> As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park.

Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

I suppose it shouldn't be terribly surprising as being successful requires hard work & a good idea. But it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.

People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do anything!" meanwhile millions of people with much more than that fritter it away on nothing, even if they are trying not to. It takes something more to be Bezos.

Whereas the proverbial Bezos will think about the grit and determination it took to march for decades through treacherous financial and political swamps, and think "would I have let a lack of an initial 300k stop me from even starting? Would I have failed to secure the capital and cooperation without that seed? Given the heroics I've pulled over the years? Hell no, that wouldn't have stopped me."

But here's the part that most people misunderstand. The 300k is a small advantage, it might have made a difference, and some cases might make THE difference, but it's only the most concrete, obvious advantage. The real thing is like this:

In my earliest memories I was pretty poor, but also in those memories both my parents were going to university, while my dad was packing fiberglass at a factory. Then they graduated and he got a job and we became suburban middle class, my dad staying at his big corporation for the rest of his life, while my mom more or less stayed at home although she went back to school and ended up about half way through a PhD program. I would think about what career I wanted as a child, and what school I might go to, that sort of thing.

Fast forward to my first wife who I met when I was 17. She is self described "british ghetto trash," and she emigrated because she couldn't escape her accent, in a phrase. She taught me what I didn't know about privilege, at a time before that was a term anyone was using for this purpose. The reality she knew in the council housing (ie projects) where she grew up was that her dad was a scam artist flake who floated in and out of her life without regard for the many promises he made, and whenever he pulled off a big one he'd show up and splash a little cash around before running off again. He was far from ashamed, he was a "2 types of people in this world!" type scammer. Her mom wasn't much better, basically scamming the government for benefits, working whatever angle she could but never actually "working working."

My ex never thought about careers or schools or anything. She thought about what scam she could pull to make it to next month. It was a weird series of events that brought her across the pond, and into university and beyond.

That's what Bezos had that my ex didn't have. He thought he belonged inside society, he thought he could do things and that people would let him. He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously. The same for her but opposite, the idea of participating in society at all, never mind changing it was utterly foreign to her experience.

I think it was crushingly more important than the 300k in terms of pivotal advantages. It sucks to start with bad cards, but it's much tougher to not be in the game in the first place.

I’ve seen it in startups too. Some founders take bold risks because they know, consciously or not, that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll be fine. Others carry the weight of “I can’t afford to screw this up,” and that changes how they operate. Even if they’re equally capable, the emotional cost of risk is just higher when you don’t have that built-in safety net.

And from the outside, those differences are invisible. Both people might succeed, but one was playing on easy mode and didn’t know it. The other had to brute-force their way through every step. That gap is real, and we don’t talk about it enough.

Upbringing, background, mindset, social safety nets (eg knowing that if you fail, you’ll still be fine) — these things are huge and make a huge difference.

But 300k then is about 650k today, and just the time this would buy me alone would mean I’d be able to dedicate my full energy to a few projects that, while I don’t think could ever reach the scale of Amazon, would at least have the potential to make a reasonable return on that initial investment. The 300k is a huge boost that a lot of people don’t have access to.

But you’re absolutely right. If you’re not in the game at all, it’s very difficult to get in, and those other non-financial benefits are a big deal.

And now you have Silicon Valley "leaders" looking to tear down the public institutions that seeded the place.

https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatom...

"The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-94 11306. Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project."

Oh you need advice from a $10,000 a day law firm for a difficult business situation? My dads friend John works at "prestigious law-firm" I'll get him to get us some feedback on the situation.

In the case of law at least, it is true you can no side-step the 10k fee for a -consultancy- but lawyers and doctors will remain a human guarded work for long imho, at least in the sign-off phase, even if they use these tools to amplify their work

- brave

- prepared

- connected to vast sums of easily-accessed loaner money

Not necessarily equal measures to all three.

Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege.

Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk.

My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap.

They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since.

Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house.

By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons.

But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine.

You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month.

You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do.

Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe.

Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do.

I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand.

Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.

I have a lot of questions... who sells plots of land for that little money? Are there tax implications? Does anyone ever get on your case for upkeep?

You really should write a blog post. It definitely would hit the front page.

Edit

  who sells plots of land for that little money?

I've been looking for a while for a few acres of unimproved/secluded/wooded land within an hour or two drive away from me here in Kansas, mostly just for bushcrafting or tooling around. The only place I really know to check is Zillow, and while there are a few listings in my distance range, they're typically upwards of $10k/acre. I just checked ebay and saw parcels priced much closer to what I'd expect for unimproved land out in the middle of nowhere, but I couldn't find any in my middle of nowhere, just several states away.

