Most of my (new) colleagues are always very amazed and baffled when i tell them that investigations, intakes and inventory before starting projects take me huge amounts of time.
Most of my colleagues finish their intakes very quickly, finish projects early and most (not all) have a huge amount of time of aftersales and aftercare. They usually call this aftercare 'out of scope'.
My finished projects usually do not have any aftercare. They work, because i invested a lot of time in the beginning. I call this 'the actual scope'.
I've been fixing some of my colleagues projects recently. Some of these projects should have ended 18 months ago... Most take be about two weeks to fix.
So we can conclude that the LLM doesn’t think much of “tasted Honda” or “repelling tape”, and was very surprised by “Honda’s spicy rodent”, but it knows enough about human nature that “and I will do it again” came as almost no surprise whatsoever.
I was en route to St Helena and I had several days of a raging fever on Ascension, and my memories of the place on either side of my illness are suitably strange. I remember walking through a landscape of sharp, anthracite grey volcanic rock and throwing a banana peel into the sea, to watch the fish churn around it like piranha. I remember going past a rock covered in paint -- everyone who was determined to never come back added a new splash of colour. I think it was right next to 'the worst golf course in the world'. I remember leaving the barren low-lands and climbing the mountain switchbacks, into rainforest-like verdancy. A very odd place.
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.]
The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community.
As relevant here:
1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to...
2) Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is "justified" to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you're trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you're trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively.
3) Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty.
4) The nature of being a "freethinker" is that you're at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you'll get stuck in it, because there's no external "drag" or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you've got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally:
5) It's a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I'd never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There's some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.)
TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical "doctrine" that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz's group is only one of several.
I don't think anyone knows enough about the period to answer that question. Our main written source is the Annals of Spring and Autumn (春秋), from Lu (not Yue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_(state)) which spends 18000 words on 242 years, in chronological order. For many of those years it simply says something like "螽" ("locusts"). It does not go into any detail on questions like which hobbies the kings of other countries spent their spare time on, and that's a difficult thing to infer from archaeological evidence, too. The written records of Yue were destroyed by order of 秦始皇 in the 焚書坑儒.
So we kind of have to guess. My guesses are not the most informed.
The sword (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Goujian) is bronze, so it was probably cast (you can forge bronze but the cost/benefit ratio is terrible). You could imagine a king pouring the hot bronze into the mold—that would be much quicker than forging an iron sword—but you probably wouldn't want him to make a habit of it, because contaminants in the metals would expose him to arsenic vapor, though this sword in particular is almost arsenic-free.
Then all that's left is sharpening the blade, which any warrior has to be good at, and what is a king if not a warrior foremost? So it's plausible that a king might have put in most of the work embodied in the blade himself, with a grindstone, even if he didn't go around casting bronze regularly.
Apparently his mother said, about teaching him Scrabble:
"When he learnt to talk he wasn't interested in words, just numbers. I said: I know a game you're not going to be very good at because you can't spell very well and you weren't good at English at school."
>> Since graduating from undergraduate studies (which marks exactly one year as I write this post)
Author sounds young .. yes, absolutely try to consume less and create more, it's way more life-affirming than the opposite configuration, but:
Getting better at your job, like everything else in life, is just a function of time. Show up, and then show up consistently. Put in the time. Be patient. Lead with an open mind and an open heart -- opportunities go to those who are present way more often than those who aren't. Willingly take on shitty jobs, do them well, and you'll find yourself being trusted with bigger and better jobs. Learn when to be the worker bee and when to be the queen bee. Say "yes" until you're truly able to say "no". Try to accept that, at the end of the day, things don't matter as much as you think they might -- I'm talking about projects, stress, deadlines, shit that floods your veins with cortisol. The only thing people will truly remember is how you made them feel during a crisis, not the minutiae of what you actually contributed -- and those personal relationships will be the gasoline in the engine of your career.
I really believe people will go far if they focus on this kind of stuff, and way less on structured self-improvement, productivity hacking, finding "secrets", shortcuts via programs, seminars, coaches, and tools, and all that shallow, nutritionless baloney.
