Yup. And thinking through the physical realities or whatever real world constraints exist.

One thing that always exists in financial markets is cycles. It just might last longer than we care for.

I’m a small biz guy and not interested in VC. Very boring.

What scares me is the thought his nonsense is common sense within some circles.

Circles like HN? Seems like a lot of folks here bought into it in the thread discussing the article.

Time will tell. Did you know that when bicycles were invented society was concerned about the moral corruption of children and women? Who knows where they will go without men!

The anthropomorphising is also a head scratcher for me. Ancient civilisations explained the weather with gods. We are doing the same here, explaining the unknown by assuming there is some being/consciousness.

Forget common sense, he is a trusted figure by many, so if he says something wrong or nonsensical, people are going to believe it as long as it's engaging. If he's willing to abuse the trust of his audience and lie and mislead people, that he's no better than Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, or Joe Rogan.

I think it’s important to understand that your job need not be your identity, while acknowledging that for many of us particularly early in our careers the job is very important.

Maybe focus on a hobby, a partner, something that gives you another sense of identity or worth, which reduces the pressure of the job to fulfill that role.

I think we all need meaning in our lives so the strict advice to “care less” is tough to implement. But hopefully the strategies above will help. Build up a multi-faceted identity.

You are not worth less bc your company takes months to ship GET endpoints.

and yet we still have people saying the rate of change is increasing

my view is we had a leap over the last fe years and it's tapering off.

this is fine, but for the IPOs

The improvement is compounding just about every way you can look at it. The frontier keeps getting smarter. And at any sub-frontier threshold the cost is dropping dramatically. The amounts of smarts you can fit on hardware is increasing so dramatically that even 6 year old consumer GPUs are increasing in price. The pace of change in LLMs and downstream applications is absolutely ripping compared to 2023 or 2024.

We had a leap because of the introduction and refinement of agents - the rest has been minor

I've been using the same agent for 15 months. I think this statement is laughably wrong.

they're also being heavily rlhf'ed to use agents and tools and stuff. 15 months ago this was less of the case.

So… figure out what’s going on before changing things?

I must admit I’ve always considered this to be self-evident but maybe I’m the odd one out.

I’d be a terrible blogger.

I've met my fair share of people throughout the years for whom this wasn't self-evident. Anecdatally, they also don't tend to stick around for too long. I suspect it's because teams don't tend to warm to people who already enter the door with a "you're doing it wrong".

But yes, the article can basically be distilled into just Chesterton's Fence.

I did this… I have a specific system-generated PDF bank statement and it didn’t take too long to write a parsing program, which would have taken much longer before.

> When a user cancels a subscription Stripe asks them for a reason. At the moment I don’t really do anything with the cancellation reason, actually this is the first time I’ve ever looked at the data.

This comes across as very unserious. If you’re truly trying to build a business then this seems like one of the best signals/datapoints you can get…

I often think of my experience at Citibank 15 years ago when I closed my account at the branch. The teller said 'sure thing, just put your debit card into the device and enter your pin'. I did that and he said ok I'll close the account and give you cash? I said 'yes' and then it was done. He said, "have a great day!"

It was one of the best customer experiences of my life to not have to answer a series of 'why are you leaving?' questions and I would like to head back to Citibank just because of it. Unfortunately I don't live in NYC anymore so can't really do that.

I agree that most companies are awful at trying to get you to stay when you tell them to leave, but I'd be disappointed if a company didn't care at all to know why I left. If I'm leaving I already have a bad feeling about them, and I would have a worse image of them if they didn't care why.

Ideally they wouldn't pressure at all for me to stay and cancellation would be a quick process, and I would be happy to tell them why I left. Either to vent, or to at least get the (most likely misguided) feeling that they might do something about it. But if there's no asking as part of their process, I'd definitely think worse of them.

Yeah I like to make the question optional. No impact on their exit unless they want to share something.

Interesting analogy.

Sounds like an opportunity for GitHub/others to better filter these.

Yeah I think you call out the right incentives. Lots of people are very interested in renting out the hardware, and it gives us lots of flexibility vs buying.

If the pace of hardware change is what the jensens of the world say, then the rents on existing hardware will decline.