I'm pretty sure there's tons of completely unused land all over the place here that people would be willing to get rid of for cheap, but I have no idea how to find those people. I've considered just going to every small town within an hour of me and posting a "will buy" ad on whatever bulletin boards I'm allowed to post stuff on, but for now I'm still holding out hope that there's a better way. Tips?

That's your main privilege...

Those things are achievable IF you are willing to give up luxuries that you may see as essential. (the kind of job you want, comfort, etc). But if you are willing to forgo those things for a few years , you can build a resource base so that you will never have to be worried about those things ever again in your life. You will always have a fallback.

The main thing you get from having a "place", even if you don't live there, but a place... is the ability to tolerate risk. Without risk tolerance, there are very few ways forward where you do not exist at the charity of someone or something you cannot control - a life where inherently you are forced to work for priorities that are not your own, and be placated by trappings of wealth that you do not really have.

All part of my strategy of success through lowered expectations. Im finding that this decade has made me an accidental optimist lol, but these days I can pontificate well insulated from the outcome.

But to start a company in a garage you must have access to a garage; lots of people do not have this level of resources. The origins of these companies are not as humble as they sound, they rely access to resources that are not actually common (unless you look from the POV of a well-offish 'middle class' family)

People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity

Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have a shovel

Having a shovel doesn't matter if you don't know where to dig

And you need to have enough time ('runway' in startup speak) to actually try digging for gold in the first place

Few would suggest anyone having time, a place, necessities covered well enough, and few distractions is going to be ensured success.

But with those things, someone who also has ideas, insights, a strong work ethic (or often much better, a strong natural enthusiasm for something useful) has much better chances.

I do believe you need someone to have your back for the basics, but there's much more to it.

My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.

Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.

Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.

Like why did these guys neighbors not end up billionaire. Or the other people in their class or school.

While they may have had some money it’s not like they took fathers 500 billion and turned it in to a nice 200 billion for them self.

They clearly did something different out of the very large common group they belonged to.

Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper?

There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they founded the world's first $100T company. Who is it? If we knew it was deterministic and that some "thing they did" caused success, we would all just do that thing.

Then many who do get that chance choose not to, they choose a less risky path

It is very few people who even can attempt to flip the coin ten times

And "the 1%" can flip it as many times as they want until it lands on heads 10 times in a row

Having well connected parents and family is huge, and a big part of why a lot of these people are so wildly successful

Her father was head of a Federal govt agency at one point and a VP at Enron (I know, I know).

Also, a direct descendant of the Fleischmann yeast family.

Her mother also had worked as a Congressional aide.

We hear much from the Jobs and Gates of society, and little from the other garage-folk who just didn't make it: they ran out of time, ran out of steam, ran out of funding, or were doing something that would have worked great and made them billionaires if Apple hadn't hit the market three months sooner than them.

Billionaires in garages are a confirmation-bias story.

Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.

> The Internet is no longer the world's great frontier, and the pool of unsatisfied wants that suddenly welled up as the world first came online is not what it once was. There once was no graphical operating system, no decent web browser, no search engine that could find what you were looking for. The basic amenities are now there. Of course there is still much room for innovation, but merely being able to write a computer program and understand what computer networks are good for is no longer the superpower it once was. If you're young enough to pound Red Bulls all night, you're probably not old enough to have the breadth of knowledge required to launch a great software product.

> Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone, and the opportunities that remain require expertise and wisdom from a bunch of different people.

The tech companies that became big after 2008 solved problems with the same spirit as Jeremy Clarkson asking, 'How hard can it be?' and proceeding to build an electric car with a moustache called Geoff[0]. Those companies - Uber, AirBnB, Meta, Twitter, and so on - waded into very complex problem spaces, waved the magic wand of software, and used vast amounts of venture capital to obliterate the traditional solutions to these problems before anyone could realise how unsatisfactory these new solutions were. So now governments are coming up with all sorts of regulations - some of which are completely inappropriate - in an attempt to get these companies to stop being so irresponsible with the fabric of society, so everyone is now even more upset.

