The color is part of it. I put a greyscale filter on my phone and it’s insane how much it’s reduced the device’s ability to suck me in and keep me staring at it.
The reproducibility crisis and general decay of academia has given us a few decades of bad science. Entire fields have been built using massaged statistics to deny common sense in the pursuit of tenure.
We're just now "unlearning" much of this, especially in the social sciences.
Why would we be "unlearning" anything now? It doesn't make sense. What changed? Are academicians not monetarily awarded for attention-grabbing and breakthrough-sounding research anymore?
I mean, these fields weren't considered fields before. Sociology is a new field in that the methods it uses (the scientific method) are now being newly applied to social issues. There are several metaphysical and semantic questions to be answered here. Is the scientific method even appropriate for studying society? One prerequisite for the application of the scientific method is the belief that the laws being studied are fixed. Does that apply to every sociological question? If not, then the entire field is called into question.
In times past, sociology would be the realm of philosophers who would, after careful study (not scientific, just regular human intuition) and reading (so they could 'experience' past events), would come up with a framework of human behavior and then defend it.
We work with non-technical founders. I've written a version of this post—although not as comprehensive.
My main advice for all aspiring founders is the same:
You cannot be waiting. You must be executing.
You can't wait for funding. You can't wait for a technical cofounder. You can't wait for the dev shop to finish your MVP.
If you're not actively, personally building something, you MUST be executing somewhere else. Ideally this means you're talking to customers, pitching, and trying to solve their problems with the skills and resources you have available to you.
But you can't just sit around and wait for someone to save you and your startup. And this article gives a great explanation of why: those saviors can save themselves. If you're 100% dependent on them for success, what are they getting out of the relationship?
IMHO this is what most non-technical founders are missing. They come to you with a proposal like “build this thing and then I’ll sell” and you have to trust they would. Sometimes they provably can and this is a great deal then. More often than not nothing indicates they can sell anything, unfortunately.
Hey mate, everyone decided to dunk on you instead of actually being helpful. HN is full of nerds that look down on people like you. Don't take it to heart.
AI isn't magic: it just does things people do, really fast, and at enormous scale. Any "AI SaaS" is really just a productized version of something you can do with your hands—just done 1M times faster by AI.
Find a thing that's being down slowly today. Learn the ins and outs of that workflow. And then plug AI in.
If you're open to it, I'd love to chat. Email me at james@nonerds.com
The ROI is the mitigation of a third world war by a mad despot and the consequential preservation of lives that would otherwise have been lost. It's a hugely valuable investment once you look at the historical costs of appeasement.
Also, to repeat the point with a bit more nuance: most of the money being "sent" doesn't even leave the US economy until it's in the hands of people e.g as wages. US military procurement rules mean that the aid money going to Ukraine for hardware procurement ultimately only goes back to US equipment manufacturers and other US companies in that supply chain.
Tldr: each aid package is largely a gift card to spend at the Made-In-USA gun store.
> The ROI is the mitigation of a third world war by a mad despot and the consequential preservation of lives that would otherwise have been lost. It's a hugely valuable investment once you look at the historical costs of appeasement.
Citation *massively* needed. There is no evidence that a 3rd world war was mitigated. There is substantial evidence that this war has gone on far longer than it would have if the west had stayed out.
> Also, to repeat the point with a bit more nuance: most of the money being "sent" doesn't even leave the US economy until it's in the hands of people e.g as wages. US military procurement rules mean that the aid money going to Ukraine for hardware procurement ultimately only goes back to US equipment manufacturers and other US companies in that supply chain.
I understand this.
What I do not understand is how making a massive wealth transfer from our children and grandchildren to shareholders of the military-industrial complex is viewed as net-positive economic activity.
Taking out a loan against the future productivity of your children isn't suddenly made okay because you spend that money with other Americans to send guns to someone in another country.
It's net-positive activity full-stop, not just economic activity.
The US dollar thrives because it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government. Which in all practical terms means it's backed by our guns, or more precisely our ability to wage war. Closely allied nations and currencies such as the Euro, the Pound, and the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Dollars similarly benefit.
So in immediate terms you may see it as a wealth transfer, in longer timescales opening up our economic horizons (improving economic and political conditions with our allies and opening fronts for investment with new allies) improves our ability to grow GDP, revenue, our tax base, and our ability to do more business in our own currency.
