6 ms·

Right. Which is why government research is probably a better model for these world-changing basic technologies than Silicon Valley. Ugh, can you imagine how ba

by beat 7y ago

Right. Which is why government research is probably a better model for these world-changing basic technologies than Silicon Valley. Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding?

erobbins 7y ago
which tcp/ip? There would be 10, all with incomplete feature sets and poor reliability.
- streb-lo 7y ago
  "Here at bleh we've developed a revolutionary method for transmitting your TCP/IP packets on-chain using AI to perform network level flow control."
  - outworlder 7y ago
    The system would probably store all packets in a block chain and routing would be based on a machine learning system.
    - jerf 7y ago
      "Our router can route an astonishing 2,000 packets per second! No other router can offer you this sort of performance! Blockchain. Go ahead. Ask our competitors if they can match this. You'll find their jaw drops and that they'll tell you that this level of performance shouldn't even be possible on commodity hardware! Our experts hand-tuned the multi-billion parameter neural nets our product uses. The competition wouldn't even dream of putting neural nets of this scale into their routers. That's how far ahead we are on this. You can't get this sort of performance from anyone else in the business!" Your Email: ( ) [ Yes, contact me and tell me MORE! ]
      - ignoramous 7y ago
        That made me chuckle. I cringe at exaggerated, buzz-wordy, vague sales-copy as much as the other person, but isn't it shown to work (by Apple et al)? I'd be interested if you or anyone else have examples of to-the-point landing pages / sales-copy with zero exaggeration and gimmicks. I liked the WhatsApp's back in the day [0], but they had a lot going for them and didn't need any extraordinary claims. MissiveApp [1] is another one that feels comfortable, to me. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090914114259/http://www.whatsapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090914114259/http://www.whatsa... [1] https://missiveapp.com https://missiveapp.com
    - aogl 7y ago
      Ahhh, don't tell all our secrets to the world! "It's not ready yet"
- mef 7y ago
  and all proprietary
- paulddraper 7y ago
  As it is, we've only had half that many versions, all incompatible and multiple in common use today with no end in sight.
heartbeats 7y ago
If you want a vision of the future, imagine JavaScript running on a cloud - forever.
mc32 7y ago
Or companies which can afford research fellows working on fundamental technologies with a very long view.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  Snark aside, that is a good point. Erlang is a nice language and it was developed as a pretty short-term project to fill a specific need. In fact, you might even argue it is a nice language because it was developed as a pretty short-term project to fill a specific need.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding? It was. Several times. It was developed by a lot of large companies too. Nobody remember those, for obvious reasons, but people used to use them.
- 1996 7y ago
  People like to forget. It helps pretend government research and alliances always produce the best outcomes. Your example may be a bit too old. Even novell netware, token ring etc won't ring a bell to many people. Try a simpler one instead: Do you guys remember about the various wireless standards before Wifi? The Orinocos and the Intel 2011 PCMCIA were IIRC among the first ones of the 802.11b - quickly eclipsing everything else. Also, what about DECT from about the same period? Some companies (mostly in Europe) tried to make an equivalent of Wifi, but using DECT modems. Some devices even made it to the market!
  - beat 7y ago
    You're talking about the product of standards committees there, not startups. Standards committees are sort of "We're doing this so no one company owns/controls this basic tech, so we can all build new and interoperable products with the basic tech and make money!"
    - 1996 7y ago
      The beauty of standards is that there are so many to chose from! So it's not very different from startups. Eventually, somethings dominate whether it comes from a standard body or is "branded" as a standard ex-post.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    > It helps pretend government research and alliances always produce the best outcomes. Well, at least on this case government research did produce the best outcome. By far. So far no comparison even makes sense, and people don't even remember there were other attempts.
paulddraper 7y ago
Is that true though? Nobody -- public, private, international -- has had any luck in fusion. I think that has more to do with the problem itself. But consider "world-changing" technologies like electric cars. The SV model doesn't see so terrible, does it? (Yes, I know about government grants. It's still a primarily private industry play.)
- lmm 7y ago
  I saw a controversy recently in an open-source project where someone who packaged up the implementation with a friendly GUI was making thousands a month on Patreon, while none of that was going to the people who actually implemented the hard technical parts. Credit for these technologies can seem similar - the government does all the basic research (through universities etc), funds the development of the tech through grants and the like, and Silicon Valley just does the customer-facing part and picks up all the credit.
rossdavidh 7y ago
There are a few examples of government agencies which can make many parallel bets, on the understanding that most will fail but a few may pay off big. But, by "a few examples", I actually just mean DARPA. I'm sure there are others, not many though. Politics does not work well with "most of these projects failed". It's too easy of a target. Anything that failed, is an easy target for a congressman to take aim at as being "wasted", because in some sense that particular investment was wasted, in the same sense that every insurance payment is wasted except for the one right before you need insurance. But, the logic behind "many long-shot bets in parallel" is inherently more difficult to explain in the political arena, which is why I think VC may actually be better at some of these kinds of things.
- SolarNet 7y ago
  > I actually just mean DARPA NASA is the obvious next example. They pay for a lot of esoteric stuff that once made they don't actually end up needing - but having paid the startup costs - end up contributing to other fields. I think FEMA also does similar things though at a much less parallel (but a higher volume). Most of the "regulate and promote an industry" (a dumb idea for structuring them but I digress) agencies also do this. The NRC for example does a lot of research on storing and recycling nuclear waste, but also on new nuclear technologies. And other military agencies aren't worth leaving out. The army core of engineers pushes a lot of contractors to deliver unique solutions that end up getting resold, see the concrete barriers in Iraq.
  - killjoywashere 7y ago
    IARPA, DTRA, SCO, DIU. The DoD spends like 50B a year in research and development. NIH and CDMRP grant programs is several additional billion.
    - mattkrause 7y ago
      NIH is about 40 billion, and does a lot less development.
  - rossdavidh 7y ago
zeveb 7y ago
Well, TCP/IP was the military version: the international government version was the misbegotten OSI protocol stack (yes, before it was in irrelevant model on every IT certification exam, OSI was an actual collection of protocol standards), so governments can produce pretty nasty technologies too.
Gatsky 7y ago
The importance of government research is waning. Most academics vying for government funding are in various states of despair. The blow up in the size of universities and the number of PhDs etc has created a lot of competition with perverse incentives. In biotech, nothing interesting gets done without very early private investment (pharma mainly, some VCs).