The days when a person who can build stuff and a person who can sell stuff were all you needed to start a startup are gone. There's a third role that's crucial now: the person who has deep understanding of the problem before product design starts so that the company doesn't build another version of The Angrifier.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OlOP0BQ_U

Uber, AirBNB and such were really remarkable because they could fight city hall and cartels like taxis and hotels (for better and for worse.) Also those businesses have a huge amount of "dealing with bullshit" in the sense of the Uber driver assaulting a passenger, a passenger assaulting the driver, the people who have a party and trash your apartment, etc. If I'd tried to pitch businesses like that anywhere outside the bay area any investors would be like "are you kidding?"

Also, it's baffling to me that you consider fleets refilling vending machines to be a harder problem than what Uber did. Sure maybe it's harder in a leetcode sense, but the economics are much easier to reason about, and customer acquisition in B2B vs B2C is much more straightforward. The idea that you could build a random MVP and have 20% chance of success is laughably naive. I estimate thousands of attempts at this (I know of at least 3-4 personally), it's not easy to be Uber (or even Lyft).

VC leads in the Bay Area because VCs there will get behind high risk/high reward ventures that others won't.

At certain times and places it has been relatively easy to reach consumers. Circa 2001 we got a list of 10,000 emails in a developing country that got a better >20% response rate to join a voice chat service. I saw amazing success stories with SEO. There was a time that companies like King could get games to spread virally on Facebook. Those kind of opportunities have dried up as the gatekeepers have been able to capture more value out of their ecosystems.

But yeah, you're right, marketing is often 100x the work that people think it will be.

Taxis before Uber were a shit show. The worst Uber drive you had would still be aboce median for the pre-Uber taxi experience.

Same goes for finding a place to stay before AirBnB if you wanted anything outside a chain hotel.

That doesn't justify all they did, but it also points out that the market was stuck in a local minimum. Breaking out of that is a successful achievement. (We can debate if it was worth the costs. We can debate if the costs needed to be as high as they are, or if that was an outflow of using VC money. There are many debates to be had).

But "all because illegal" is intellectually irresponsible reductionism.

Easier done with VC's money tho

Eh, Mark Zuckerberg is 40. Facebook is planting seeds in some pretty ambitious places (VR/AR + AI). To put that into perspective, Elon Musk is 53 now, but he was ~40 when the Falcon 9 first launched for SpaceX and the Model S was released at Tesla. In June 2012, when the S was released, Tesla was worth about 0.7% of what it is now. Elon Musk was certainly rich, but no where close to the wealthiest folks at the time. Similarly, at 40 years old (21 years ago) Jeff Bezos was worth about 100th of what he is now. Rich, but it wasn't clear that Amazon would ever come close to, say, Walmart, in terms of market cap.

Mark Zuckerberg's empire still has plenty of time to grow.

1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs.

2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.

3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out.

4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with.

7. Hackers at hackathons are not dealing with problems most people deal with. A number of hackathons I've participated in had very similar solutions pitched - you could name the categories, and see them all over again in each hackathon years apart. Usually catering to the tech or the sponsors instead of actual products anyone wanted to use.

Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering.

Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term.

But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.

There is more to do b2b, a lot more, but it is far less culturally relevant. It probably dovetails with people who aren't professional generalist programmers doing more programming as part of their job. That's a somewhat fractured conversation almost by definition.

I think with the LLM bubble bursts this will settle in better.

It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.

It's a motte and bailey where if people accuse you of doing that you retreat to saying "no see they're separate lists".

https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication...

Basically he has kept a very low profile.

It would explain the early retirement + lack of work history.

But yes, family money is also a possibility.

Are you a robot?

It seems you've contrived a rather hilarious strawman that unless you know what they've done in open source, they don't matter. I assure you that almost no one agrees with you.

This and the other post of yours about Damore are super weird, and you seem incredibly bitter about the guy. Weird stuff.

Damore's appearance in this piece is bizarre. He was an SWE at Google that made speculations about diversity targets, not realizing, courtesy of being the spectrum, that it was a massive taboo. For this guy to lump him in with Andreeson and Zuckerberg in his bizarre ageism screed is absolutely bizarre, and makes it seem like it was some LLM generation or something.

I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life.

After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely.

But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.

He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified.

If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it.

(To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important)

1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

Advancement has always been made by standing on the shoulders of giants, and that enables small teams to execute different things in different eras. If you can't see what the changes are today you would have been no better off in another time.

Physics hasn't been the same since Einstein's era. While breakthroughs have happened, the fundamental reframing of the way we comprehend the world that happened with the one-two punch of the theories of relativity and the experimental evidence for the quantum model have patterned the world in which we now live, but understanding that pattern is the new work.

