This is just a terrific read. The following excerpt from the final chapter of his e-book is just as good:
There are indeed “echo chambers” on YouTube, but they are filled with an active and demanding audience. When the YouTuber uploads their video, whatever originality, creativity or meaning they intended to communicate is reduced to the public audience measures that the platform appends to the video. This quantification puts the video into immediate comparison with the YouTuber’s previous videos, and indeed with every video on the platform.
It requires incredible willpower to ignore the reverberations of the ever-present audience on social media, to maintain an independent artistic vision or coherent ideological position. And for YouTubers attempting to make a living, the vast and intense competition makes it impossible to do so. The audience can simply click away if the YouTuber displeases them. The pressure of having millions of bosses issuing conflicting demands can produce “Creator burnout” or worse.
My poetic aspiration is that whenever you read the words “YouTube Creator” you think instead of “Audience Creation.” Social media does not create powerful Influencers but rather powerless marionettes, dancing jerkily to quantified audience tugs.
The anti-clickbait truncation HN applies to headlines works well in the singular: "This politician wants to ban bicycles" --> "Politician wants to ban bicycles."
In the plural it should probably convert "These" to "Some" rather than implying that "all physicists want to ditch dark energy."
Because paulg encoded a bunch of subjective rules on how to decrease community toxicity in lisp of all things, and no one knows how to program in lisp.
Kidding, mostly. I do think it's an indicator of institutional issues with the site, its moderation staff and the motivations for keeping it alive. It wouldn't be surprising to me to find that many decisions were made by or for eccentric wealthy and/or smart people having a mild ego trip. "We're reducing the internet's toxicity via automated symbolic manipulation of media titles thus making the world a better place."
> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round.
Rhetorically, why was it time for this?
Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they can mark up the value on their portfolio, or if the market isn't hot enough for a high-priced Series A, force an exit.
> why was it time for this?
Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech.
Remember that this is a decision you make when you accept the seed money, not when it comes to looking for further money. If you want to build a profitable growing company, bc funding is not the path to that.
Depends, if you have a majority on the board you can do whatever you want. Some companies get a seed round to then use that to bootstrap to profitability and growth over time.
Practically, what happens if the founders don’t want to play ball? VCs can muscle up and force a sale on worse terms? Just not clear how much of what goes on is asking nicely vs coercion, and where the actual leverage lies.
It’s going to depend on what the terms you agreed to are. In my experience, the company leadership are free to suggest an alternative to the hyper growth plan, but the board (which you likely won’t have a majority on) will reject it. VC’s don’t care about recouping money, they’d rather you fired everyone, pivoted, and started again and tried again with the money you have. They want successful exits, not break evens. It’s not about money it’s about reputation.
If you suggest something they don’t like, they’ll stall until you run out of money, or force you out.
Our seed round was 100% made of SAFE, so VCs did not have the power to force us to do anything.
The sentence in the blog post is a tad misleading. I suspect François is not really talking about VCs that had already invested in quickwit, but about the usual flow of other VCs who contacted us, to know about the company and be part of our eventual series A.
It just generally felt like we were "at a crossing".
Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for jumping to an incorrect conclusion based on vague wording. (I would edit my comment accordingly but I can't anymore.)
Is that a rhetorical question, or aimed at me specifically?
Regardless, in my case, it's not my first rodeo; I didn't give up any board seats or majority control. I mostly raised from angels that I know personally and trust me. And we're a high-margin B2B business (apparently similar in those limited respects to Quickwit) so I don't feel particularly capital constrained without raising additional rounds.
So I don't have a board pushing me for "valuation events."
But I am very familiar with this toxic dynamic from my previous experience.
It also makes no sense and looks terrible to connect those two glyphs with a ligature.
Unlike "fi" or "ij", there's no reason (kerning or spelling) to want to smush # into {.
I don't doubt that but I cannot really pinpoint what the reason is to want "fi" and "ij" in a monospace font? Do these narrow letter ligatures then take up only a single character cell?
If you're Dutch, "ij" is a technically a single letter, and may sometimes be written as "y".
(Traditionally, Dutch words are sorted alphabetically with "ij" treated as if it were "y". On my first visit to Amsterdam, pre-Google Maps, I had the bizarre experience of standing in one of the main streets, Vijzelstraat, but being unable to find it on my map. Its index of streets has nothing starting "Vij...". I sheepishly had to ask someone wtf was going on. He pointed me lower down to the end of the "V"s where all the "Vij..." street names were hiding!)
#{ in a few languages is a bit of a high-level operator like "start a record/object/hash table". The # is visually a bit like a handle on a coffee cup (which you are about to fill). The octothorpe (#) is also sometimes called a "hash", making it also a bit of a visual pun if it is indeed the start of a hash-table. (Think JSON object syntax in a language where you want to make sure you can't just accidentally write objects anywhere or confuse different uses of { such as starting a code block, so you put a handle on them.)
"Smushing" it together makes it even more visually distinct as a "single" operator, further adds to the visual metaphor of the "coffee cup handle", maybe obscures the "hash" visual pun a little bit, but maybe not enough to care.
Or similarly, how he was accused of 'bringing the game of snooker into disrepute' by taking a shot with his left hand (and then playing three perfect games left-handed)
http://en.espn.co.uk/snooker/sport/player/1241.html
Photonic computation is never going to make sense as an alternative to electrical computation.
Among other reasons, you can create an electronic transistor in silicon by using an electrical signal to open and close a gate.
You can't really do this with light, light beams just pass through each other. And the kind of light-carrying media that can be affected by the presence of a control beam respond much slower and less effectively than doped silicon responds to voltage.
This! And optical waveguides are big, and they need to be spaced apart to avoid interference. Speed of light is limiting for such large circuits to be fast.
I’m a big fan of using older small form factor commercial office grade laser printers. You can basically get them free, especially if they lack wifi and usb, and most of the time they’ll last for years and years of hard use with essentially no maintenance- you can just drill a hole in the toner cartridge and pour toner in.
This is great, I think this has an excellent chance.
The biggest argument Oracle would have is GraalVM but that supports primarily Java and many other languages. I'm not even sure that Oracle at this point would want to conflate Javascript and Java. (Which may be why they haven't cited GraalVM as a use of the JS mark in commerce in their trademark filings).
There are indeed “echo chambers” on YouTube, but they are filled with an active and demanding audience. When the YouTuber uploads their video, whatever originality, creativity or meaning they intended to communicate is reduced to the public audience measures that the platform appends to the video. This quantification puts the video into immediate comparison with the YouTuber’s previous videos, and indeed with every video on the platform.
It requires incredible willpower to ignore the reverberations of the ever-present audience on social media, to maintain an independent artistic vision or coherent ideological position. And for YouTubers attempting to make a living, the vast and intense competition makes it impossible to do so. The audience can simply click away if the YouTuber displeases them. The pressure of having millions of bosses issuing conflicting demands can produce “Creator burnout” or worse.
My poetic aspiration is that whenever you read the words “YouTube Creator” you think instead of “Audience Creation.” Social media does not create powerful Influencers but rather powerless marionettes, dancing jerkily to quantified audience tugs.