rabidsnail

fund my new simulated annealing accelerator startup where we etch your model onto an aluminum flake and then hit it with a blowtorch

Housing development is one of the highest on the ripe-for-disruption list, maybe second after higher education. Virtually none of the money these people are going into debt to spend on houses generates real value in their lives, they're doing it because they think they're supposed to. If you can figure out how to build cheap housing on cheap land that offers good living standards (doable now that you don't need access to the power grid) then you'll unlock literally trillions in value.

The only reason to join a startup is if you know the founders and you think working with them would be fun enough that you're willing to give up hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it.

"How is this better than TensorFlow" is the new "How is this better than Hadoop".

I wonder how their distributed training setup compares to mxent ps-lite (in terms of performance and licensing).

I'm probably going to turn this into a blog post but this is the outline of my take on what federation is good for:

* different people have different needs from social networks

* starting new social networks is hard becasue getting a critical mass of users is hard

* people would have social networks that are better tailored to their needs if there was a larger diversity of social networks

* centralized platforms target the average of everyone which doesn't serve anyone very well

* there are two ways to get critical mass: piggy-backing off an existing network or trying to bootstrap one from friends/family/interest groups

* piggy-backing is awkward because the upstart network and the established network both want to kill each other in the long run, but think they can get value out of each other in the short run

* federation can provide the benefits of piggy-backing without being adversarial

* if it's the case that each person has a social network that's right for them that isn't right for that many people, then federation can be a stable equilibrium

Taking time off between jobs is very common and future employers won't think anything of it. The only question is whether you can afford the opportunity cost of not bringing in a salary.