It's inline CSS, but with all the limitations of inline styles removed. There is a lot of stuff that can't be done with inline styles, like media queries.
I think tech founders need to think smaller. Build software for a few thousand people and make a profit from it. Something niche. Something that is sustainable with a small team.
VC eats up everything that's becoming bigger. And they will kill it. Their goal is not to run a healthy business that serves their customers. They try to take out as much money as possible and then trash it.
This is it. Sustainability. Not everything has to be about more money quickly. You don't even need VCs for that. More win to bootstrappers! I see a lot of folks bootstrapping in the LLM era, but that can be defeaned in the VC noise.
Exactly. And the dangerous mindset tends to be worse than just "more money quickly": it's far too commonly "if this can't become the next Facebook/iPhone/ChatGPT, it's not worth doing." The only options are "take over the world" or "fail"; there's no room (in many people's heads) for a product that makes a decent, steady profit and continues to do so over the course of many years.
There is, is just different capital for those companies (debt, growth equity, angels, grants) and less attention. There’s far more of these types of companies too.
Because you still need a good sales and product team. Speak with potential customers, understand their problems. Building the software was never the hard part.
They don't give a shit about making a good product, the literal only thing any of these ghouls care about is line going up in the short term, because if line goes up they can dump their investments and move on to the next entity that they can get their greedy claws on and devour.
This is becoming more and more of a problem. For a small software company it could become an asset. Tell customers they are privately owned and small, and therefore won't be acquired by VCs.
Traditionally big vendors were more trustworthy and stable, that's no longer the case.
Edit: I'm not talking about end users, most commercial software is licensed by companies.
In that environment the founder has no hope or reason to go public, making equity in the company worthless.
VC used to push to public exits in order to maximize the founders and VCs stake which turned employees equity to a liquid asset. Truly aligning everyones interests, nowadays not so much.
You're forgetting about dividend, and off-market trade.
If a company is worthless if it isn't public, then IKEA would be absolute garbage. Quite strange for a company making hundreds of millions in profit for its owners.
The insane valuations for selling a dream are what make VC worthwhile.
TSLA would be worth crap if it were a private company giving off dividends. It is really truly about the insane valuations driven by collective delusion.
Are there modern positioning systems that can automatically join all those data sources into one position? Traditionally navaids are treated as completely separate sources and are shown on different kind of instruments. But they could also be used as a replacement source for GNSS data on a modern map screen.
Depending on their kind they might not return a specific position, but in combination with other sources they often do via triangulation.
PS: INS (Inertial Navigation) also still exits. It often works for quite a long time really precisely. Also precision can be calculated. So it can start as a dot on a map which becomes a bigger circle as the precision decreases. It could be automatically recalibrated whenever high confidence positioning is available.
Yes, modern flight management computers in commercial airliners do exactly this. I can't speak to smaller aircraft.
Essentially a position is calculated from VOR/DME, GPS, and INS. When there is disagreement it is flagged and procedures are in place to fall back.
The issue is VOR/DME is slowly being decommissioned eliminating one of those sanity checks. It hasn't been degraded to the point of creating massive gaps in coverage over land but it will slowly happen if the rate of decommissioning continues.
Ultimately, INS is sufficient for enroute navigation but if you're degraded to just that state, the impacts to traffic separation, particularly in congested airspace, are significant. Required Navigation Performance (RNP) levels dictate all of this.
The "cut and die" part is happening rather quickly, and you're done with it. But you might be hungry for weeks and have to watch your crops grow. Probably really boring and uncomfortable.
It's actually not that hard to return to this lifestyle. Maybe easier than ever before. Just buy an old farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere and do your thing. There are many regions in the world where farmland is really cheap and nobody will bother you.
Here in Europe employees turn off their company devices after work. Getting called-in in your time off usually happens not more than once every few months. You're not supposed to check your messages in your time off. But it still feels a lot like described in this article.
In the article's conclusion, "once freed from the false satisfaction of believing we are changing the world with our day jobs, perhaps we will be inspired to fill that hole with something real".
I suppose we agree and are saying something similar.
If you've worked for startups then you've delt with existential threats, perhaps hard times and failures. I read the article as a lot of corporate jobs. When you fail you find out quickly what is important in life. You need some not-work to be important in your life too. AI can only mimic your creativity and your emotions. You are not as replaceable as it may seem. Maybe I'm not convinced that Anthropic and OpenAI are going to replace us all just yet.
We are living in strange times, not only with threats of automation everywhere but with great political upheaval all over the world. One thing is certain, change, things won't always be this way. I'm going to rely on my grit and remember what is important to me and what makes me happy.
I have the feeling this goes much deeper than knowledge work and AI. I see it in many places that people seem to not take their job serious anymore. The incentive seems to be gone. Also their managers don't seem to care anymore, as they are also taking their job less seriously.
I can't put a finger on it, but it's not about younger people or Gen Z, it also applies to older people. It just feels like good work doesn't matter much anymore, and everyone tries to make the best out of it in their private life.
Sometimes in an effort to understand things I'll try and take them to their limit. One limit, framed as a path to a kind of dystopia is "wire heading". Another more tangible limit is opium addiction. These are basically collapsing of values. Trading a rich and robust value system for pure dopamine.
Modern media is on this spectrum (infinite scroll, algorithmically tailored, short form video).
When people can get dopamine by pressing a button it's easy for them to trade a rich and diverse set of values for that button. When people can get dopamine by pressing a button, it's hard to maintain a rich and diverse set of values.
Values are genuine interest (want) in taking actions and patterns of actions.
Interesting idea. Modern media and social media is probably really the most relevant change we had in the last 15 years. Everything else didn't change that much.
It's the product of a low-trust society. Goals and aspirations are founded upon optimism about the future and striving to better youself. If you're a new grad and can't even start your career, what hope do you have for the future.
For the older folk, it does seem like they gave up but also refuse to cede poewr. They lived their full careers and are comfy in retirement on assets. They are just enjoying the rest of life and have no regards for the future.
Yeah something broke during COVID. One factor was the stimulus created enormous wealth inequality, people who owned assets before that live like gods now and people who didn’t can’t even buy a home. The economic policies since then have exacerbated the issue.
I think 15 years of asset boom has made enormous fortunes not just for billionaires but for regular middle class folks and especially anything tech or finance related. When your investments make much more than your wages, its hard to care about your career but this is the norm now for lots of people around me.
This is inevitable in any system where the old want to maintain purchasing power over the young and the proportions of old are increasing relative to the young.
I'd say its more like about time we had a correction to make people realize markets dont always go up, money doesn't come easily and we all have to get back to working.
It would be quite ironic if this technology would render all those AI data centers practically useless. If the next step are just a much smaller amount of expensive chips, and the bottleneck becomes manufacturing those chips fast. Not building huge data centers and fighting for electrical power.
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