idkwhattocallme

The bubble bursts when Apple announces it's doing good enough (private/secure) LLMs on device. At that point the capex on cloud infra starts to come into question and the dominos start to fall...

The Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report for August, published by political consulting firm Slingshot Strategies, polled 8,000 Americans. Only 14% of those surveyed said FSD would make them more likely to buy a Tesla, while 35% said the technology would make them less likely to purchase one.

But it is broken. There is a shortage of every type of trades worker. Sure it's been great for existing trade folks because there are plenty of jobs and the pay is great more demand than supply. But the lack of supply has meant that it's too expensive to build/fix stuff. If you're in the US look around. It looks like we literally stopped building in the 1950s. Every renovation/building project is multi-year. Why? The lack of plentiful skilled trades people is one of the reasons the US building and infrastructure are deteriorating.

Fossil Fuels. I read 70% of it is wasted in extraction, processing, transportation and inefficient use. This despite ~100 years of working on the problem.

A couple of years ago, some smart kids created fractal. Every week (or maybe 2) you got matched with another exec. It was super high quality and I got a lot of value from it. I met someone I hired, someone who eventually hired me and another I still trade texts with. My impression was others felt strongly about it as well. But they abandoned the project as there was no viable monetization model. That and Founders are a terrible demographic to build for. 99% don't stay founders for long.

I wonder if the callousness is a consequence of generational experiences. Hundreds of years ago, Europe was once like the US. It had hype manias (tulips). But perhaps they had enough of them where they stopped believing. The US is much younger and we're now in just our 3-4 meta hype cycle. Though in the last 10 years they seemingly have accelerated in tech (SaaS, SoLoMo, Crypto, AI). I wonder if over time that hype will wane. I do agree with DHH here that VC is the gas that keeps the engine going.

A landline for a 3 year old to communicate with her friends. lol

The local public elementary school blocked all chat programs on student chromebooks. The 3rd graders figured out that they could chat with another in a shared google doc. They had thousands of pages of chat before the teacher finally put an end to it. The teacher only found out because a kid shared that it was getting unruly during class. I share this because most kids have an ipad and are digital communication natives. This landline concept is like puting a lid back on a can of worms.

I've managed thousands of people. In my experience people didn't feel guilt about taking PTO, they felt FOMO because they didn't feel secure in their position or at the company. They felt something would come up or someone would undermine them while they were away that would affect their employment.

A digital strike by all employees for a week to get a collective bargaining agreement in place to show companies just how far AI has to go as a replacement would be powerful.

For the most part, I'm indifferent to layoffs. Companies over hire and then course correct. It's part of the game. But for MSFT, it rubs me the wrong way. In the past 5 years, their stock has soared (150% on stock and doubled in valuation). They are insanely profitable ($82B profit). They are diverse (no existential business risk). The fact that they are unceremoniously laying off 30K of the people that helped them get there drives home it's just a paycheck, do your job, but know it can and will end when convenient for the company. I know folks will argue, low performers, but really. This "productivity apps" company hired them, onboarded them, made $82B in profit, surely they can figure out how to uplevel folks. Also how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years. Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively ensured a labor job meant a secure future. I wonder if that's the solution (again).

For the most part, I'm indifferent to layoffs. Companies over hire and then course correct. It's part of the game. But for MSFT, it rubs me the wrong way. In the past 5 years, their stock has soared (150% on stock and doubled in valuation). They are insanely profitable ($82B profit). They are diverse (no existential business risk). The fact that they are unceremoniously laying off 30K of the people that helped them get there drives home it's just a paycheck, do your job, but know it can and will end when convenient for the company. I know folks will argue, low performers, but really. This "productivity apps" company hired them, onboarded them, made $82B in profit, surely they can figure out how to uplevel folks. Also how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years. Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively created the middle class. I wonder if that's the solution (again).

I've gone down this rabbit hole with customers as a PM still working in the space. Here is what I've learned. The past decade of devices (hololens, realwear, google glass, vuzix, etc) were some combination of way too heavy, expensive, fragile, short battery life, no wifi connectivity, too much UI long to get to point of value and/or simply not useful. That and most customers had a content problem. The AR/VR use in the field typically came down to looking something up in a manual or calling someone. Both easily and perhaps more effectively done on a smartphone. There was an instance where I asked techs why they weren't using the headset for showing what they were seeing in realtime and they said, it's easier to facetime (hard to argue that). The cool AR 3-D demos or overlays rarely worked in the field on real equip or didn't actually convey anything useful (everyone knows the basics of how the machine works). There are training VR use cases (like learning to operate a crane), but once again it's a nice to have supplement and not a replacement. Recent advances with LLMs (specifically voice) + Meta type "glasses form factor" have created intrigue again with innovation centers at large companies. The use case we're currently working on is inspections or filling out forms with audio/videos.