Similarly, I think a good case can be made that the one-two punch of the implementation of the Internet as a fabric and the web as a killer app is now finished work. While the remaining work is real, valid, and valuable, it is of different kind to the creation of the new pattern; consolidation and comprehension of the pattern is the work of the day, and that's not nearly as glamorous, sexy, or profitable (to reputation or pocketbook).

It's fine for there to be eras of great opportunity and eras of not, so long as we respect which we're in.

(Google is great as a case-study for this concept. The circumstances that birthed Google are now actively suppressed in the ecosystem... Mostly by Google. The positive feedback loop of great-search-breeds-great-search-data that birthed Google doesn't leave room for multiple Googles because human attention and time is finite; this is evidenced by Bing being unable to draw users despite huge monetary investment and just as much technical competence. But they can't draw the users because they aren't already better than Google.

As consequence, two guys in their garage can make something but it won't be a Google-scale search engine. Meanwhile, the small, scrappy search engine is now a huge behemoth with 8.5 billion daily searches, and that amount of real human contact implies real human responsibility... if Google goes offline, people will literally die from lack of access to information, so they can't take the kind of risks they used to be able to.

Young systems have different features than old systems. Young ten-person companies have different behavior than old 100,000-person Fortune 500s. Young people have different wants and capabilities than older people. Making the transition is key. Failure to make the transition causes pain not only to the one failing but to the ones interacting with them).

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations

Instead, the gang you describe is aspiring to migrate into well known high visibility disputes such as climate change, gender issues, politics reform. They genuinely think they can help, but the inner principal motive is to be noticed as quickly as possible as "a big stakes kind of person". The more famous and loud the issues they can touch, the better. They will only talk about what appeals to newer generation struggles.

> "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems."

Who is the author referring to here?

(I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to some commonly accepted knowledge that I'm out of the loop on.)

Funny I am known for being a steady, slow and dependable hand in real life but I team up with youngsters to win hackathons, I drive them nuts with my insistence on minimal and viable but my ability to go up on stage and demo something broken and make it look great carries the weekend -- good 'old fashion startup veteran skills.

pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?

This is the DEI movement in a nutshell. A bunch of people driven by fear and anxiety and anger into demanding they be handed things for free instead of working for them. Which is why it's ironic that the article seems to validate the DEI movement

Usually the choice to pour too much into an unproven, nascent prospect was objectively a bad idea, poor investment or, at least, not prudent. We know this because other smarter, more sober people looked at the opportunity during those early moments and made wiser choices, which only seem unwise in hindsight. It's also usually the case that those early zealots taxed their available environmental resources (whether spousal support, parental savings, current employer latitude, etc) to the point of unfair burden, if not abusive burden. Sometimes those unwilling 'resource investors' were repaid and sometimes not. And, of course, even having environmental resources to tap (and unfairly burden) in the first place has always been a matter of luck.

There's an historical record bias here because if we double-click as deeply into the circumstances around other early market entrants, such as a Herman Hollerith and punch card tabulating, we often find similar patterns of abdicating current responsibilities to make unwise leaps into months of furious work to realize some speculative vision, enabled by unfairly (or abusively) burdened family, friends or employers whose existence was random luck. On top of that, there's selection bias at work. Because whether we're talking about Zuckerberg, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Hollerith or Gutenberg - we're only talking about them because they are the black swan exceptional outliers. The vast majority of the time this pattern ends in unrecorded ignominy or tragedy, existing only as cautionary tales about the distant relative who squandered whatever job or prospects they had, along with their money, family's money and finally the patience of all around them in the pursuit of some crazy dream which never panned out.

The more interesting question is whether this repeating pattern of irrationally abdicating responsibilities to chase speculative dreams in unhealthily unbalanced ways enabled by unfairly burdening environmental resources is, on the whole, net bad or good. And I think that depends on the scope by which we choose to measure. On an individual, family or community level its probably net bad. On a societal level it may be net positive. The thorny issue is that the pattern involves unfairness or abuse of unwilling others to whom rewards may not flow, even in the unlikely event it doesn't end in tragedy. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to eliminate the possibility of unfairness toward others or the overall ambient unfairness of 'winning' by leveraging environmental luck.

A good TL;DR for the essay.

The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.

If you’re talking about starting a business, the market has shown that it largely doesn’t care about those things.

There will eventually be new waves that create opportunities for startups again, LLMs are like that in some cases, but I’d argue that mobile phones were by far a larger disruptive innovation than LLMs so far.

Apple is the best example that doing the opposite can be immensely successful.

