The fact that I’m calling an HP support line automatically means I’m annoyed. Keeping me waiting for 15 mins will only leave me inflamed. I have better emotional regulation but dealing with customer service sometimes pushes me to the “being assertive but polite” phase, which a lot of people will just skip. And for the workers, there’s only so much abuse you can take in a day.
A valuable skill as entrepreneurs, is to know when to stop and move on. Recognizing what you built may not be viable financially long term or is no longer a fit for the market and then making adjustments is what good entrepreneurs do. Sometimes it means shutting shop, while other times it means getting acquired and refocusing on the path forward.
This is one of those things that sounds so good with a quick read, but for every example you give me of a smart entrepreneur who knew when to pull the plug I can gave you a gritty, determined one who stayed focus on the vision and built something successful. In this case did they ever have market fit or financial viablilty?
Being proud and being acquired aren’t mutually exclusive things. You can be proud of projects that are not viable financially. They are proud of what they built and are also moving to a place where they can continue building more.
Continuing to struggle for money isn’t a requirement for building cool stuff.
Funny part about oil is that it’s in everything. US is energy independent, but its supply chain is not. AI chips, for example, which prop up the entire economy need oil for the various materials needed to produce it.
The other funny part about oil is that it has an inelastic demand. A 20% reduction in global supply doesn’t mean a 20% increase in prices. It means increase in prices until 20% demand collapses (which could theoretically mean orders of magnitude of increase in pricing). Which means expensive fertilizers, medicines and pretty every other bare necessity.
With these two facts, pretty much every country needs the oil from the Middle East.
If AI tools are as good as the CEOs claim, we should have no friction towards building multiple open source alternatives very quickly. Unless of course, they aren’t as good as they are being sold as, in which case, we have nothing to worry about.
It is well known that there was a brief moment in time when people were abandoning San Francisco and “moving to Texas” (mostly Austin) that coincides when the rents peaked in Austin. I’d be not surprised if that was also the time when San Francisco rents were down.
We’re seeing a reversal in trend when SF is hot again and Austin is not. So not exactly a straightforward comparison. It could explain the SF-> Austin and back trend.
So we've got point in time comparisons between Austin and itself; the change in delta between Austin and a particular city known for restricting housing; and the change in delta between Austin and national median rents. They all support the idea that increasing supply tends to decrease costs, which by a massive coincidence is what basic economic theory suggests.
Of course, people can come up with an ad hoc explanation for why Austin's prices happened to decrease against each of those data points. But is there a single principled way to present the data that suggests increasing supply in Austin did not decrease costs?
> But is there a single principled way to present the data that suggests increasing supply in Austin did not decrease costs?
Building more housing will make housing affordable. That’s not up for debate. The extent to which is what you need to look at. You can’t ignore the effects of net migration trends. My comment mostly wanted to address the parent which arbitrarily picked up data points of 2021 and right now and was comparing Austin and San Francisco. Because those specific points in time are tied to the migration of people between the two cities at a higher rate than usual.
You mean the folk with highest purchasing power (2-3x median wages of the average person in the city) moving in and out of the city have negligible impact on the average rent in the entire city? I guess the 20% increase in rent in 2021 in Austin was just vibes.
> One thing odd, maybe just to me, is why OpenAI has been stuffing its ranks with former Facebookers who are known to juice growth, find edges, and keep people addicted
There is a very simple answer for this: that’s how leadership ranks work in SV. When one “leader” moves from Company A to Company B, a lot of existing employees are pushed out or sidelined, and the ranks are filled with loyalists from previous companies. Sometimes this works out, but a lot of time it doesn’t and it stays that way until another “leader” is brought in. What’s good for the company doesn’t matter unless there clear incentives and targets lined out for them.
> I get regulating CSAM, calls for violence or really obvious bullying (serious ones like "kill yourself" to a kid)
I’ve reported videos that look like sexual exploitation, videos that call for violence and videos that promote hate (xyz people are cockroaches) and all I’ve gotten is that “it does not go against community guidelines” with a link to block the person who created them. So any concerns of “where do we draw the line” are in my opinion pointless because the bare minimum isn’t even being done.
I agree with your CSAM and explicit calls for violence examples - they probably should be regulated. But a few comments ago in another thread someone didn't like me calling people in the workplace who annoy me with their mindless chit chat "corporate drones". My post could be construed as promoting hate. Where do we draw the line from "cockroaches" to "drones"? Do I have to call a certain "protected class" drones for it to qualify as hate speech?
What if I didn't say anything bad about a race or a sex, but said:
> I have coworkers that pester with me with their small talk about the weather every time I see them. I hate those fucking cockroaches.
That's in bad taste, sure, but should it be regulated? You may know I obviously don't hate-hate them (they're just annoying, but most of them are good people) or actually consider them cockroach-like in any meaningful aspect (they're obviously people, but with annoying tendencies). But would a regulator know the difference? What about a malicious regulator who gets paid by (ok, this is a silly example, but bear with me) the weather-talking coworker lobby to censor me? In many not-so-silly examples a regulator could silence anyone for anything (politics, sex, drugs, ethics), as long as it uses a bad word or says anything negative about anyone. I don't want to live in such a society. That much power would be abused sooner or later.
If this were remotely true, there wouldn't have huge layoff rounds. The opposite is true: they hire thousands upon thousands of people and teach them how to build scalable software, and then set them loose. I'm frankly surprised by the lack of competition, but I suppose that's gated at multiple levels (visas, personal risk, funding, network effects, etc)
> Don't they screen to hire people who already know that?
There was a time when big tech widely hired dor entry-level jobs.
Also, cramming for the design portion of an interview, and doing it for real, and interacting with the architects/design documents are 2 very different things
I am more leaning towards them simply having infinitely more money than sense. So they keep throwing it at anything that looks like it could be something. Well same goes for Google...
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