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…the forces of mediocrity are now microprocessor-powered, heavily funded, and determined to hold on to the middle of the market. More grey, more goo. It’s hard to make a great sequel. Better to spend our time to make a remarkable original.
VC is pattern-matching. Because of this, less competent players fall into the trap of pitching themselves as the X of Y … Tell me you don’t know what you’re doing with out telling me you don’t know what you’re doing.
There has been a spate of “tall poppy” cry-wanks in the NZ entrepreneurial community over the past week. The theme is: I’m a tall poppy and I keep getting knocked down. Turns out that the people getting this coverage are generally: really unpleasant to deal with, they hurt people as their managerial MO, their achievements…
Most interesting are owners’ debates over what, exactly, they just purchased. Is the Vision Pro for watching movies? Working? Being alone? Collaborating? Nobody knows, really. Rather than settling into a new routine, or building a workflow around their new computers, users spend a lot of time talking in the future tense, about what this thing…
This type of cultural creep from major corporations is nothing new, but Disney has a particularly disturbing history of accelerated, amplified control across the mediums they enter. Each new property they acquire seems to permeate culture instantly, from stores to amusement parks to screens around the world. Even for non-Disney fans, escaping exposure has become…
“A Voyage to Arcturus is tripping balls…”
“…if you weren’t a straight white American male wearing aviators your chances of winning a Hugo award were minimal”
The AVP feels like Apple cargo-culting itself The truth is that there’s very little true vision behind the Vision Pro. The headset is not the product of revolutionary work being done in the bowels of its donut-shaped headquarters. It exists to prove to investors and critics of Tim Cook’s leadership that the company isn’t just…
Some interesting new directions of thought.
Infrastructure improvements may seem unsexy and unheroic, but to my mind, tech-utopian hero worship is one of the social scourges of our time. A reinvigoration of collective solidarity and a commitment to making major infrastructural improvements seems much more likely to lead us to a better future.
I like this reframing…I’ve never cared about people being wealthy. I’ve care about: But if you want to tax wealth, what is better, a few billion in many years’ time after a watered-down wealth tax is introduced, or reforms that could be done almost overnight now to existing laws that would undoubtedly raise more money?
Can’t get enough of Chibi projects… their work, IMO, represents one of those branches. https://chibitronics.com/2024/01/17/sending-hugs-using-animating-led-sticker-and-the-pull-tab-switch/
Our current computing eco-system is, essentially, a speed-run down *one* branch of the possibility tree. When you grok that, you then ask the what-if question. When you unhook yourself from the profit motive as a culling mechanism… shit gets really interesting. If I die an old man exploring those other branches… I’ll die a happy…
China will have 1,200 gigawatts (GW) of installed wind and solar energy capacity by the end of 2024 — a full six years earlier than the government had targeted, according to the International Energy Agency’s estimates. Why it matters: The IEA says the unrivalled renewables boom underway in the world’s second-largest economy has increased the chances…
The biggest event of the week was the Sleeper Agents paper from Anthropic. I expect that to inform our thoughts for a while to come, and to lay foundation for additional work. We also had the first third of the IMO solved at almost gold metal level by DeepMind, discovering that math competition geometry is…
My alarms went off big time when Apple presented the Vision Pro on stage. It all had the whiff of we-have-money-to-fake-passion. What ever you think of Jobs, the moment he walked on stage with a product… You. Just. Knew. You buckled in and you opened your wallet. Tim Cook is the master of supply chain…
Dave5 