My friends make a cocktail with Malort, White Monster, and C4 preworkout. They also have a multi-year running gag where they offer me a bottle of fine whiskey or bourbon at a campfire but it has in fact been replaced by Malort. Then, when I am choking and gagging someone else offers me some water to wash away the taste, which is in fact also Malort.
weird story, I happen to have known the devil quite well. all the things they say about him are true, and that's the uncanny thing. you'd look at this man, slightly too large, objectively not attractive, impossibly clever and disarming, wealthy, seemingly impervious to any known law, known and welcomed everywhere, the exception to every rule and convention, accompanied everywhere by beautiful women, with literal horns on his head, and never once said a dishonest word even for the sake of politeness. Rationally, it was impossible that he could have been the devil, even if he specifically said it, broadcast it, and advertised it in every humanly possible way, the more he told you, the less you believed it, the more you felt like you were in on it. After all, he was harmless and fun, nobody around him ever did anything they didn't want to do. They always chose, they always consented with enthusiasm, and there are thousands of people who would rush to his defence and aid if anyone were to suggest he had ever done anything untoward. He is quite legitimately a great man in this world of men. Even when you knew, how much harm could be done in letting people who are already lost mislead themselves? We are not their keepers. They were having the time of their lives, but without him, their lives were less. He encouraged them up the hedonic treadmill to see how well they swam out of their depth. Decadent nights out became credit card bills, indulgences became needs, flings became transactions, familiarity contempt. They were all my choices as well, and I spent them unwisely, and at some truly astonishing personal cost, because we were spending what we wouldn't miss until it was gone. You couldn't know because you didn't know you were valuable. That was the impossible brilliance of it. I allowed myself to be seduced and misled because that was the whole ride. It's awesome. You can't judge the devil, it doesn't mean anything to him, but you can learn to appreciate and respect him for what he is, it's only a question of what you will pay for that education.
I haven't seen him in many years and it's hard not to miss him, but with some distance and respect I'm good with that. If you don't believe me and maybe think I'm insane, it doesn't matter either. If you ever want to prove it to yourself and find him, all you need to do is want for the material things in this world a bit more than others for whatever reason, and I guarantee he will find you. Bye old friend, you're missed, and may we never meet again.
If it is Calpis, that is really easy to replicate, it is just yoghurt, sugar, and citric acid/lemon juice heated over a pan of boiling water. I regularly helped make a jug of this to have ready to dilute. It is as good as the store bought, and you can also make the dilution ratio to your strength. You can make it to replicate the thicker version that is occasionally sold.
Over time, the scar transformed into a state religion in the USSR: obsessive celebration of all kinds of anniversaries, children tortured in schools with made up stories of heroism, huge monuments everywhere, TV and cinemas filled with endless stream of most inane morally black-and-white WWII movies like the worst cowboy flicks. Instead of Sunday church, I had to sit in school listening to senile veterans who had never seen frontline action (but had their chest full of anniversary medals) tell fairy tales how they single-handedly destroyed 50 Tiger tanks and 100 planes and then threw themselves in front of a machine gun nest to save their comrades, but stepped on a mine while doing so and lost both legs and crawled for a week back to their unit, successfully avoiding German patrols.
By the 1970s, the WWII mythology (of which a lot was entirely made up) had formed the core of the identity of "Soviet people" and an excuse for everything. The narrative of "Soviet people as the victors of the WWII" acted as a God-given right to stomp over other nations, because after all, only a fascist would resist the glorious Soviet people. The way we see Zelenskyy, a Jewish comedian, branded as a Nazi, and the war against Ukraine propagandized as a "holy war against Nazism like our grandfathers fought", is an echo of that. Doesn't make any sense unless you are familiar with the warped Soviet WWII mythology.
Aggressive militarism is common in post-war generations that grew up with the simplistic brainwashing. There was very little militarism in the generation that actually saw the war, because the Eastern front was morally an ambiguous place. One of my older relatives fought in the battle of Velikiye Luki. He always suspected that his unit had been placed on purpose into a very poor position to wipe them out with German hands for earlier insubordination. The unit got hit hard, he got wounded and was taken prisoner by Germans. Weeks or months later Soviets overran German positions and he was reunited.