by beat 7y ago

erobbins 7y ago

which tcp/ip? There would be 10, all with incomplete feature sets and poor reliability.

streb-lo 7y ago
"Here at bleh we've developed a revolutionary method for transmitting your TCP/IP packets on-chain using AI to perform network level flow control."
- outworlder 7y ago
  The system would probably store all packets in a block chain and routing would be based on a machine learning system.
  - jerf 7y ago
    "Our router can route an astonishing 2,000 packets per second! No other router can offer you this sort of performance! Blockchain. Go ahead. Ask our competitors if they can match this. You'll find their jaw drops and that they'll tell you that this level of performance shouldn't even be possible on commodity hardware! Our experts hand-tuned the multi-billion parameter neural nets our product uses. The competition wouldn't even dream of putting neural nets of this scale into their routers. That's how far ahead we are on this. You can't get this sort of performance from anyone else in the business!" Your Email: ( ) [ Yes, contact me and tell me MORE! ]
    - ignoramous 7y ago
      That made me chuckle. I cringe at exaggerated, buzz-wordy, vague sales-copy as much as the other person, but isn't it shown to work (by Apple et al)? I'd be interested if you or anyone else have examples of to-the-point landing pages / sales-copy with zero exaggeration and gimmicks. I liked the WhatsApp's back in the day [0], but they had a lot going for them and didn't need any extraordinary claims. MissiveApp [1] is another one that feels comfortable, to me. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090914114259/http://www.whatsapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090914114259/http://www.whatsa... [1] https://missiveapp.com https://missiveapp.com
  - aogl 7y ago
    Ahhh, don't tell all our secrets to the world! "It's not ready yet"
mef 7y ago
and all proprietary
paulddraper 7y ago
As it is, we've only had half that many versions, all incompatible and multiple in common use today with no end in sight.

heartbeats 7y ago

If you want a vision of the future, imagine JavaScript running on a cloud - forever.

mc32 7y ago

Or companies which can afford research fellows working on fundamental technologies with a very long view.

heartbeats 7y ago
Snark aside, that is a good point. Erlang is a nice language and it was developed as a pretty short-term project to fill a specific need. In fact, you might even argue it is a nice language because it was developed as a pretty short-term project to fill a specific need.

marcosdumay 7y ago

> Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding? It was. Several times. It was developed by a lot of large companies too. Nobody remember those, for obvious reasons, but people used to use them.

