Sometimes, yeah. Comedy is one such example: it gives huge rewards to a few celebrities, while a lot of other equally talented people just never manage to be in the right place at the right time.
It's perhaps especially true for comedy. You can see it when you watch a comic on TV: they're much less funny than in person, because you're not surrounded by a lot of other laughing people. The same routine by the same person can get little more than snickers when done at somebody's open mic night -- unless somebody recognizes that they're famous. Celebrity reinforces itself.
Burnham is very talented and I'm sure he worked like crazy to market his work. But he will also tell you the names of a hundred others who are equally talented and worked equally hard, but you've never heard of them. The market for celebrity is very fickle, heaping huge rewards on a few, but drop off rapidly for people who aren't in the hump of the long tail.
Warren Buffett isn't profiting from celebrity in the same sense, but there's a similar effect where the biggest winners are lucky as well as smart. Their advice often doesn't take that into account, and it's important to measure that in your appetite for risk.
I think those are good points. I don't know much about comedy or entertainment but I get the same feeling that getting "chosen" matters more than your content.
On the other hand, great work doesn't happen by accident.
Great businesses are a result of good management. Good products are results of good design.
Those don't happen by accident, just like a great program doesn't write itself.
You may not be a warren buffet, due to limited opportunities. But, you could leave someone like that penniless and nameless and i'm sure he could leverage his skills and knowledge to be "successful", even if not a mega-billionaire.
Marketing and sales is an important component which is left out (if you care about making money). That's also something you can deliberately work on and improve.
Absolutely. Talent, luck, and hard work. All 3 are required to strike it big. I've known extremely talented and hard working people who did well, but never got to the super star level.
Pg has a quote along the lines of "easier jobs that are hard to get fired from are worth more money." Of course not every public job is easy, rather often there are benefits involved other than cash
Absolutely. It's almost unheard of to work at a major academic institution without one.
Becoming a professor is all preparation from 18-30, and then was an assistant you still have to grind and run errands to "earn your place".
Is he mean? Or do associate those views with mean people.
I just don't understand why everyone needs to be a PR polished suit. These people work on computers, not administer public policy. We can appreciate their contributions and ignore their quirks or the fact they don't have all the popular opinions.
> Just because somebody is good in one area that doesn't mean they have any authority in another
Precisely what I am saying. We can applaud Nick for contributions to cryptography without importing his views of other things. We don't have to weigh his political opinions at all.
> just wanting that people are decent human beings.
This sounds to me like "having views I like, because only undecent people would think otherwise".
Do you have an instance of Nick being nasty or indecent?
> This sounds to me like "having views I like, because only undecent people would think otherwise".
Yeah, that's a sentiment you hear a lot in political discourse these days. But if you follow cryptocurrencies, you wouldn't get far with this attitude. The combination of technological, financial, and political issues that make up this field draw a lot of different people to it. Including a lot of wackos, often even with a cult following. So you need to have a good filter to find the interesting stuff.
But I followed him long enough to notice that there is no interesting stuff anymore and some of his content was showing uncomfortable character traits to me, so I unfollowed.
> Do you have an instance of Nick being nasty or indecent?
This Twitter thread by somebody else is a good start.
The intent of that thread is to peer into his tweets to associate him with an untouchable "white supremacist", as opposed to any particular wrong doing.
That's not even a description, it's just a reason to dehumanize someone.
> so I unfollowed.
I completely encourage that.
I'm not asking for his political views to be platformed, just that we treat them separately. In other words, it's not in bad taste to respect Nick for a Bitcoin opinion, even if what else he has going on we believe or even know to be incorrect.
Did consumers demand subscription services? Or did vendors (led by Adobe) decide to change to subscriptions to get uniform cash flow?
At agencies I have worked at all creatives I worked with would prefer to spend $200-400 and have a permanent software license. Perhaps this isn't a representative group.
I'm not saying consumers demanded subscriptions. vendors push them because it's a saner way of managing revenue for products that require maintenance post-sale anyway.
that said, I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives. one way or another, a product will stop receiving support when the money stops flowing in. with a permanent license, it ends when people stop buying licenses. with subscriptions, it continues as long as enough people keep paying.
> I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives.
Funny how consumers tend to despise them though.
