*int13 Labs. (stealth)
*Working on Crayfish, a framework for small teams/solo devs.
*Crypto skeptic.
*Selective omnivore.
*Cowboy codin' since 1991.
*French.
Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong.
He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.
Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
But from the few interactions I had with him I would say he is quite abrasive, stubborn and probably somewhat on the spectrum.
But there is a special kind of unpleasantness in writing/debugging netcode for large projects, I don't think you can be agreeable and still you your job correctly.
The company was successful, had one of the most prestigious brand in the game industry, was early enough to capitalize on the rise of PC gaming, incredible talents and tech.
Yet it didn't transform into a Blizzard or Epic.
And it seems that both the early success and stall were the responsibility of one very talented but somewhat obtuse nerd.
I think the rationale is that they are already using typical car factory automation, but they see a huge potential market for general purpose robotics in the coming decades, they don't need the humanoids, they are simply dogfooding a future product.
I think this is smart and not very risky. Tesla is playing a similar game with Optimus, for now Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is at least 5 years ahead.
If you own a factory, what you see is a big box with input and output, human labor is just an annoying variable, removing it won't turn the entire thing "free".
The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.
Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.
I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.
The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.
And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.
This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.
But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.
The issue with billionaires is that some of them got insanely rich while being net negative from a societal perspective.
The most famous ones ended-up in prison (Sam Bankman Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Jeffrey Epstein, Bernie Madoff) but anyone with a basic grasp of statistics and criminal behavior know that many others will escape the justice system forever.
It does not mean that all billionaires are bad, the criminals are not the majority, but there are enough criminals to justify skepticism and scrutiny.
twitter: @stephc_int13