Case in point: Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase "due to inflation," despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by — get this — corporations raising prices. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting as a means of providing "balanced" coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is good, contorting to prove that prices aren't higher even as companies boasted about literally raising their prices. In fact, the media spent years debating with itself whether price gouging was happening, despite years of proof that it was.

There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.

This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. But the misinformation crisis is not always what we think it is.

Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

The way this equation is written, it leads to two sources of confusion, which I’ll call the “two myths”:

1. Many people wrongly assume that imports reduce GDP, because they appear in the equation with a minus sign.

2. Many people wrongly assume that if consumers become pessimistic and decide to spend less while saving more, this will cause GDP to fall. That’s because consumer spending appears in the equation with a positive sign.

Why in Turing's name would I want to have AIs attend a meeting for me that I don’t want to go to myself? What’d the AI do to deserve this? Let me give you a litmus test: if you think you would rather send an AI to attend a meeting for you rather than waste your time, your life, on that meeting, consider just taking it to email, or not having that meeting at all. Don’t punish the poor AI, wasting all those kilowatt hours of GPU time on that nonsense. Think of the planet!

Every time I think about linkedin I get this exhausted feeling thinking about dealing with it, updating, that horrible feed of generic "rah rah <empty emotional statement> company" posts that feel cold as ice ... all the unsolicited email they send me. I can't think of another site that makes me feel like that.

I have a profile, but it is as old as the last job I got and I have no desire to go to that site but I still feel tied to it to some extent.

I can't think of another site that has that weird combination of undesirable factors that I'm stuck with.

It's hard to overstate the significance of a collapse of growth in the SaaS market, as is it hard to overstate how dangerous generative AI is to its fortunes. While these companies had costs before, generative AI is multitudes higher than regular cloud compute costs, meaning that any new revenue growth from this software will be burdened by leveraging an increasingly-expensive solution to a problem that most of them have trouble describing.

And if the revenue never arrives, they'll be faced with the same problem as the rest of the tech industry — that they've run out of ideas to generate growth.

At that point, they'll have to reckon with the fact that there are too many software companies incapable of solving any problem other than "how do we find a new way to charge customers for something?"

The strategy that delivers the best returns, it turns out, is to divide the funding equally among all researchers. And the second- and third-best strategies involve distributing it at random to 10 or 20 percent of scientists.

About bootstrapped and VC projects

To do it, we need to (paradoxically) ignore house prices and instead, focus on income. The root driver of the housing crisis is that poor people can’t afford to buy houses or pay rent. And yet the rich have their cake and get to eat it too. Maybe … just maybe … if we took some of this money and gave it to the poor, then these folks could afford a place to live.

What makes monopoly a monopoly:

If you are a monopoly and then you do something to maintain that monopoly or to extend your monopoly, that's what makes it illegal. Like, if I just create a new product category, some widget that no one's ever heard of before, and I start making it and it's popular, I'm by definition going to have a hundred percent of the market. That’s not illegal.

What would be illegal is if I had a hundred percent of the market and then I said to my distributors: “Hey, if you want my thing that everybody wants, you can't distribute my rival's thing.” That's what turns it into an illegal conspiracy.

About connection between authoritarianism and monopolies:

John Sherman, of the Sherman Antitrust Act, said that if we will not be ruled by a monarch, we should not be ruled by an autocrat of trade. He was very explicit about the link between monarchy and authoritarianism and monopoly. And they were using the term monarchy because fascism hadn't happened yet, but monarchy did exist. In the 19th century, Americans were looking across the ocean and they were seeing a bunch of kingdoms. There was a little bit of democracy, but that's what they were really looking at. And they were like, we don't want that.