As a punishment for being taken prisoner, he was moved to a penal battalion, because not fighting until your death was officially declared treason. Penal battalion was a lighter punishment. Those who had panicked were executed. Penal battalions were "dumb meat" used to dig or dismantle fortifications under enemy fire, and attack in first waves to identify machine gun nests and minefields. If they didn't attack with enough enthusiasm, then the barrier troops placed behind them would open fire. (This practice lives on, as can be seen in Ukraine.) By some miracle, he survived it all. Most didn't. You can imagine how keen he was to put on his uniform, parade around on the V-E day celebrations and listen to speeches how "the Soviet people fought united like one man against Nazi invaders".
And not only do they cosplay in wartime uniforms, but they also the adopt the language of propagandized version of history that they've only witnessed from movies, and go around yelling how Russia is fighting Nazis again and "we won't stop before Berlin".
In a way, that's even understandable. Pre-USSR history is beyond living memory, and USSR put a lot of effort into creating a cultural disconnect with pre-1917 Russia. Older history offers no strong identity, it's just too far away to be relevant, it's hard for modern urban population to identify with either the imperial nobility or with peasantry. Modern Russia offers no identity either beyond "superyacht for me and poverty for thee". So what's left? Only the militaristic propagandized USSR victory narrative that so many cling to, otherwise they'd have no identity at all, because that's the only meaningful thing in the past century of Russian history.
It depends on the context. On an entertainment yt channel, one single real trumpet, so what. But the context apple produced is the implication that the very concept of a trumpet is being destroyed and replaced with a thin, temporary simulacrum.
The difference is subtle. In the first case, a single real trumpet. Only worth a few hundred bucks. In the advertisement, the crushed trumpet is a symbol representing everything around trumpets: lessons, spit valves, centuries/milennia of history, inherited instruments, afternoons afterschool marching around on a football field with childhood friends.
One of my long standing beefs with C-suites and their MBAs and whatever meat factory grinds them out is the continued lack of comprehension of basic software and IT management.
Back in the early 2000s, this could be saliently characterized by the exuberance many CEOs of companies bragged about how IT-ignorant they were. I saw the "my secretary prints out my emails" written proudly in print many a time in the CEO worship magazines like Fortune and the like.
Every decade of continued IT penetration and performance benefits in business are continuing the principle: the health of your business is strongly tied to its IT health.
BUT MY COMPANIES JUST STAMPS WIDGETS. Ok, look. MBAs long ago accepted that every business, regardless of what it does, needs two things: accounting and finance. So every MBA gets a decent education on those.
Well, hate to tell you, MBAs need to know the fundamentals of IT.
Basically, C-suites not understanding productivity measures in IT are hard is stupid not only because it is a basic aspect of IT management, but its a bit more disturbing than that:
YOU CAN'T MEASURE MANAGER PRODUCTIVITY EITHER. How does traditional MBA measure middle managers and those types of orgs? That is rife with all the problems of measuring developers, not the least of it being the "juke the stats" universal phenomenon. That's why the most important single indicator of manager ability is: headcount. Headcount headcount headcount. The second is size of budget: bigger bigger bigger.
Of course everyone that has working in companies knows the hilarity of what that produces: bloated orgs, pointless spending to use up a budget otherwise it gets cut, building empires, etc.
The essence of developer that C-suites need to understand is that they are not factory workers: they are in fact MANAGERs. They just don't manage people, they manage virtual employees/subordinates (software). Go ahead, ask any software dev in an org what they do. Generally, somewhere in there is a bunch of acronyms and the fact that they ... wait for it ... MANAGE those acronyms. Krazam's microservices is a perfect example of this. What is that long diatribe essentially about? MANAGING all those services.
That gets to another major undercurrent of IT. Managers want to place IT employees in the "worker bee" category. They don't want IT workers to be managers, and entitled to the great benefits according the management class. The long running IT salary advantage in the US, and the constant ebb and flow between management and IT "working" to push that down is a major social undercurrent here.
No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere.
We emit 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.
That is more than 7x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 8x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 17x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 60x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons).
But carbon is completely worthless. We can't build a logistics pipeline dedicated solely to moving a worthless substance that is larger than the rest of human logistics combined.
