cactus2093

I agree, it's an interesting distortion to the traditional technology feedback loop.

I would expect someone who "strikes gold" like this in a solo endeaver to raise money, start a company, hire a team. Then they have to solve the always challenging problem of how to monetize an open-source tool. Look at a company like Docker, they've been successful but they didn't capture more than a small fraction of the commercial revenue that the entire industry has paid to host the product they developed and maintain. Their peak valuation was over a billion dollars, but who knows by the time all is said and done what they'll be worth when they sell or IPO.

So if you invent something that is transformative to the industry you might work really hard for a decade and if you're lucky the company is worth $500M, if you can hang onto 20% of the company maybe it's worth $100M.

Or, you skip the decade in the trenches and get acqui-hired by a frontier lab who allegedly give out $100M signing bonuses to top talent. No idea if he got a comparable offer to a top researcher, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. Even a $10M package to skip a decade of risky & grueling work if all you really want to do is see the product succeed is a great trade.

It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps.

Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.

So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.

This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. It was great and we got things like the Netflix Prize and all sorts of content ranking improvements, better CDN platforms, lower latency and less buffering, more content upgraded to HD and 4K. Plus some annoying but clearly effective practices like auto-play of trailers and unrelated shows.

Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.

> I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content

This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.

I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work.

What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem.

There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something.

I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way.

Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.

> His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit

Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?

> Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?

Who would want to? There are a lot of jobs in the real world that do work this way, and they are generally not the most desirable jobs. E.g. data entry or picking fruit or customer support or working on an assembly line.

The ability to improve, scale your work, and over time make a bigger impact with less effort is one of the key things that makes any kind of work interesting.

Not to mention a lot of the the most desirable jobs, like, say, professional athlete or movie star, tend to work very differently than what you're describing. Many people work very hard in those fields and never succeed, it's the combination of hard work and skill and a little bit of luck/randomness that makes it interesting.

> create a space where a community of people you care about can thrive

> the reward could evaporate at any moment

Wait a minute, is the reward the fact that the community exists? That's not going to evaporate overnight when Reddit replaces a mod.

The fear of your reward evaporating sounds a lot more like this work is driven by ego and the desire for control.

That's why I'm curious just how good the resolution can be on the Vision Pro. If it takes a 5k monitor at, say, 2ft away which covers maybe 30 degrees of your field of view vertically to be truly "retina", then surely a 4k display 3 inches away from your eye that covers ~120 degrees of your field of view is not quite there.

But you also have lenses that are stretching out the screen to cover your periphery where it can be much less sharp so it's not exactly comparable.

> Before, mods could run subreddits as they saw fit, users could choose the subreddits they participated in, and a user can always create a new subreddit if they don't think any existing ones suit their needs.

As a frequent Reddit user I don't agree with that. The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.

As a user if I don't like something about a certain subreddit including how it's moderated, the more realistic option is just to not participate in that subject matter on Reddit. I can still use Reddit for other topics but I feel like there's very rarely an alternative subreddit on the same topic which is anywhere near as active as the main one.

So, no offense to Reddit mods, but I really don't think these are all highly skilled, irreplaceable individuals. There's no competition that incentivizes the best people to rise to the top, these are just average folks that volunteered at the right time and now they're mods. There is apparently even a lot of cronyism among the mod community and I have heard that it can be hard to break into for first time mods.

If Reddit forces some of them out, there will be many people willing to step in who can do just as good of a job. It might even be a net positive thing to get new people involved.

I agree with all of that, but honestly the more important factor is this is just not a very good cause to get all worked up about. Reddit is trying to grow into a profitable company, their business model is showing ads to users, they obviously can't just let millions of people use 3rd party apps for free.

I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?

Interesting, at what viewing distance is a 4k monitor 70 PPD?

From what I've seen the common advice for monitors is that 5k is the ideal resolution for a 27" screen and 4k is a little bit less sharp if you're looking closely.

I have a really hard time believing this is being actively driven by collusion among rich families who know they could game non-SAT metrics. It would require a huge organizational effort, and for what? It's still not going to be a sure thing to get their kids in, there's gonna be even more randomness in the process after this change than there is now. And sending your kids to elite an school doesn't even buy them that much anyway if you're already rich & influential, you can pull strings to get them a job after they graduate from a mediocre school.

It's much easier to believe that this is being driven by college administrators who know that the way to advance their careers in the current climate is by passing radical social justice changes, and this particular idea is simply an organically popular fad among social justice influencers so it's the one they've latched onto.

I just can't take any discussion of "skills" seriously that equates skill to some formal certification or degree.

As a software engineer, basically all the skills I use to do my job on a day to day basis are things I've learned from experience, or informal mentorship from other engineers, or reading blog posts on programming practices and then applying those things and seeing what works and what doesn't.

But to an economist none of this counts. A 24 year old that just started their first job after getting a masters degree in CS is considered objectively more skilled than someone with an undergrad degree and 10 years of experience.