What is the "top"? "Top" is where you live off capital gains, meaning - in the broadest sense, someone else is working for you all the time. That's not something I'd aspire to. That's just plain lazy.
In some way, the "hard working elite" is the "laziest class" at the same time.
I do not wish for some utopian work world - I'd only wish we would not expect from others what we would not want for ourselves. And if the rich would never work for someone else, I'd be happy if they would not expect anyone to work for them.
Corrupt police men in Indian sprawls know this for a long time. You cannot extract lots from a few rich drivers (in addition, you may face personal consequences as well).
The best spots are where you have a many middle class to lower class drivers, who need to be somewhere quickly, and will pay up. Smaller amounts, but continuously.
VW ships 3M cars per year, let's say a car is used 1h per day. Given all cars are used in this subscription model, we look at $765M MRR, or almost $10B per year, which is already about 10% of their current revenue.
Given that autonomous vehicles do not suck time out of the user's budget, they might even be used more. At 3h/day, we already at $30B yearly revenue - almost half of what they made in 2020.
And software has marginal costs, so once you got over the investment (they recruit developers extremely heavily in Germany right now), you are looking at a more than comfortable income stream.
Not sure about you, but I literally see the level of dopamine floating on the VW management floors right now.
That said, I hope I never need a personal car in my life.
Sometimes I wonder what was wrong with a mostly static pages in the first place. Even http://mail.google.com/mail/h/ works fine, even in a slower browser - and I would say 80% of the sites today are less complex than Gmail.
I maintain OS projects and my stance is simple: I'll fix thing, that are broken - mostly because I want things to work. I won't add new features for you, unless I really see the appeal. If you come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time to review, but even for that there is no guarantee.
The same limits I impose on the community I fully expect to follow when working with any OS project. Period.
Remember, in that "other world", we would have to pay for each and every little proprietary piece of sh* code. The "new world" will not be built by profit-maximizing value-extractors, and if you think it will, then I wish you a happy burnout.
Also remember, that for millions of people the notion of giving away something valuable for free is totally absent. They literally fail to comprehend. They are happy to sell the same thing many times over.
In my book, OS software developers are living in the future, today and a lot of the friction comes from a world, that just works by a totally different set of rules.
My personality seem not to allow me to just do one thing. Even today, I have a couple of jobs and I enjoy the variety of challenges. It's also risk management - basically any of my jobs could fail and it would not really affect me, which allows me to have a certain distance to each of the activities as well.
I have not implied that Google tried to be evil. It was just a very interesting observation (which I unfortunately did not experiment around longer, by removing ads again, etc.).
Risk is too high for such things to be decided, but maybe someone buried a change in the second decimal place in an to "ad-fraud" prevention subsystem, which required a minimum amount of traffic or some other non-voluntary things like that.
Even more: impenetrable deep learning models trained to maximize ad revenue - imagine pagerank and availability of ads on the site are two of the N features, what would the optimizer suggest you do?
I was under the impression that private equity was mainly a vehicle for the rich to get richer. Serious question: Do companies have no choice but to go this route or why are they doing this?
I experienced parts of CS academia and it was off-putting to say the least. Full of mediocre people who understood "the system" - not that much different from a direct-marketing operation, or a mafia - all while pestering CS professionals working in the weeds with their crazy-talk. Creating papers out of things, my colleagues and I talk while having a coffee. I'm not joking, intelligent guys get high on their own supply and will sell you ideas, that never gonna fly in the real-world with a straight face - and they will try it over and over again. It's embarassing.
Personally, I'm trying out the route of getting the resources myself to do my research, much more work - but at least sane work with a level of independence that I feel is necessary to see things through.
I read a Blockchain book from O'Reilly in 2015, when it came out and it left me with the distinct impression that this "technology" is vaporous. It could do anything, yet, almost no examples to try out, let alone real-world successes.
Over time I witnessed many "new" things, and the ones which stick typically have a specific aura to them, like a 10x simplification, or speedup or reduction in "noise". These things are really rare; most things are incremental and that's good, too.
Blockchain did not seemed to have any of that.
PS. Merkle trees are super interesting and I use them daily (in git) - so all the tech ideas are certainly worth considering, it's just that they are not fit for the advertised purpose plus it has gotten an enormous drag on resources, for nothing.
PPS. I typically have an "tech instinct" to see new things, but I currently cannot really see anything that looks like a major tech shifts from the past. ML is incremental and despite its grande successes is mostly applied by the surveillance industry, which makes it much less attractive. Cloud seems much more profound and the whole apification of the world transformation - although I do not like the centralization, even if it is more economical. In general, the real revolutionary tool or technology does not need to sell itself, it is picked up by the weird and intelligent first, then trickles down to the masses (also: tech can be great w/o mainstream adoption, too - it just not a revolution then).
PPPS: Wild speculation: With 5G, everyone with a phone could host their business directly on their device, instead on other peoples servers. When phones hit a TB in storage, you can run your socnet with your friends - and you probably will, because mainstream money will have moved to something much more immersive, addictive, profitable like glasses, vr, ar.
The smarter tool (i.e. AI) mega-trend will continue and there is a lot to automate across the globe. This will sprawl into biotech (drug discovery) and energy management.
In some way, the "hard working elite" is the "laziest class" at the same time.
I do not wish for some utopian work world - I'd only wish we would not expect from others what we would not want for ourselves. And if the rich would never work for someone else, I'd be happy if they would not expect anyone to work for them.