This is also literally one of the most complex, relationship-based, and opaque to outsiders communities on the planet. Try to wrap your head around the unimaginable clout and favor calling that this took to develop. "Exclusive" is an understatement. Nobody has free access to something like this.
It's now possible to do this 100% within Linux, without running any emulators or Windows software, even though Adobe don't care about Linux support.
Knock is no longer maintained, however apparently it was just a wrapper around libgourou which is still maintained.
Installing libgourou (on Arch Linux it can be found in the AUR) allows you to download the ACSM file to a PDF or ePub:
# Use your username and password from https://account.adobe.com
# This registers your device so only needs to be done once.
adept_activate -u user -p pass
# Download the ACSM file
acsmdownloader -f myfile.acsm
The downloaded file requires a password to open it, but if you need to open it in a normal viewing application, you can also remove the password:
adept_remove file.pdf
This process allows Linux users to access the same materials as their Windows and Mac friends, even without support from Adobe.
Just for fun, a scenario in which this wouldn't be crazy is in a hypothetical society where pretty much everyone loves chocolate ice cream, but there is some cultural taboo against admitting it for some reason, but also a cultural expectation of hospitality.
Then it would not be unusual to say you don't really like it, but still be pleased they have some available.
Communication isn't just about what you say, but also what is implied, and that is culturally dependent.
If a lot of other people lie about their budget, then I have to assume you might be truthful, or might be exaggerating it. It doesn't make sense for me to assume you're definitely being truthful unless I know you well enough to know you're not like everyone else, and are more truthful than average.
It's not just about lying, a lot of buyers genuinely aren't sure about their budget because it really is a partially subjective decision of tradeoffs. "My budget is $400k max" "here's this amazing $405k house" "oh wow, ok I guess i my budget was actually $405k and I didn't realize it" is a common outcome!
Or they're even aware of this dynamic, and keeping the budget artificially lower at first is intentional to help control costs, knowing it's easy to let the budget gradually balloon as the process goes on but hard to rein it back in.
But then the realtor has the opposite incentive. Buyers and sellers have an incentive to get the best price they respectively can, but do not necessarily have any incentive to complete the deal quickly. Some do but some really would be fine shopping around for a year.
This is awful for the realtor, because the price variation isn't likely to be that much relative to the realtor's commission -- so the realtor is incentivized to not worry about the price and mainly worry about making the sale happen at all, and as soon as possible. A realtor who is too respectful of the claimed budget will be punished by the market. Making sales happen at all can be hard. Sellers don't really want to settle for the insanely low prices in this garbage market, and buyers don't really want to have to settle for the insanely high prices in this ridiculous market, but they have to meet in the middle somewhere, and therein lies the art of the deal: a relentless focus on Getting It Done, on Sooner is Always better then Later, and on It Ain't Over Till It's Over.
If you understand this all realtor and similar dealmaker behavior suddenly makes perfect sense.
Except of course for motivated buyers/sellers, which are just like random manna from heaven from the point of view of of the market... but underpriced listings and overbudgetted buyers tend to be snatched up off the market very quickly, often by the first counterpart that sees them, so most of the market's energy has to be spent on the great mass of hesitant buyers and sellers who are working to convince themselves that they can manage to live with the prices they must compromise to accept. (This is also why if you're looking for a deal, you have to get notified of brand new listings every day and immediately jump on any gems.)
Exaggerating on resumes is similar. At a recent job I had a manager who expected quite a bit of exaggeration on resumes, to the point that I realized I've probably been hurting myself in the past by being too modest -- at least for hiring managers with a similarly jaded view.
> Imagine if I told you that I don't like chocolate ice cream, and then you show up to the party with chocolate ice cream and an expectation that I will eat it, not because you forgot about my distaste for it, but because you just, like, decided that actually I do like chocolate ice cream
> You should write something about what you do too.
I think most of what one needs to know is already out there. The key is being adaptable to the current environment and being aware of one’s value add (skill set, network, etc.).
The problem with writing specifics about what I do is that it invites competitors and/or haters (e.g., review bombers or DDoSers). Some parts of my businesses have enough moat such that I don’t care, but other parts definitely do not. It’s not something I want to spend additional brain cycles on.
> Buying businesses sounds interesting, can you expand on this?
