So, it finally happened. The Project is so thirsty for RAM that not even the world's most well-capitalized computer company could have the final word any longer. There's only so many more powerful organizations in the world than Apple. Well... we'll find out soon enough if such a thing could be built, or should I say, summoned.
I feel the same, but then I have to be honest with myself that the MacBook Neo is still a sub-$1,000 solid personal computer that's broadly available. Now... if that starts going out of stock, yeah, tin foil hat time!
Black bar for Om please. Truly sad for this loss, was so grateful for his impassioned writing and storytelling about our industry. You will be missed deeply Om. May there be all the pens in the world for you in the afterlife.
100% this. Interviewing isn't something that can compound. Striking out from company after company doesn't leave behind a trail of real work and real lessons. Starting a business is tough but it really does teach skills that are hard to find any other way (about sales, recruiting, management, etc). After a certain point, it's wiser to give up on getting hired, and just hire yourself and build something.
Chiming in here to say that while yes, often AI/LLMs will tend to agree with you, I have also definitely had many (high context) conversations where the AI/LLM disagreed strongly with me. The danger is in people not having a parallel thread running in their mind while using these systems about 'how agreeable is it being with me right now?' as a meta-axis along which to evaluate the information.
> You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things
Don't conflate what is theoretically vs. realistically possible. In the real world, successful companies have moats from data, patents/IP, network effects, and so forth. Just because you can develop something in 1/100th the time doesn't make it instantly feasible to build a new business around. Look around the tech industry today.. plenty of companies that could be disrupted by spry AI-powered buidlers, but they are not (owing to these lock-in effects).
I understand that standing up memory fabrication plants is no small feat, but how much of this is due to memory fabricators' patent moat? To what degree is this caused by IP barriers vs. the difficulty in actually manufacturing the things? If it's the case that even older-generation / process-node RAM is also going up in value, aren't those 'easier' to produce?
Agreed, and this is exactly what we see happening. Your posts back then were prescient ... there's literally now 'Copilot for Excel' and 'Claude for Excel' etc. But what do you propose the people/commons can still do at this stage to redistribute the inherent power found in RL data loops to a more stable equilibria of sharing participants?
Great question and there’s two steps in my opinion:
First is to become as free as possible from lock in and own your own data. The best way to do this is the self host your own technology.
This is really not possible for the majority of people though.
So practically I always suggest that you have multiple providers for services, don’t pool your data any one place (other than your own place) and own your backups. This is basic stuff that we’ve been teaching since the 90s and still very applicable today.
The harder and more impactful thing is to then create community owned technology that is outside of the commerce model.
So for example imagine that instead of FAANG running the world, the largest tech and data orgs would look more like wikimedia foundation, Annas archive, scihub, Graphene, Linux etc…. and more generally that technology and governance are open and not bound to commerce/taxation/coercion based organizations.
Ultimately we need to create a democratic-technology movement such that capitalists don’t monopolize technology, which is currently the trend. This is not some kind of simple thing by the way, this is revolutionary economics is what I’m talking about.
My suggestion is to read Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin
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