Their entire life was in an environment where nothing was stable or cohesive or efficient and everything was either "free" or rented. They don't recognize what they're missing or why it might matter.

So as consumers they don't know to care when you build better stuff, and as producers they don't even know what it means to build better stuff. And soon these people will graduate into leadership and management with the same understanding of the world.

Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects from disaster, shoring them up as their sloppy compromises overtake them, but unfortunately it's very possible that it'll be a long while still before a strong and viable demand for "better stuff" returns.

Once our generation (the rest of us) is in the ground, there will be nobody alive that even remembers that software can be made with high quality. Nobody who's ever seen really fast performing software, software that didn't crash unexpectedly, software that didn't eat your battery and storage space, software that wasn't exploitable by a 14 year old in their basement, software that didn't leak personal information all over the world. No developers who have counted CPU cycles or took the time and effort to keep a for loop in a single page of memory. Neither developers nor consumers will even believe that software can be great.

What usually happens next is that 99% of that "better-ness" value then gets clawed back by the creator and monetized, and then users are left with something roughly comparable to the product it was supposed to supplant. E.g. "we're gaining users left and right, how many ads do you think they will tolerate without abandoning us?"

It is getting a little tiring to hear that building software is a superhuman endeavor and that almost nothing new can be built and nothing can be replaced.

If anything, this attitude plays right into what the people criticized in the article want everyone to think. “Just give up, there won’t ever be another Marc Andreesen or Mark Zuckeberg”

Consider how many businesses are built around Excel and either cannot re-create their workflows in LibreOffice Calc/Google Sheets or don't see the value proposition in doing so. You can argue till you're blue in the face that business critical processes shouldn't rely on Excel, and you'd be right, but good luck convincing the people who matter most that they need to change something that still works well enough (especially if they're not privy to the behind-the-scenes work required to integrate other systems with Excel). It's not like Excel is the only thing keeping them hooked on Office.

When it comes to other, less ambitious projects, like email software (not even hosting, just an email client; hosting is its own can of worms), you're competing against companies that either give it away for free or include it in a bundle of other applications businesses really want, like O365. I pay for Shortwave because I loved Inbox by Google that much, but it's a very niche product. I doubt the average person loved Inbox enough to trust a third party with their emails so they can get that experience back, much less pay said third party when the Gmail web interface is good enough for most tasks.

There's a reason we can describe companies like MS as being entrenched: there are no real competitors left. Enshittification works because people aren't inclined to switch without significant upsides. If your selling point is not being actively hostile to your users, why should I believe you will resist doing the same when you IPO or get bought out?

you can build great software, but the bigger challenge is to defeat network effect of preoccupied/monopolized market.

I’ve been running windows 11 on a couple of pcs for at least a year and never seen it crash once.

Recommend using an AME Wizard playbook to decrapify it

https://revi.cc/

https://atlasos.net/

based on AME Wizard

https://ameliorated.io/

"AME 11 Official Ameliorated Playbook for Windows 11. Cutting the tumor out of your OS."

Enshittification is mostly just the process of not running on VC Capital and generating sustainable revenue sources.

VC capital is useful for speed & innovation, but most of the time leads to bloat & rent-seeking. Does DocuSign need 7,000 employees? My journey of bootstrapped entrepreneurship has been much more sustainable and respectful to my users.

IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. They were all the cool underdogs for a decade, then slowly decline in quality.

You may get a 2x speedup, but humans are still the bottleneck.

But that always happens when times are good. Crazy emerges out of desperation.

In all seriousness, there is definitely the comfortable lie of nostalgia playing into a lot of the dudes approaching (or squarely in) middle age as far as tech goes.

It's truly a bummer that they're expressing the internalization of the wrong lessons. Instead of standing up against decades of enshittification, they're complaining about having to say "allowlist" instead of "blacklist", and still erroneously believing that the right hackathon will solve their company's existential problems.

I got the best monkeys and the best typewriters, so if I let them do what they want in this "meritocracy" I created, it will definitely make the next Hamlet, right?

Car crash death rates in the US have been declining for 50 years in both total number and per-capita rates (except for an uptick that started in 2020, presumably some knock-on effects from covid): https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... -- 40,990 deaths in 2023 vs. 54,052 deaths in 1973; 12.06 vs 25.51 per 100k population

Car fuel efficiency has ~doubled since 1975: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1237-may-...

Airline fuel efficiency has quadrupled since 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi...

Corn yields per acre have doubled since 1975: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren...

Lithium-ion batteries didn't practically exist in 1975.