It’s largely not. It’s financially comfortable, and it’s nice being your own boss / leading your own team if that’s what you’re into (I am), but I’ve done more interesting work while working for “The Man”. A lot of what I do is just streamline a system that was inefficiently run/managed.
What I do is very similar to what Andrew Wilkinson of TinyCo has done, except I am about 10 years back on his timeline, and I’m not sure I will end up going public. I recommend looking for interviews and podcasts with Andrew — I have found them to be super interesting.
In relatively vague terms, I started a web dev agency, and then used that cash flow to start buying businesses that generate additional cash flow. Rinse and repeat. This is exactly what Andrew did. Note that I didn’t learn about Andrew until last year, so I was happy to see someone taking a similar path and scaling to a holding co worth over half a billion.
Some things that I think folks don’t do well when buying and/or valuing businesses (both buyers and sellers):
- Keep an active deal flow pipeline, ideally one that is not widely tapped. This usually entails talking to people… lots of people. For example, finding solid businesses on FEI is possible, but they will be very competitively priced, and it will be prudent to have some sort of pocket growth “hack” in mind if you want to make it pay off handsomely. On the other hand, targeting some “mom and pops” that have little or no idea about SEO and SEM can present some soft deals.
- Figure out ways that one party can scale that others can’t. This is the type of “growth hack” that I mentioned above. I know one guy who has one main move. He looks for businesses in which he already buys some of their inputs at a huge volume discount that smaller businesses can’t access (supplements are an example of this… I don’t recommend getting into supplements unless you are already eyeballs deep in that world). Another example is having access to markets or distribution that the businesses you are targeting to buy don’t have. One area I target (when relevant) that many others don’t is East Asian markets. Another area I target is just increasing prices (usually via segmentation). So many businesses charge way less than the market will bear.
- Learn how to negotiate, including how to say no. Many people just lay down and leave a ton of money on the table. You don’t have to be an asshole about it, but it’s prudent to be aware of what the value is for both the buyer and the seller, and it’s not uncommon for the buyer to have significant upside potential.
- As someone else said, you’re basically turning over a lot of rocks. There are a lot of people trying to bamboozle you, and there are a lot of solid businesses that don’t really offer a growth opportunity that you can efficiently maximize. When you find something that fits, it’s often a no-brainer.
Let me know if you have any other questions. I will be happy to answer.
I will add as a caveat that I can only give you perspective from my limited experiences — there are myriad ways to buy and sell businesses profitably, and my path is only one of them.
I am a Bulgarian, born in 1986 and immigrated to Austria in 1997. But it pains and scares me that an exiled Bulgarian now wants to take on the Bulgarian collective with postmodern, cosmopolitan and American ideas.
The cycles he describes exist mostly in the minds of postmodern cosmopolitans. And these arise because cosmopolitans in reality cannot produce anything other than ideology and services. Yet the terrible and boring every day bread still comes from the bakery! And since you can't invent a new ideology or service or produce a new work of art every day (except for journalists of course, who mastered the producing of "nothingness" every single day), at some point you get lost in pondering and start looking for the culprit. Of course, the first scapegoat is politics, society, people - always the others. Just because you can't free yourself from your nihilistic mental wheel, you have to conjure up and condemn the entire collective. Herein lies the birth of all 'structural arguments', I claim, ad hoc. 'My dissatisfaction must have structural reasons, otherwise I wouldn't be dissatisfied.' The eternal lamentation of the upper-urban-class cosmopolitans.
No, I know and admire people for whom such complaints are distant, even annoying. People who don't have time for it. And you can just as freely and willingly decide to lead a calm and regulated life. This life is not a danger to humanity, as the postmodernists and cosmopolitans have always wanted to tell us, and I do not want Bulgaria to be 'Americanized' that way. I would rather listen to a Kaba Gaida in the mountains than have to read through a capitalist-cosmopolitan lament. The former gives me power and strength, a connection to the world, the latter just makes me sick and weak.
I know Bulgaria has its issues, but losing its uniqueness to solve them, is for me the bigger issue.
