roosterdawn

7 ms·

1.
by roosterdawn 6y ago
> does it mean that if you sell something people actually want, literally nothing else matters about your intelligence, education, character, background, or anything at all You got it. As always, it's the gross margins. Cocaine has
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Wow, thanks for the scoop! Is there anywhere interested readers can read more about Dave and Chamath's tenure at FB, particularly the latter and the issues you pointed out?
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Great points. I think your points are especially salient given GP's points earlier above: > There's a whole real-life social network out there, and they definitely aren't inviting the programmers. Is that really the case?
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I think that clarifies your viewpoint considerably. If you don't mind me asking, could you elaborate on the kinds of opportunities that money doesn't buy? And furthermore, to what extent have yo
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
> there's a family of careers were wealth is more a consequence of status and influence than the reverse That's I think where I disagree. I would say that wealth is almost always a consequence of status and influence than the r
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
I'm not sure I agree. Either you are conflating vocation, field of academic study, political power, socioeconomic class and status, or things are just different in the UK. Here in the US, you rarely study computer science to become a c
7.
by roosterdawn 6y ago
I (do not) look forward to seeing the results of "failing fast" here. The conspiracy theorists are convinced that this is how we got to COVID19 in the first place, and while I'm not really convinced there, I really do not enj
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
> There is value in all 3 approaches but don't make the mistake of thinking they're all the same. I respectfully disagree, and would gladly take the counterpoint to that argument. You will find the intersection of the three ins
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
> None of ecosystem, long term ownership, iteration, or codebases at scale are relevant to a foundational language (i.e. one that is being taught in order to teach the concepts of programming.) I cannot agree with this. Embedded in this
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
All I see is a list of complaints about warts that Python has, and no real foundational reasons for or against using Python, such as the ecosystem, long term cost of ownership, ease of iteration, or ability to manage a codebase at scale. I
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
What you are demonstrating is one of many ironies that one can see in academic writing. Here, the writing criticizes the rise of Veblenian entrepreneurship and the fall of innovation entrepreneurship, but ironically, this kind of a paper co
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Yup, you nailed it. Most companies are content to let this kind of anchoring and psychological inertia let them lose out on capitalizing on their investments, but let's remember that this isn't necessarily unintentional. Companies
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
One way to rephrase your question would be to take a look at the sum total of commodities markets, specifically the subset that includes natural resources (specifically precious metals) mineable on mars. How much of that market is bottlenec
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
A perennial classic. Still pertinent after nearly twenty years.
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Great, practical advice for companies of that size. We can debate about whether it's unfortunate that it's necessary (I'd tend to agree that it is), but learning how to do this is the basic block and tackling required to get
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Certainly, wealth inequality is on the rise, and I think you accurately sum up some of the forces that draw folks towards the city. Cities are places of deterritorialization -- not for nothing, it seems like every city has disdain for gentr
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think your subtle distinction between the market and ecosystem is key here because they don't fully map 1 to 1. And you're correct that the market is downstream from the ecosystem itself. But wit
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
> Our culture has shifted further toward valuing the individual over the group Further from where? For better or worse, America has always been a deeply individualist country. Is it maybe the case that now the less savory consequences of
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
> it displaces "human worth" onto _individual_ fertility and offspring I think the word "worth" could be an anthropomorphization. I read the concept through the lens of survivability. Hypothetically, a societal identi
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Sadly, this feels intuitively correct. I've heard a formalization of the prisoner's dilemma called the IQ shredder [1]. Whether it's a reach or not is something I am still debating internally. At the very least, I do sense th
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Love the idea. Churn reduction is one of those unsexy parts of the funnel (much like cart abandonment) that has a huge ROI but is traditionally neglected because it's not as visible as top of funnel work. Of course, it's all part
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Have you ever dealt with a cartel in real life? The idea that you can apply a "hacker" solution or "black hat" the cartel itself is naive. The whole point of any cartel (legal or otherwise) is to control and punish any a
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
> Does that mean the US needs needs to be authoritarian now too? No thanks. I think that the concern you touched upon is essentially the lose-lose quagmire that we as a country arrived at during the onset of the cold war, a war that I be
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
You raise an interesting point, but I wonder if the point is less that people trust the brand than they _distrust_ the government. Do you think it might be possible that however much people distrust corporations, they at least trust the cor
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Counterpoint: the better you get at copying, the faster you accelerate your ascent towards being exceptional. Copying is generally the beginning, not the end. By this anti-copying logic, practicing scales on an instrument shouldn't hav
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
I don't know if this was intended to dissuade me or other readers, but you've only piqued my interest even further! If it is cynical and "toxic", is that only because it reflects the true nature of the thing it discusses
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Love this thread from your end. I think you're speaking some really hard truths that folk don't want to hear. Because of the way big organizations work, it's true to politics is a huge part of what the vocation entails. I&#x2
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
I love this point and I've repeated it so often over the years to friends and colleagues who end up at this point. A good forcing function is to always ask, when you're getting a new tool, whether you've exhausted the capabil
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
> actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here. Not that things cannot be significantly improved or that I'm not extremely disappointed with our level of political executive
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by roosterdawn 6y ago
Bingo. Checks and balances.

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