tomdell

Industrialization relied heavily upon raw materials generated cheaply with slavery - cotton picked in the American South was exported and was a necessity to fuel the industrialization of textile production in England, for example. There is a reason that industrializing and industrialized countries that relied on slavery and other exploitative economic relationships have achieved greater wealth than more newly industrializing countries have. America's wealth is largely supported by cheap labor and raw materials in other countries, opened up for the use of international corporations by state-sponsored violence - see America's history of interfering in South American politics or Chiquita's recent guilty verdict for sponsoring paramilitary forces in Colombia.

I would be surprised if Suno is very disruptive to the music industry.

It has extremely impressive output for a music generator, and it is very fun to play with - but people will always want to hear something new, and something real.

I don't think that music fans are going to connect with completely AI-generated music without a real personality and story behind it - and good, original music will always be more impressive to people and likely more successful than an AI-generated amalgamation of what already exists.

You're right! The company is very openly continuing layoffs for the next 2 years, so I don't have much faith in the team I was moved to sticking around for much longer. I fixed up my resume and started applying elsewhere the week after everyone I work with was laid off. The job search is going well, fortunately.

I spent the past two and a half years building prototype features for a large internal application. One month ago, the CFO decided that as a part of organizational restructuring, the company will no longer invest in the application. New development on it is ending, and the entire application may potentially be deprecated at some point in the future in favor of cheap dashboards.

I am being moved to the team that builds the cheap dashboards (I'm not happy about it). Among all the prototype work I did, only one significant project has made it into production - the others were continually iterated on for a couple of years, and though some of them have a highly engaged and appreciative beta userbase within the company, I am not allowed to do much more development on them, and they will be taken out of my hands at some point and passed off to other teams.

It seems like Starbucks and a lot of other fast food chains are chasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term viability. A quick check shows Starbucks' gross profit has gone up 12% each year in the past 2 years - that's pretty significant for a stable business that isn't really changing much, and it doesn't seem sustainable. The profit of McDonald's is up 10%, 5%, and then 29% year-over-year, respectively, over the past 3 full years.

My question is - why? Isn't raising fast food prices so much to increase short-term profits an incredibly poor business decision? A major part of the appeal of fast food is low cost. If people fall out of the habit of going to McDonald's, Starbucks, etc. - which they will when they realize they can get higher-quality food/coffee/whatever at a local business for a lower cost - then I think it would be extremely difficult for these chains to win back their business.

My support is first-hand experience and major disappointment buying and reading his most popular book - Deep Work. It was a borderline insulting read in its lukewarm repackaging of common sense wisdom and other people's original research.

Do yourself a favor and don't buy any books by Cal Newport. They're glorified blog posts with a bunch of overblown common sense rebranded with marketable terminology. Read Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi if you want something similar that has more substance.

Definitely similar in a lot of ways (going against the current, similar design language), but there are a couple of key differences to the point I wouldn't say Tesla is the Apple of cars -

Apple typically productizes mature technology and ensures that its products are designed well. Tesla is an early adopter and productizes immature technology which it overhypes and overpromises on (e.g. self-driving).

Apple's manufacturing quality control and attention to detail is also generally pretty impressive. Tesla products looks impressive on the outside but feel cheap on the inside, and there are a lot of issues with the quality of manufacturing. Apple uses nice materials and Tesla uses cheap materials.

Apple making a car always struck me as weird, though.

I would argue BMW or Mercedes are much closer to being the Apple of cars - they aren't early adopters of new technology, and their products are immaculately designed (though using a much different design language than Apple does) and are and feel expensive, unlike Tesla's cars, which look nice but feel like toys.

Compared to prior work, it's great. On it's own, I don't agree with describing it as high-quality.

An impressive technical achievement, yes - but the presentation/marketing of this is absurd.

The generated videos are aesthetically horrendous. I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics are going on that they can confidently describe something where the body shapes are nonsensically in flux with every change of frame (look at the eagle's talons, or the dog's leg movements as it runs) as "high-quality video".

Is generative AI hype blinding them to how hideous these videos are, or do they know and they just pretend like it's something it isn't?

They set out without any ability to do what they claimed to do and lied about it to investors, customers, and the press. A 3D model outsourcing shop isn't going to raise a lot of investment money compared to an "AI" startup.

Some are happy for now because they largely aren't accounting for the deferred costs that are being pushed down the road - once you account for wear & tear on the car and associated maintenance and eventual new car purchases, their earnings are much less than what it seems in the short-term. Uber relies on drivers not running all the numbers before signing up.

I definitely still feel sadness and anxiety over the feeling that I'm wasting my life on something I don't care about, but it feels more manageable for me than the earth-shattering feeling of having nothing but one thing and that one thing isn't working out the way I thought it would.

Trade-offs indeed.