> "We are so amazed by its ability to babble in a confident manner"
But we do this with people - religious leaders, political leaders, 'thought' leaders, venture capitalists, story tellers, celebrities, and more - we're enchanted by smooth talkers, we have words and names for them - silver tongued, they have the gift of the gab, slick talker, conman, etc. When a marketing manager sells a CEO on cloud services, and neither of them know what cloud services are, you can argue that it should matter but it doesn't actually seem to matter. When a bloke on a soapbox has a crowd wrapped around their finger, everyone goes home after and the most common result is that the feeling fades and nothing changes. When two people go for lunch and one asks 'what's a chicken fajita?' and the other says 'a Spanish potato omelette' and they both have a bacon sandwich and neither of them check a dictionary, it doesn't matter.
Does it matter if Bing Chat reports Lululemon's earnings wrongly? Does it matter if Google results are full of SEO spam? It "should" matter but it doesn't seem to. Who is interested enough in finances to understand the difference between "the unadjusted gross margin" and "The gross margin adjusted for impairment charges" and the difference matters to them, and they are relying exclusively on Bing Chat to find that out, and they can't spot the mistake?
I suspect that your fears won't play out because most of us go through our lives with piles of wrong understanding which doesn't matter in the slightest - at most it affects a trivia quiz result at the pub. People with life threatening allergies take more care than 'what their coworker thinks is probably safe'. We're going to have ChatGPT churn out plausible sounding marketing material which people don't read. If people do read it and call, the call center will say "sorry that's not right, yes we had a problem with our computer systems" and that happens all the time already. Some people will be inconvenienced, some businesses will suffer some lost income, society is resilient and will overall route around damage, it won't be the collapse of civilisation.
Full time employment is rigged. For everyone. Tech workers are just now waking up to the reality that they are the same disposable peasants like all the rest. Seeing this kind of compensation and thinking .. oh well that guy must have done hell of a job must be some kind of delusion.
I build something similar https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vbz-fahrgastinformation/ but with way less BOM and I keep getting asked that I should sell them. The primary reason I don't is because I don't want to support something like that for the next 10 years...
It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing. And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year.
I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing.
If you want to be a thinker, you have to write.
It really forces you to address your ideas more formulaically and concretizes your theses.
Start a blog! If you're reading this chances are you know how to buy a domain and spin up a blog in less than 30 minutes. Try Wordpress, or hugo with templates if you want more control. And if you don't know what to write about, this link was recently shared on HN, I thought it was pretty useful: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
And yes, it's important to publish it. It makes your thoughts real. And ideas were meant to be shared.
Of course, given the depth of financial depravity on display here and the incredible thinness of the financial defense, one must also entertain the theory that they did do the due diligence, they were aware of how dangerous this was, and they invested anyhow for other reasons. And that those reasons are probably not good.
There have been many cases where companies go to great lengths to do accounting alchemy to fool even very smart auditors, but we are clearly not dealing with that here. Binance or whoever was offering to buy FTX out literally figured out within single-digit hours of looking at FTX's books that they were not interested. A person skilled in the art can literally glance at these books and figure out that they are worthless. I do not believe there is any credible theory that any investor could possibly have been unaware of these issues.
FTX's books don't so much have red flags as that they are printed on red flags, with ink derived from red flags, a custom-made red cover made out of more red flags, and each page, when opened, has pop-up red flags along with a little electronic speaker that plays Red Flag by Antigoni while you get sprayed with Red Flag perfume [1].
In responding to your example first - to start with, I live and practice in a country where it isn't a choice between healthcare and food on the table. Beyond that, I believe that it is a basic human right to have free healthcare.
The next bit is a bit more complex. I don't think it is right or sensible to advertise medications to people directly. The US is almost alone amongst industrialised/western countries in having prescription medications being directly advertised to consumers. From my time in the US as a medical student, I saw directly how that changed the patient-doctor relationship, and I don't believe in a positive way.
So - I don't think it's right that there's a medical racket that fleeces you to see a doctor, but I don't think it's right that you decide your prescription anyway. On the other hand, it should (speaking of an idealised utopian world) be easy to get refills of medications that have been appropriately prescribed.
So here is where it gets interesting with the VC-backed Subscription healthcare model.
I did a touch of consulting for one starting in Australia (well, it would probably be a stretch to call it consulting but I sat down with the founders as they were running through their spin-up process).
