Cash, as in free cash flow. Maybe not the best usage of the term, but better than revenue. And secret in that people in this niche don’t advertise the opportunity as new competition would cut into profits.
I’m amused that the 100x dev caught more flack than a likely solo $B bootstrap. In my view developer ability follows the Pareto distribution.
I was born to program and have done it all my life and it’s all I do. I’ve been formally trained and have worked at world leading research institutions. I’ve always been considered a bit of a freak by my peers.
I currently have two direct competitors, both have 100s of developers and are staffed by thousands. Despite starting after them I was able to ship a key feature long before them.
Lol, this is me, a 100x dev, screwed over by big co employer. Decide to go solo and slowly build a company to compete with them. Started part time 12 years ago. I think I could easily hit $1B valuation within 10 years. It is already super profitable and still growing. Eventually I’ll cost the competitors so much business that it’ll be much cheaper for them to buy me out for $Bs. If not it’ll still throw off $Ms in cash per year.
AFAIK the Afghan commanders stole their soldiers pay so the soldiers sold their weapons to the Taliban. The Taliban taking it back over seems like a natural consequence.
US companies are now being hoisted by their own petard.
There are not that many exploitable smart people left, even internationally. In my applied research niche they already hired internationally and the ability was rare, being high functioning autistic was basically a prerequisite. Supply dried up because these people have better options now; start ups, finance, crypto, independent scientists, more promising companies in their home countries.
It’s much easier for me to change companies than for companies to change. I’ve been remote for 7 years and will retire long before going back to an office.
Some tech jobs are only available in a handful of companies that were a part of the cartel. Some of us took the bet that a big investment in education in one of these specialties would pay off. The cartel effectively suppressed the pay off. Now these companies are complaining that the supply of specialists has dried up.
I became known as a conspiracy theorist amount my friends when I told them about this. A week later the Snowden revelations came out and yet somehow I’m still the conspiracy theorist.
It occurred in both Windows and Ubuntu. In Windows “Never” wasn’t an option for Sleep (edit; I forget if it wasn’t an option or selecting it didn’t work), in Ubuntu the usual disable sleep commands didn’t work. Someone in the Ubuntu forums suggested there was a recent power management change due to EU reg and the code around it was freshly buggy. I spent a day on it before cutting my losses.
Years ago I bought a tiny hockey puck sized computer to act as an internal web server. AFAIK there seemed to be no way for me to prevent it from going to sleep, I presume it was due to a similar regulation. This one from the EU. Had to throw the thing out.
I’m not looking forward to having to fight hardware / software locks on my computer that make it go to sleep all the time.
The SFO has a habit of not finding sufficient evidence, I wouldn’t read too much into that other than perhaps they too are incompetent. In my view they are also likely corrupt as well.
AFAIK it was good old fashioned accounting fraud. Losses booked as marketing expenses, lifetime revenue of contracts booked immediately, bundling overpriced software with underpriced hardware to change the revenue mix to get better valuation multiples. The fact that such blatant fraud could be missed for so long is an indictment of everyone involved.
The Serious Fraud Office has corruption problems; so I wouldn’t expect much justice out of them at all.
Mike Lynch is the bad guy in this. Autonomy was an intentional fraud that was offloaded into HP - with the help of Goldman Sachs and Meg Whitman (if my memory serves correctly.) The fraud was well known in the small Cambridge tech community as their former workers warned others about it. It’s hard to overstate the effect Autonomy had on the UK tech scene. It split my former peers along ethical lines.
As bad as US justice is; in this case it may still be better than the UK.
A theory that I ascribe to is that Long Covid is viral induced CFS/ME. As someone with hEDS I've battled CFS/ME for most of my life. I don't want to celebrate too soon but in the last few weeks do I feel like I have now won the battle. I just started using a combination of very powerful but targeted drugs. I feel 110% and no longer get Post Exertion Malease (PEM) which is a major indicator of CFS/ME.
I take Low Dose Naltrexone, Testosterone Cypionate, BPC-157, TB-500, Mod GRF, Ipamorelin, Thyroxine (T4), and Triiodothyronine (T3). I take a ton of vitamins but the effective ones seem to be the megadoses of B1 and B3. I also take NMN for NAD+ deficiency but I'm not sure if that is doing anything. I eat a low carb diet and take cold showers and work out every other day.
Low Dose Naltrexone is great for brain fog and I've been taking it for 5 years.
The Test, hGH peptides, and T3/T4 is probably responsible for the bulk of my improvement. I've only been taking them for a few weeks and it's night and day difference.
I'm not saying this is for everyone but it definitely worked for me so it may help others looking for ideas.
Megadose B3 2000mg per day does seem to be commonly effective. The theory is NAD+. Gives me a headache so an aspirin is needed as well but was one of the first treatments that pulled me out of fatigue.
And I think it’s weird when people assume that nature would conform to morality. That would be convenient and I’m suspicious of convenience.
It’s a proposed causation hence the ‘may’ qualifier. I’m suggesting people should check it out further. They may be surprised.
Also, it has huge implications beyond employment. My particular RCCX mutations yield hEDS which I can now treat. I wish I would have known 20 years ago. That’s one of many treatable genetic disorders that people barely know about.
It would also mean burnout is curable, so instead of not hiring people susceptible to burnout we can instead cure it for everyone.