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I would strongly disagree with the idea that 'low-hanging fruit' is gone.
> But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.
Two things; First those skills are more useful than you can imagine when you're using commoditized things to do something new and second, it isn't "low hanging fruit to recreate something you can buy anywhere.
If you look at today's software (as an example) we have programs that waste the crap out of resources. Is making them more efficient a win? Yes if you can re-purpose the resources you freed up for other things. I've thought long and hard about things people use "computers" and the "internet" for today that could be built more securely on simpler hardware with ironclad privacy guarantees and more utility. That is a low hanging fruit.
What I'm hearing when I reading your comment is that you feel that all the value has been sucked out of the market and there isn't anything left. And in that I think you'll find that enshittification has polluted the value so much that new opportunities have opened up for unpolluted value. There are many things that are currently "solved" with an existing and and over priced solution which creates opportunities to re-imagine the solution with something less expensive and come in underneath the market. The IBM PC/AT completely displaced minicomputers at small to medium businesses, you can build a PC/AT equivalent today for $6, not $6,000.
The thing here is that 'technology' isn't the same thing as 'value.' Just like knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. As the author in the linked article writes, it doesn't take a whole lot to stand up a manufacturing line to make a new thing these days, and if that thing has value because it solves a problem, then people will pay to enjoy that value. And to pair that with the earlier metaphor, if you wanted to start a local newspaper (high value) you could with a printing press, some newsprint, and a journalist or two. But without the experience of how newspapers are valuable to their readers, you might be unsuccessful even though you know everything you need to know about writing news stories and printing them.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here, yes there are lots of things going on, and it can seem hopeless, but it isn't. And if you do want to design a high performance CPU you can get a kick ass FPGA to host it for cheap. Variants on RISC-V are pretty impressive and you can make a new one and license it to a chip fab if you choose to. This is WCH's entire business. Don't worry about being the next Tesla or Edison, neither of them knew they were going to be the Tesla or Edison we know today. They were both just trying to create solutions to problems. Look for the problems, think about ways to solve them, and then talk to people who live with those problems day in and day out and see what it might be worth to them to have that problem solved. People love to complain in my experience :-).
I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work. But I've always augmented that with "okay and this is how we'd make something like that." As a result my kids, now adults, always start with the mindset of "Somebody made this, so I could too if I had to." and that really unlimits the kinds of self constraints people put on themselves. When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. And when I see someone building tools out of the abundance of capabilities that are out there I say, "Yup, they get it." 3D printing, inexpensive miniature milling machines and lathes, libraries full of books about making stuff. Its all doable, you don't have to buy it from a store and the one you make yourself will work exactly the way you want it to.
> What Google makes is irrelevant to the content producer.
Is it though? Let's say I weave a basket out of reeds I've spent the weekend picking from the shores of a local creek. I take the basket to a guy who pays me $20 for it. Then that same guy takes it to a swap meet that he runs in town and sells it for $200.
That's just market economics, until you try to set up your own smaller swap meet on the route to this guys market and sell your baskets there, and this guy calls the police and has them shut down your "illegal swap meet." So you go to city hall for a permit and they say, "We don't sell permits unless you can prove that at least 1,000 people will go to your swap meet and every week you'll have at least 10 new products to show." See where I'm going with that?
Asymmetric markets are ones where a single individual or small group of individuals can exercise control over the entire operation of the market. You can think of then as nascent monopolies or perhaps price fixing cartels. In the US, after experiencing the Great Depression, as a result of unregulated markets, the US made it government policy to regulate market abuses as no single participant (or even a set of participants) could hope to compete with the monopoly or cartel.
Information markets, or non-real property markets like video content, did an end run around controls in an effort to capture the value that is associated with a product you can manufacture instances of for pennies, but sell for dollars. Games, Office processing suites, Videos, Musical recordings, can all be "sold" for 100 to 1000x the cost to produce them. It is an area that is under studied in my opinion.
This is one of my all time favorite blog posts. Why? Because it strikes at something that is both true, and a huge trap for smart people. Specifically, people who are experts in one discipline will often imagine that something in some other discipline is "pretty straight forward." And yet, my experience is that it never is. But that doesn't stop smart people from promising something that turns out to be waaaaaay harder to do than they imagined it could be.
That's fair, Google admitted in the DoJ trial where it was convicted of being a monopolist that the revenues that it paid out were roughly 10% of the revenues it collected. If you have fewer than a requisite number of subscribers they keep 100% of the monetization proceeds. I was simply struck by the parallels between the way YouTube has grown up and how the whole movie industry grew up.