My concerns are that you can't just prescribe anything to anyone, and for the vast majority of prescription medications there are often side-effects that need to be monitored (some of which can be serious), as well as inappropriate prescribing.
The 2 examples the company I was talking to were Finasteride as well as Viagra.
Seperating these two out, my concerns with Erectile Dysfunction are that it could be inappropriately funnelling everyone into prescription treatment, when there is in a reasonable percentage of cases other psychological issues that are impinging on erectile function, and whilst it might be all well and good to get viagra to get to the end result, it is also missing the broader holistic picture of aiming to achieve better health.
For finasteride, there are a reasonable percentage of people who experience quite unwanted side-effects, from gynaecomastia to erectile dysfunction. Since the target audience is young men, these effects are often more psychologically concerning than the cosmetic issue they were trying to solve with a serious prescription medication and I was concerned about follow-up, referral and support in these instances.
I was able to be reassured by them that they had adequate safeguards in place and good clinical governance oversight to achieve good all round care and then we split ways.
I have no idea if they have or are maintaining those protections; additionally I have recently heard they have been pulled infront of the regulators here in Australia for cutting a few corners so my suspicion is that the money and growth hacking has gotten the better of their product development.
Ultimately it is going to be an interesting bounce between both the regulation and the inevitable clinical disasters that will pop up. There's no doubt there is room for innovation in the space, and I feel that there is certainly a way to do it safely - ensure that, for certain conditions, you can answer a few questions, get your medication, and still have safe follow-up, and do this in a innovative way that reduces overall demands on a healthcare professional for a full sit-down (ie wrap up a bunch of the bullshit in algorithms and decision trees and take care of a lot of the back room stuff).
But after 9 years as a doctor and a health-tech founder, I am also convinced that there are a number of elements of health that just do not scale, at least not with anything like the technology we currently have (ie well developed expert systems - I am also fairly fundamentally convinced that the use of AI for diagnosis and the black-box internals is going to cause issues due to uncertainty over where the fuzzy edge lies)
So - TLDR: do I see VC driven subscription prescription as a bad thing? No, but also potentially yes
If I can give any home buying tip from my experience of buying two houses it's been to look at places that are in "the middle". Both homes I've bought in SoCal have had some god-awful photos online, and the finish is new-ish, but done by someone in the 70s so it's new but tacky in a little-old-lady way.
This ends up pricing the house too expensive to flippers, and not nice enough to sell compared to other houses because it doesn't have the farmhouse sink and looks exactly like a grandma took out a home equity line and renovated (which is what happened).
One of the smartest things I ever did was to just sort of quietly quit putting so much effort into pleasing all the people I used to depend on to reinforce my self-esteem or sense-of-self or whatever-it-is. I kind of died, and was reborn as myself. It's way better. But the self I am is much smaller than the one I wished I was or thought I could be or whatever... the one I conceived of. (There is no limit to what we can conceive of, so it's not super impressive to dream up a big version of yourself. Just be who you are and forgive yourself for not being the outsized caricature.)
The emptiness in your life will never go away. The error lies in thinking there ought to be more. More more more, it ought to ring a bell, and be recognized as a form of greed. Trying to fill the hole with friends is just as bad as filling it with drugs or booze or work. Just let it be empty. What's the big deal? It's empty, so what? Don't dwell on it, because that's the same thing, except you're trying to fill the emptiness up with an obsession about the emptiness itself. That isn't going to work, the emptiness will just grow to accommodate itself and eventually swallow you too. Get back to work. It's the one thing everyone has to do to survive, even if you're rich and it's just the work of showering once in a while. But don't try to fill the emptiness with work either. Just be like an animal (the animal you actually are). Get a dog if it helps you remember.
Most of my colleagues finish their intakes very quickly, finish projects early and most (not all) have a huge amount of time of aftersales and aftercare. They usually call this aftercare 'out of scope'.
My finished projects usually do not have any aftercare. They work, because i invested a lot of time in the beginning. I call this 'the actual scope'.
I've been fixing some of my colleagues projects recently. Some of these projects should have ended 18 months ago... Most take be about two weeks to fix.
They eventually will learn :)