I agree, it's an interesting distortion to the traditional technology feedback loop.
I would expect someone who "strikes gold" like this in a solo endeaver to raise money, start a company, hire a team. Then they have to solve the always challenging problem of how to monetize an open-source tool. Look at a company like Docker, they've been successful but they didn't capture more than a small fraction of the commercial revenue that the entire industry has paid to host the product they developed and maintain. Their peak valuation was over a billion dollars, but who knows by the time all is said and done what they'll be worth when they sell or IPO.
So if you invent something that is transformative to the industry you might work really hard for a decade and if you're lucky the company is worth $500M, if you can hang onto 20% of the company maybe it's worth $100M.
Or, you skip the decade in the trenches and get acqui-hired by a frontier lab who allegedly give out $100M signing bonuses to top talent. No idea if he got a comparable offer to a top researcher, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. Even a $10M package to skip a decade of risky & grueling work if all you really want to do is see the product succeed is a great trade.
It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps.
Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.
So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.
This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. It was great and we got things like the Netflix Prize and all sorts of content ranking improvements, better CDN platforms, lower latency and less buffering, more content upgraded to HD and 4K. Plus some annoying but clearly effective practices like auto-play of trailers and unrelated shows.
Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.
> I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content
This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.
I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work.
What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem.
There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something.
I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way.
Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.
I think the author invited this though. Half the article is a well thought out discussion of important problems. There is some nuanced thinking about markets and capitalism that addressed both the pros and cons.
But the article started and ended with completely unsupported claims about how the world is going to hell and "we all feel it".
The commenter you're responding to merely pointed out that, no we don't all feel it, most people actually have things very good these days. And that doesn't mean there aren't still major issues that we should be working hard on.
> Also, doing burnouts and donuts on public streets sounds fun but it leaves the road covered in tire rubber and I imagine it smells awful while they’re doing it.
I don't get why you've left out probably the most legitimate criticism of the practice, that it's quite dangerous. I don't know much about Austin, but in SF and Oakland people are killed fairly often in side shows, and often it's innocent bystanders.
At the risk of being cast into your uncool categorization... it sounds like maybe you just have your own personal preferences like everyone else in the world? I'm not really seeing much of a pattern in the things you like and don't like here - sitting on your phone not socializing is uncool, and so is throwing trash on the ground and stealing shopping carts. But playing loud music that disturbs the neighbors and doing dangerous car stunts on public streets is cool.
Hey, I hope you find the like-minded community that you're looking for. But maybe consider that you could still be yourself without totally writing off everyone who isn't just like you as irredeemably uncool and telling them to pound salt?
Eh, I feel the opposite. My Bose headphones are starting to wear out, and have always been kind of finicky in pairing and getting disconnected. It's worth it to me to pay the $200 more to get newer headphones that in all likelihood sound noticeably better, have spatial audio, and hopefully have no trouble connecting to and switching between Apple devices.
The one thing holding me back actually is, based on the reaction I'm seeing so far, wondering if there will be a negative stigma to these or if they'll attract a lot of attention. Like the google glass years ago where everyone noticed it immediately and thought you were a douchebag for wearing it.
Yeah you can also get a TV for under $400. You could get a decent hotel for the weekend in many places for under $400 all-in! You could adopt a puppy, or fall in love, for free. Why would anybody buy these headphones instead??!
Bose requires using their mobile app that is always very slow to open and sync and full of useless bloated features, and for whatever reason they've decided nobody should ever have more than 2 devices as a firm rule. So you want to use them with a work computer, home computer, and phone? Gotta spend 20 seconds opening the shitty app all the time and fiddling with which two are the currently connected devices.
And then on top of that, even when exactly 2 devices are connected they frequently steal focus from each other (which may be MacOS behaving badly rather than the fault of Bose, but the end result is that I'm often connected to the wrong thing and my sound isn't working).
If you think this list of high-end headphones, many of them even open-backed, are good alternatives to wireless, noise canceling headphones, then I can't really relate.
One is for sitting alone in a quiet room listening to music, the other is for travel, work, commuting, etc. in noisy environments where you still want decent sound quality.
The only real alternatives to these new Airpods are things like the Bose QC3 and similar Sony model, and based on the pricing I would say Apple is confident theirs sound significantly better.
It uses a lightning cable??! You’ve gotta be kidding me. So if you buy these and then buy the new iPhone rumored for next September your $550, less than a year old high-tech headphones will need to charge with a deprecated, proprietary cable that you’ll have to keep around just for them.
Having paid $350 for Bose QC3 headphones 4 years ago, that I use every day but sometimes have to fight with when e.g. my MacBook Pro keeps trying to steal focus even though i shut it and am trying to use the headphones with my phone now, etc. I completely agree. Paying a bit more for something that just works as well as my airpods do, assuming that this delivers, is totally worth it.