The term "subscription" itself a typically a euphemism for "rental". There are a small number of companies who offer a year of updates that you get to keep forever (which makes consumers play the game of when exactly to buy to maximize the new features in that year), but most so-called subscriptions disable the software entirely if you stop paying. In other words, rental.
Long-term rental is almost always a bad deal for consumers. One of the few exceptions is housing, because many consumers can't afford to buy a house, and also houses are one of the least liquid assets you can own, if you have to move it (and yourself). Otherwise, rental is going to cost you a lot more in the long run.
Financially, rental can work well for the seller, of course, but we end up with "subscription fatigue", where the market can't sustain as many sellers, and the few rich companies get richer (which is exactly why they were "pioneered" by BigCos such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple).
> Funny how consumers tend to despise them though.
sure, and as an individual I behave the same way. I always want to solve my problem in the cheapest possible way. still, I can't help but notice that products with stable ongoing revenue tend to get much better support.
I think the clearest example is with games. most games get released with a pile of bugs. a bunch get fixed in a release day patch and then there are a few more patches over the next few months (when most of the sales happen). once the initial wave of sales subsides, you tend to be stuck with whatever bugs remain. cs:source had several game breaking bugs for years (defuse kit over bomb blocking defuse, defusing through walls, etc.) despite being one of the most popular FPS titles of its time. AFAIK, most of these still exist fifteen years later. csgo, which is monetized through microtransactions, gets bugs fixed almost as fast as they can be posted to reddit/youtube. microtransactions aren't quite the same as subscriptions, of course, but they generate revenue proportional to the current userbase, rather than the rate that people buy the game for the first time (which will inevitably dry up).
> that said, I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives.
Actually, I think subscriptions misaligns incentives. With subscriptions, it becomes important for the vendors to keep releasing updates (so that the customers feel like they're getting value out of the subscription), which means having bug-free software is a terrible idea. You'd need to either release intentionally buggy software (so you can ship a follow-up version to fix it) or go on a feature treadmill (in which case trying to stabilize has rapidly diminishing returns and high opportunity cost).
As a consumer, software that was developed knowing it would never be fixed and has to be perfect the first try is much better (even if it still has bugs). Mario64 had bugs (e.g. backwards jump going really fast); but the bugs weren't really noticeable in normal gameplay because they couldn't just ship an update most of the size of the whole game before you start to play.
Houses, cars, etc are far more reliable and well designed than software. Think about all the extreme conditions cars continue to function in. How many people don't even follow basic maintenance schedules?
Another key difference is that in maintenance of your home, you have complete control. It's extremely easy to understand and act to improve or maintain it. When large software systems (like the IRS login) have problems, you are totally helpless.
> Houses, cars, etc are far more reliable and well designed than software
Buy software the price of a house and you’ll be right to expect the same build level.
Then even at the price of your house you’ll have fun with mold growing inside the walls issues, soil that degrades in unexpected ways after heavy rain hits the hill you’re built on; rooms were fresh and bright enough on a hot summer day when you visited, but you realize overall orientation makes way darker and gloomy in winter that you expected. And you’ll pay for that house for your next 20 years.
Cars are the same at a lower level, and you see small issues creep up as you lower your budget (or go buy a fancy vintage italian car and you’re in for the wild ride).
> Another key difference is that in maintenance of your home, you have complete control.
In the good old days people had timers on their desk to remember to restart programs before they crash. Also saving stuff, making backups etc.
Of course online services are a different beast, but it’s more akin to fighting bureaucracy, which I see as a our society’s software in a way, with the shitty forms with not enough space for your name and other niceties.
PG benefits from self-confidence as well (certainly to a less degree).
Being extremely self aware and re-questioning ones positions constantly doesn't seem to be a winning trait in business and promotion. At the very least, if it's being done internally you want to continue to broadcast consistent and confident messages.
Yes. I think programming provides a lot of interesting examples of eg functors and other such structures.
Enough to build your intuition at least, and then start learning category theory from there. (And then try to use that knowledge to kick off some further investigation into the other areas of math that category theory historically comes from, if you are so interested.)
I think it's a bit like learning Spanish first and then Latin later. Vs learning Latin first and then some romance languages.
