FiatLuxDave

In that case, how about someone saying,

"Let's tax advertising!"

This seems like a good place to leave a few memories of some WWII vets.

My grandfather fought in WWII under Patton, at the battle of the bulge and a lot more. It really messed him up. I've posted about him before. After he passed away in the 1980s, I became friends with two of his old army & engineering friends, Sam and Ernie. I was a teenager, and my mom and grandmother would go to lunch once a week with a group of adults and bring me along, and Ernie and Sam were there. I was interested in science, and they were both engineers. As a young teenager I was always trying to come up with a way to make a perpetual motion machine. Every week I'd come at them with a new idea, and they would educate me in why it wouldn't work. I think I learned most of my basic physics from them that way.

I remember around 2002 I had a conversation with Sam about the war. He didn't talk about the battles much, but he was keen to tell me about the fun he and his buddies had looting a pub basement full of beer barrels in Germany. I asked if he was afraid of getting in trouble for that (good luck trying that in the army now), and he said it was just a very different time.

Here's to you, Ernie and Sam!

I'm about halfway through this book and I can second the recommendation.

This year, LLMs have been involved in a number of interesting proofs of conjectures. But that is not even half of mathematics. Has anyone tried to use an LLM to generate a mathematically interesting conjecture, on the level of Conway's refinement conjecture? If so, what happened?

With all the talk of mathematicians possibly being obsolete, I'm wondering where the future conjectures that future LLMs would prove might come from.

I'm guessing you located are in the bay area? If so, that is one thing under your control that you could change. The early SV VCs didn't build the industry by staying in NY (where the capital concentration at that time was). They had to get away from that scene to do what they did. It might be easier to cut your own lane if you weren't sharing the same turf.

I'm wondering if anyone in charge at Netflix is going to wise up and realize that their biggest problem is their UI.

Years ago, if you asked a programmer why the Netflix UI worked the way it did, the answer was that it was designed to hide how small their catalog actually was. Then, Netflix became quite successful and their UI became an industry standard, with Amazon, Youtube, etc. all copying it or aspects of it. So why mess with success?

But now Netflix is in a situation where they have a dearth of new good content, but now they also have a fairly substantial catalog which has been built up over more than a decade. And they are still sticking with a UI designed to hide the size of their catalog. I often talk with friends and family who have Netflix and they are not aware of shows which they might like, simply because the Netflix algorithm hasn't shown it to them.

I suspect that making one simple UI change could have as much effect on their fortunes as adding $hundreds of millions of new content. Simply only display the icon for a given show once in any given session. In other words, if say "Rebel Moon" is shown under Sci-Fi movies, only show it there, not also under Action movies or some other row. They've already seen it once and clicked past, so showing it again is wasting a space for some other show they might like.

People are leaving Netflix because they click around for too long trying to find something they want to watch. The problem is perceived as lack of good new content, but the real problem might just be the clicking around.

Similar to the plasma physicist R.F. Heeter

Rarely have I seen someone shoot down their own argument with a link quite as effectively as this.

You might want to google those cities, since every single one that I've checked is a small population city surrounded by rural area.

Your argument about cultural influence might be more persuasive if you compared larger cities.

The Great Pulping is the name, or rather names, that modern historians have given to two legendary events which were supposed to have occured early in the Confusion Era. The first of these events was when libraries converted from a primarly paper-based form of information storage to a digital form. A majority of library book collections were scanned, digitized, and then once the information was stored in digital forms, the books were sold to be pulped in order to free up room for library patrons to use the new system more effectively. Of course, the librarians could not know what was going to happen in the future to all this information, what with the viruses, cross-copying, AI hallucinations, archival rivalries, meme wars, and all the other diverse information-distorting causes of the Confusion.

The second event refers to what happened to the librarians who had been responsible for this decision, when the full effects of it became evident.

- A legendarium of the Confusion Era, by Franklin Duane, 192 PCE Edition

Hi Eric, I enjoyed The Lean Startup.

You used the phrase "our industry". Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the 'tech industry' concept, simply because a lot of startups are not in software/computing, and a lot of new technology isn't either. But I get what people mean.

I notice that the companies you mention like Costco and Patagonia are not in the tech industry. Does your new book have any examples which show how to stay incorruptible in the face of the network effects that drive monopolization in the tech industry? Alternatively, have you seen workable ways to split network effects amongst networked affiliates, to spread out the market power?

I know that most founders aren't exactly looking to make a startup with a lot of competition (I'm sure not), but it would be nice to know if someone is fixing problems specific to the 'tech industry'.

I rarely use Google for search, but I've actually gone back a few times just to use the AI search function. Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for.

But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like:

"You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?"

Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.