That's pretty much the payoff, if you're looking for one in strictly economic terms.
> It's net-positive activity full-stop, not just economic activity.
Net positive for who? It doesn't seem to be a net positive for Ukraine, who have effectively lost an entire generation of young men.
> in longer timescales opening up our economic horizons (improving economic and political conditions with our allies and opening fronts for investment with new allies) improves our ability to grow GDP, revenue, our tax base, and our ability to do more business in our own currency.
This is a wildly nebulous claim. At "longer timescales" I can claim the same thing: indebting future generations to help defend non allies ("new ally" is an interesting word for someone who wasn't an ally until they needed our help) without a clear ROI is a fantastic way to slow future GDP growth by continually increasing the amount of debt we have to service.
> Net positive for who? It doesn't seem to be a net positive for Ukraine, who have effectively lost an entire generation of young men.
Men who laid down their lives to defend their homeland. This isn't a serious counterargument on your part and devalues your standing as a good-faith participant in this exchange.
> This is a wildly nebulous claim
The history of our nation as a world superpower disagrees.
I belong to a social group of dads from my son’s school. Most of them are blue collar conservatives. They all have pickups.
Not one is opposed to electric, as long as the details make sense.
But these are camping, fishing, hunting folk. Even the Lightning, which is an awesome product all around, doesn’t have the range+charging network to make it useable away from the home.
So for now, they’ll buy another ICE truck. But they’re absolutely open to it.
Very, very few people are opposed to electric for “ideological reasons.”
This is what happens during periods of economic uncertainty. It's like counting cards with a freshly shuffled deck: nobody can tell what the state of the game is, so you place a minimum bet until you can get a feel for things again.
The movie is meh, but the boardroom scene in Margin Call has a great line:
"I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence."
Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in a row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to do next.
> Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in a row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to do next.
Sure, but you can leave a downturn four ways:
1. You went out of business
2. You experienced a decline and let a lot of people go
3. You managed to stay roughly where you were, no further forward, no further backwards (this is a small success but still a great achievement) and you may have let some people go — the expression "running to stand still" applies here
4. You find a way to come out better than you went in and maybe continued to hire
Spotify feel like they've gone from #3 to #2, but they had ambitions to be #4 of those scenarios, they will likely survive, but in what form and with what potential? And more to the point, if their competitors manage to achieve #3 or #4, at what long-term cost to Spotify?
5. Cut your losses and keep whatever cash stores you can for the storm to come.
We have zero insight into what the Spotify execs are seeing. Maybe ad revenue is already down. Maybe subscriptions aren’t renewing. Maybe costs are increasing.
Sometimes, the best thing to do is cut some employees now, so you don’t have to cut more later.
That's peak capitalism right there - you've got people spending to buy products with money borrowed from credit card companies and banks, which they will have difficulty paying off and will pay a good amount of interest on.
If you can't make a company work in that environment, you might want to do a bit of a self examination and notice that your advertising is annoying and off-putting and your web-browser based client is utter shit.
No, the research was fine. For example, a friend of my family spent a large part of his career writing an extensive bilingual dictionary for an indigenous language in Southern Mexico. He won a "golden fleece" award from asshole Senator Proxmire of Wisconsin, who thought dictionaries for languages with only a few hundred thousand speakers was a waste of government research grant money.
Creating a bilingual dictionary for an indigenous language spoken by a few thousand people who aren't even in the country funding that research is the definition of "a waste of government research grant money."
Is this satire? Leaving aside your sloppy reading, this is one of the the most exaggerated examples of a stereotypical "technical person utterly bereft of human perspective" takes I have ever seen on this website. Which is really saying something, because there are a lot of blinkered people here.
I feel profound sadness and pity for anyone with such an impoverished worldview. I hope someday you can experience some literature, art, nature, or human connection that can pierce though it and help you reconnect with your innate capacities for empathy and wonder.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
That argument only works with a “population”, since almost nobody gets to choose which set of politicians they vote for.
In this case, OpenAI employees all voluntarily sought to join that team at one point. It’s not hard to imagine that 98% of a self-selecting group would continue to self-select in a similar fashion.
