogs (Kagi—seriously, Kagi rocks).
No, tech has become no Woz and no Jobs either. You don’t get enshittification with Jobs, but the opposite. Also he would abhorre modern day process driven product management: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
How many years need to pass until HN stops with the "what would Steve Jobs do"-mentality, where it's entirely unclear how he would operate in the current environment and where Apple would've been with him still being in charge (if he still were in charge - he would've turned 70 next year). It's been 13 years. I think most assessments are merely projection by now.
Not an expert, just searched for it, but this article suggests - just skimmed it - that while most groundwater is indeed not that deep, there is groundwater several miles down and the interaction between deep and shallow ground water is not well understood.
i don't know if Google was primarily responsible for pushing for it before (after all Firefox has ALREADY gone further than Chrome on this?), but I'm no expert in the history.
When w3.org wrote that statement after they threw in the towel, it seems bizarre to me to suggest they wrote that statement only to do Google's bidding?
The article says that particles are neither waves nor particles, which is not wrong (depending on your definition of “wave”), but it omits to mention what the actual fundamental ontology is in modern particle physics.
Tl;Dr: "Wave-particle duality" is not the notion that matter is "sometimes" a particle and "sometimes" a wave. It is, at all times, its own separate category of thing, for which "particle" and "wave" are just metaphors that approximate its behavior.
One metaphor usually comes closer than the other depending on what system you're looking at, but it's never changing back and forth between some "particle state" and "wave state".
Let's put it this way. Opposable thumbs are such a massive fitness advantage, in so many ways that are obviously massively more impactful, that such a factor, if it even exists, would be utterly negligible.
So the only conceivable reasons to raise such a bizarre topic all involve you being a very unpleasant person to converse with -- the most generous I can think of being an unearned sense of intellectual superiority simply by the fact of raising an idea you see as taboo.
If you don't like discussing weird ideas or ideas that are unpopular or devil's advocacy, you would most probably find it unpleasant to converse with me. If you prefer glibly dismissing such ideas it would probably be mutual.
What are you hoping to achieve? Convince people thumbs are great rape tools? You act like glib dismissal is inappropriate as if you have some great insight to share. You do sound very unpleasant to talk to so at least you're self aware.
The extent to which aggression differences between sexes is the result of nature or nurture seems to have policy implications. For instance it would change the balance between the effectiveness of re-training versus more physical interventions. If men indeed have a hard-wired tendency toward sexual violence, it gives cultural interventions a lower return on investment and incarceration a relatively higher one.
For instance there has recently been a lot of controversy around the claim by J.K. Rowling that studies show that transgender males have the same rates of sexual predation as other males. Understanding of the balance of biological versus social influence informs that debate.