1996 7y ago
People like to forget. It helps pretend government research and alliances always produce the best outcomes. Your example may be a bit too old. Even novell netware, token ring etc won't ring a bell to many people. Try a simpler one instead: Do you guys remember about the various wireless standards before Wifi? The Orinocos and the Intel 2011 PCMCIA were IIRC among the first ones of the 802.11b - quickly eclipsing everything else. Also, what about DECT from about the same period? Some companies (mostly in Europe) tried to make an equivalent of Wifi, but using DECT modems. Some devices even made it to the market!
- beat 7y ago
  You're talking about the product of standards committees there, not startups. Standards committees are sort of "We're doing this so no one company owns/controls this basic tech, so we can all build new and interoperable products with the basic tech and make money!"
  - 1996 7y ago
    The beauty of standards is that there are so many to chose from! So it's not very different from startups. Eventually, somethings dominate whether it comes from a standard body or is "branded" as a standard ex-post.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > It helps pretend government research and alliances always produce the best outcomes. Well, at least on this case government research did produce the best outcome. By far. So far no comparison even makes sense, and people don't even remember there were other attempts.

paulddraper 7y ago

Is that true though? Nobody -- public, private, international -- has had any luck in fusion. I think that has more to do with the problem itself. But consider "world-changing" technologies like electric cars. The SV model doesn't see so terrible, does it? (Yes, I know about government grants. It's still a primarily private industry play.)

lmm 7y ago
I saw a controversy recently in an open-source project where someone who packaged up the implementation with a friendly GUI was making thousands a month on Patreon, while none of that was going to the people who actually implemented the hard technical parts. Credit for these technologies can seem similar - the government does all the basic research (through universities etc), funds the development of the tech through grants and the like, and Silicon Valley just does the customer-facing part and picks up all the credit.

rossdavidh 7y ago

There are a few examples of government agencies which can make many parallel bets, on the understanding that most will fail but a few may pay off big. But, by "a few examples", I actually just mean DARPA. I'm sure there are others, not many though. Politics does not work well with "most of these projects failed". It's too easy of a target. Anything that failed, is an easy target for a congressman to take aim at as being "wasted", because in some sense that particular investment was wasted, in the same sense that every insurance payment is wasted except for the one right before you need insurance. But, the logic behind "many long-shot bets in parallel" is inherently more difficult to explain in the political arena, which is why I think VC may actually be better at some of these kinds of things.

SolarNet 7y ago
> I actually just mean DARPA NASA is the obvious next example. They pay for a lot of esoteric stuff that once made they don't actually end up needing - but having paid the startup costs - end up contributing to other fields. I think FEMA also does similar things though at a much less parallel (but a higher volume). Most of the "regulate and promote an industry" (a dumb idea for structuring them but I digress) agencies also do this. The NRC for example does a lot of research on storing and recycling nuclear waste, but also on new nuclear technologies. And other military agencies aren't worth leaving out. The army core of engineers pushes a lot of contractors to deliver unique solutions that end up getting resold, see the concrete barriers in Iraq.
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  IARPA, DTRA, SCO, DIU. The DoD spends like 50B a year in research and development. NIH and CDMRP grant programs is several additional billion.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    NIH is about 40 billion, and does a lot less development.
- rossdavidh 7y ago

zeveb 7y ago

Well, TCP/IP was the military version: the international government version was the misbegotten OSI protocol stack (yes, before it was in irrelevant model on every IT certification exam, OSI was an actual collection of protocol standards), so governments can produce pretty nasty technologies too.

Gatsky 7y ago

The importance of government research is waning. Most academics vying for government funding are in various states of despair. The blow up in the size of universities and the number of PhDs etc has created a lot of competition with perverse incentives. In biotech, nothing interesting gets done without very early private investment (pharma mainly, some VCs).