Do you ever think about the fact that if you're making $500 - $1000 per video on average that means Google is making $5000 - $10,000 on each of your videos on average? I mean its working for you, and that's great. I am a student of information asymmetric markets and the whole 'Ad supported' business that Google runs on all of its properties is perhaps the largest one in the current time frame.
The point being that building a production company to produce videos is a known thing, Peertube is a distribution network, and historically this is a remarkable mirror of 'independent' theaters and 'studio owned' theaters. It was a characteristic of that time that the big studios would use their monoply power to force small studios to give them their work at a discount that allowed the studio to get most of the income. They made it just enough that the small studios didn't feel motivated to build a competitive system.
When I read your comment it struck me that perhaps "$500 - $1000 average per video" was the number Google has determined to be 'just enough'.
Looks like someone is running one of the LLM models and publishing the results. It looks that way because there is a really wide mix from things that are silly "replace system binaries to run arbitrary code!" to things that could be legit. That is kind of par for the course when you ask an LLM to 'find an exploit and write a PoC' kind of prompt. Presumably if you train something on the last 15 years of Metasploit[1] reports it can find the same bugs that people have written into new code.
Not informational but I kept reading that as 'MicroVMS' which would be a scaled down version of the DEC VMS operating system?!? And I was trying to figure out if they had added containers or something to it.
This is where my head is on docks. When your connected to enhanced infrastructure (like your home lab) sure, but when you're checked into the Embassy Suites? Not particularly useful :-).
That said, I'm kind of sad that Framework and others have generally opted to let "third party USB-C docks" be the docking solution. I miss the days when my Thinkpad dropped onto its docking station with a purpose build bottom connector and seamlessly became a desktop/deskside type computer that was wired into my desk setup. Sadly I think that vision of docking died with the Thinkpad's sale to Lenovo.
I chuckled at 10G wired ethernet on a laptop. I mean in a docking station? Sure that seems reasonable. But fun none the less.
I appreciate the USB-C nature of the Framework's expansion ports, it does make real the entire reason that USB was created in the first place, hot plug slots. Still, I (and others) pointed out to Intel early on that using Ethernet with a specific packet type would be cheaper and just as fast (which the ATA over Ethernet folks proved), but then you wouldn't get the 'certification tax' that the USB consortium extracts. :-).
Cynicism aside, the design issues suggest that it might make sense in future laptops to have heat spreaders around the plug in port, although that makes things thicker and people obsess over thinness.
Its a reasonable extension. At some point if you discover that you are aiding or abetting the harm of others you have to ask yourself what kind of person you are. That said, I get that "but I need a job!" is a powerful thing and it takes someone with a strong sense of personal integrity to leave. A good friend of mine quit their game developer gig because the product manager and management were more interested in addictive behaviors and reselling eyeballs than they were in game development. But they also knew that was probably the last paying gig they were going to have in the 'games' business because it had gone from people making great games, to things on a phone/browser pulling you down.
So yeah, it is going to test you and you might come up short. I don't judge people who stay when they know, but I do grieve for the damage they do to their souls when they see themselves as someone they no longer recognize.
As someone who 'grew up' my career in Silicon Valley my first exposure to this sort of shenanigans was during the dot com bubble, where general partners at newish VC firms were fleecing limited partners (GP's got a salary to 'manage' the fund, LP's were the source of money for the funds.) They would tell the LPs well only one in ten is a real banger, looks like the fund you invested in wasn't a winner.
It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again."
The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it.
But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.
Formerly VP of Engineering at Blekko Inc (search engine) blekko.com, formerly part of the Watson group at IBM.
Influences: Sun, Startups, NetApp, Google Interests: Systems, Distributed Systems, really hairy convoluted inter-dependent systems. Hobbies: Robots, Embedded control, Music, Automata.
Feel free to contact me at my gmail address: [email protected]
Important: If you are looking at this profile because you thought something I posted was Wrong, dismissive, disrespectful, douchebaggish, what have you, I would really like to hear from you so that I could understand how you got that impression. I won't get mad, I won't "retaliate" I just want to hear what you have to say. It is important to me to communicate clearly and if something I said struck you that way then I failed and I would like to correct it.
Note: Any comments on this site attributed to me are my opinions and not those of any current, past, or future employer. Consider yourself so notified.