On top of that, I expect the sound quality will be a big step up, and the spatial audio might be really cool.
These are in a completely different category than pro audio headphones, they are wireless with active noise cancellation.
As someone that owns a couple of the high end models you mention, and uses my Bose qc3 headphones every day, if you don’t get why that’s a difference all I can say is I highly recommend trying it. If you don’t want to pay $550, then get the Bose or Sony equivalents.
All the audio quality in the world doesn’t do you much good walking down a noisy street, on a plane, or even sitting in a noisy open office. I’ll happily take pretty good sound + wireless and noise canceling over great sound in these environments.
What I’m guessing Apple is trying to sell based on this price point is sound on the same level of the high end models you mention, with the convenience of wireless noise canceling, plus the (gimmick?) of spatial audio. I’m very curious to try them at some point to see if they deliver.
I guess it might surprise you to learn that China is a big place capable of manufacturing both high quality and cheaper, low quality products,
There’s a really interesting Netflix documentary American Factory that depicts one particular example, and puts on display a lot of the complicated factors you’re talking about. But the interesting thing is after like 2 years of training and tweaking processes, the American location of this auto glass factory just can’t for the life of them produce a product as high quality as the Chinese factory.
See also: most other Apple products, for more examples of high quality things manufactured in China.
Also, call me crazy but why should I care about random Midwestern Americans any more than random Chinese people I’ve never met? Globalization has raised an astounding number of people in China out of poverty in the past 20 years which is an amazing feat.
Not wanting to support the country because of the governments human rights abuses is totally fair, but you seem to be mixing that in as just one reason among all the other protectionist rhetoric.
Lastly, to pretend that companies are giant infinite pools of money that are choosing to hold out on everyone is just silly. If they were to manufacture things in more expensive places, then you’d be looking at $700 headphones instead of $550. If you’d rather support other companies, then great, do that! That’s the beauty of having so many choices.
Have you used Bluetooth headphones this decade? And airpods in particular? There’s not really any problem with audio quality they sound pretty much indistinguishable from wired headphones in real world use (sure if you’re sitting alone in a quiet room with an audiophile setup listening to FLAC files because 320kbps mp3s aren’t high quality enough, then you may want something else).
Do you know of any remote-first tech company that pays Bay Area salaries regardless of location?
I haven’t heard of one, and I would think this would be a huge selling point so anyone doing it would want to advertise it to engineers.
On the other hand there are plenty of companies transparent about their policy to match pay to cost of living, for instance gitlab publishes their conversion percentages for different cities. Many places in the US they pay ~60% of Bay Area.
Uber & Lyft are just about as perfect an example as I can think of, of the fact that wealth isn't zero sum. You seem to be implying that it is.
How in the world could you argue that they didn't create markets or job opportunities? There are probably 10x more uber/lyft drivers in almost every city in the US than there ever were taxi drivers. People simply take more trips, or have someone else drive them when they would have previously driven themselves, now that Uber & Lyft are so prevalent. People order delivery food from restaurants more often instead of cooking for themselves. This is new money added into the economy, yes a big slice goes to the corporations, but only ~30%, the rest goes directly to drivers for whom this is a newly available source of income. Apparently 80% of drivers do it part time as an additional source of income, which they wouldn't have a way to generate otherwise.
You seem to fit very cleanly into the category I just mentioned above, you're so angry about some perceived injustice of Uber & Lyft merely existing, that you want them to be punished more than you care about any other part of this outcome. And this is not a slavery ring, nobody is being exploited, so you should take a deep breath about that too. In polls drivers overwhelmingly express a preference to remain independent contractors rather than become full-time.
Sure? I'm not particularly familiar with this law, but I generally agree patents should have relatively modest limits.
Not sure how this applies to the current conversation though, of all the things that Uber and Lyft are commonly accused of I don't think protectionist patent enforcement is among them?
I would expect someone who "strikes gold" like this in a solo endeaver to raise money, start a company, hire a team. Then they have to solve the always challenging problem of how to monetize an open-source tool. Look at a company like Docker, they've been successful but they didn't capture more than a small fraction of the commercial revenue that the entire industry has paid to host the product they developed and maintain. Their peak valuation was over a billion dollars, but who knows by the time all is said and done what they'll be worth when they sell or IPO.
So if you invent something that is transformative to the industry you might work really hard for a decade and if you're lucky the company is worth $500M, if you can hang onto 20% of the company maybe it's worth $100M.
Or, you skip the decade in the trenches and get acqui-hired by a frontier lab who allegedly give out $100M signing bonuses to top talent. No idea if he got a comparable offer to a top researcher, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. Even a $10M package to skip a decade of risky & grueling work if all you really want to do is see the product succeed is a great trade.