Modern blue LEDs (and thus white LEDs) didn't exist until 1990.

The entire personal computing industry. The Internet. Search engines. LLMs. Cellular networks. Neodymium magnets. Reusable orbital launch vehicles. Genetically modified crops. mRNA vaccines. CRISPR.

I mean I know why, but the antipathy underlying the article undermines an otherwise interesting point.

So yeah, just reminding everyone that not everything is about fierce competition -- if artists can chain smoke and drink their life through ups and downs of patronage, so can everyone else.

Noone says we should stop being responsible, but all the responsibility and adulting without play is much, much worse, in my opinion, than the alternative. It just so happens that I relax writing code.

I am still writing other things that have long been invented, and they consistently give me inspiration.

Not sure if I missed the point of the article, but I react to what I read from it, after all.

This has caused tech to look more and more like a ponzi scheme with greater and greater promises and yet the actual output is very feeble.

Even large companies like Apple have got caught in all this. Imagine what they promised and what they haven't been able to deliver.

We need a grand reset but that needs to come from the young ones.

Stop doing leetcode. Go back to original engineering. Stop using JavaScript. Build software like Winamp.

The business side's goal is to obtain a monopoly and extract rent. You can see it in google search getting worse so they can show more ads, you can see it in Apple's app store behavior, pretty much all the examples.

The objective is not to provide a good product that people want to buy, except insofar as that drives adoption towards a monopoly

I have sort of come to that believe anti-trust may be the solution to finding more successes and enabling better products

That's what the psych speak is for. It lets some bullshit fly because it codes as "smart" and sounds plausible. And now listeners will expect engagement on the level of psychoanalysis if you disagree. Whereas a more commensurate response is dropping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDmGhethEoQ and moving on with life.

What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them.

One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys.

Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.

Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.

How do you figure being male help one's chances with that?

Have you seen Musks Twitter timeline? That guy is so chronically online and desperate to be liked that it's just sad. How can you be the richest man in the world and yet so deeply pathetic?

Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing.

Deeply insecure, unhappy people, despite having all the wealth in the world. And they're gonna make sure all of us are just as unhappy, because if they can't buy happiness, why should anyone else have it?

Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pan out).

It's basically the same thing that happens to dictators. They become unhinged. Their craziest ideas receive no pushback so they go ahead and implement every whim.

What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich.

And they are likely even aware of this dynamic which is why they view everyone in the world as being just in it for the money. So why not do everything in your power to horde more since that's what everyone else you interact with is doing?

Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities.

You probably need friends that are also very rich.

> You probably need friends that are also very rich.

I don't disagree.

There's a Wendover youtube I recently watched that's tangentially about this [1]. Why do all the rich people have Yachts? His contention it's not because they like having big boats but rather because every other rich person does and that is your real social circle. If you don't fit in with them, you'll basically be friendless.

That also goes into why all rich people end up with private jets, because to interact with your social circle you basically have a packed calendar flying across the globe for rich people social events.

However, it's an insular group of people all subject to the same problem of generally being surrounded by yesmen. Further, it's not like these rich people aren't also trying to shmooze each other. Their businesses are still trying to make money and they often need to work with one another. So hard for these people to actually be friends.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNcYxHJPLE

So they’re left to just chase whose partner they can snag or whose yacht is bigger? Sounds delightful. You’d think therapy would be more capital efficient. The hedonic arena is a trap for the emotionally unsound and perpetually unfulfilled.

The mid-life crisis insecurity doesn't have the hope and the rush in the same way. It has a lot more dread and angst.

Musk, Altman, Bezos they are basically caricatures.

It's just a few of the most troubled celebrity wealth-addicts making public the inherent ego-fragility that tends to drive addiction in the first place.

Meanwhile, there's still sooo many other tech leaders just trying to develop whatever vision they have for their business, industry, career, etc

Not all tech or business leaders are addicts, but some are, and as a society we tend to enable and even celebrate their addiction for whatever reason. Because of that, and because of power that comes with wealth, some of them wreak havoc as they use that power to manifest their very deep troubles in the public sphere.

And it's not a new phenemonom, nor particular to the tech industry. You can see it happen again and again and again throughout history.

A lot of times people create problems and can't take responsibility for their own actions, so they blame externalities. That's what the author was saying about blaming DEI.

I'll defend Benioff here, a little. The O'hana thing isn't a new, desperate COVID-fried-divorced-billionaire invention; it dates, I believe, from the establishment of Salesforce, decades ago. I think it was sincere at the time.