My approach is to understand the topic one level deeper than is needed to satisfy my immediate needs. It’s not always enough but it usually exposes any obvious traps you’d run into with only a surface level understanding, or at least lets you know if the thing really is too complex to not understand deeply and still succeed.
> My approach is to understand the topic one level deeper than is needed to satisfy my immediate needs.
This is great advice!
A lot of what I read here so far is either “never” or “when I get the job done.” The first answer risks burnout or imposter syndrome, while the second risks failing to grasp first principles and how to do things efficiently, salably, sustainably.
You aren't really a generalist if all you do is solve the problem without understanding anything, and this approach will usually bite you or your replacement down the line. Just consider solving "I need a message queue", "I need to add Elasticsearch", or gods forbid, "We need a frontend JS framework". I've been at companies where this has happened, and it's a dumpster fire weeks afterward.
Just one personal anecdote: I definitely find contradictions or gaps in my thinking/knowledge when I write. Finding and resolving those deficiencies is what I point to when I say "writing is thinking".
I take most of your points except the last one. The feedback would come in the form of publications, definitely from academia and to a lesser degree industry (admittedly a slow iteration time). Also just public discourse - there was no dearth of very specific, highly technical feedback for any of the releases of alphafold on twitter, for example.
But I can’t use this at all at work (a pharma company) because it would leak confidential information. So anything they learn from usage data is systematically excluding (the vast majority of?) people working on therapeutics.
I’d speculate they convinced themselves that their startup was fundamentally great and they just needed more time for it to attain its full potential. The fake users were just a way to show JPM the company they’d eventually have, so nobody was really going to lose (in their minds).
The problem is that biology is such a huge and complex field, and there's simply no way to make progress without incremental work like this that has no immediate payoff. To even contemplate whether something like this could cure cancer means that the article completely misrepresented its value.
I think the problem is that you're viewing things as either "cures for cancer", or "not cures for cancer". I would suggest instead framing things as, "how on Earth could we possibly cure cancer when human bodies have trillions of moving parts and we only understand half of them?" It's like trying to fix a broken car and not even knowing what internal combustion is.
I think it would help to explicitly reframe this question as: “where can we find the millions of dollars needed to pay for however many full time software engineers are needed to develop a modern browser?”
I do not think this option alone would suffice, but I think Mozilla under estimates people’s willingness to donate to the development of Firefox specifically.
Nowadays Mozilla seems to be focused on many things, just not their browser. I do think there is a significant amount of people that would be willing to donate if they are sure these funds get allocated to the development of FF instead of AI and AdTech investments or ridiculous CEO pay packages.
Again, I don’t think this funding stream alone would suffice to make up for lost Google money, etc. - but I do think it would be significant enough to be worth a shot.
Google will just buy everyone and slowly suffocate the rest.
The correct way is to recognize the web standard itself as an enemy and revisit it to make making browsers viable rather than a $200M enterprise in maintenance alone.
Browsers and content aren’t fundamentally different from 25 years ago. But standards are ever growing like cancer, with the “help” of google and other web cartels.
A browser is 99.99% just a text and graphics app with a security aspect. Not a complex ERP system, not a bleeding edge next-gen video game. A browser cannot cost a billion per year, that’s bullshit people want you to believe.
For some contrast, in firefox per month costs:
GTA 5 was 0.7 ff months in development, 3.5 ff years in revenue (one of the most succesful ever).
Cyberpunk 2077 was 0.7 ff months dev, 3.7 ff mohths in revenue.
Star Citizen 2.5 ff months dev (notoriously expensive game!), 3.5 ff months in revenue.
A browser is just a wooden toy compared to all of the above. We can add 10-100x for reach and security and still not get firefox costs. Web cartels are simply sabotaging the web and nobody bats an eye.
> Google will just buy everyone and slowly suffocate the rest.
> A browser cannot cost a billion per year, that’s bullshit people want you to believe.
Those two comments contradict each other. And the second one shows why Google won't just buy everyone out. Competing as a business/org is totally doable if all Big Tech does is throw money at problems.
They emit water vapor, not liquid water. Gasoline-fueled cars emit roughly the same amount of water as a hydrogen-powered vehicle, so we already know this isn't an issue.
It’s an issue here in Minnesota; intersections and highways where there’s standing traffic are slick from the freezing exhaust condensate, but, to clarify your statement: it potentially wouldn’t be a bigger issue than it already is.
