I go back and forth on this. Maybe it is the right inclination with software development where there is a strong drive to keep pushing more features and trade offs in terms of “technical debt” or footprint can get pretty abstract at scale. But then I think of an operation like the Disney Parks and it really seems like the delight comes from constant, sustained effort. They’ve got people around attending to everything and fussing over every little detail around the park. They can emergency dispatch characters to an area if they see kids who seem like they might start to have a bad time. They have secret stashes of diaper changing kits and first aid materials so Mickey Mouse can show up and save the day if someone has an accident. There’s ways they’re not ruining it I guess, but the main impression I get is that they just never take their foot off the gas when it comes to making sure everyone is having a good time.
All of the things you described ARE "it". They're part of the Disney Parks "product". If they were to remove or change that active effort, that could be considered "ruining it". But continuing to operate in a way they've found delights their customers is exactly what Seth is arguing for, not a violation of it.
Anecdotally it seems like anywhere I’d hop to pays about the same unless I can get to the next tier up. If you want to move up a level they expect you to have at least 3-5 years already being at that level so the only way forward is to get promoted and THEN hop.
A lot of those ‘edge cases’ in the definition of “knowledge worker” are probably the stuff that’s most likely to have significant parts of the work augmented or replaced by AI agents. Like, call-centers are almost certainly going to get turned over in a big way. It’s not like the median tier-1 support operator just reading off a script is much better than an LLM anyway.
The company’s gone but the assets just got sold to other commercial real estate firms.
Uber was basically only ever software to help people use their own cars so a very small part of their valuation was physical stuff to upkeep, it was just deals and obligations they had.
Not sure how it shakes out for Anthropic and OpenAI. There’s a lot of physical capacity that needs to be built out and can depreciate. But there’s also a lot of network effects and dependencies being built in with enterprise users.
I don’t know how swappable the tooling is either. I think over the long term the UI, model training and documentation, and infrastructure are going to end up being run by different parties and I’m not sure which leg of that chain ends up in a position to skim most of the profit off. My guess is that Apple and Google end up raking in all the money since they control the OS and app stores while the rest of the stack gets driven down to being generic commodities. At least where mass market consumer adoption is concerned.
The other frustration I’ve noticed is that they key in very heavily on artist and specific “genre” designation as what feeds the recommendation, which is actually quite bad for anyone who likes experimental work.
I understand that if your recommendations are based on “people who like this also tend to like that” then you’re right in the strike zone. But that approach is basically agnostic to any property of the music itself. Suppose there’s a rock band that released a specific song where they’re experimenting with a new style that has an atypically (for them) funky/jazzy influence. If I say I want more songs like that I mean songs that fuse rock/jazz/funk, not more songs that fans of [rock band] are into.
I still think for new music discovery Pandora’s approach remains the best if you really curate a station for yourself. Apple Music has been good for creating very listenable playlists though, and their new AI playlist generator has been very fun. Surprisingly, YouTube also seems to have some secret sauce where they recommend a lot of interesting stuff that I’ve genuinely never encountered before. I suspect this is because there’s a lot more amateur and experimental artists on there doing weirder stuff and it’s able to find audiences for those in ways that the music-focused services have less visibility into since their catalog is so focused on stuff from the recording industry.
> If I say I want more songs like that I mean songs that fuse rock/jazz/funk, not more songs that fans of [rock band] are into.
I agree. There are bands where I'm not into their usual stuff but they have one or two songs that I really like. It'd be nice to drill down even father into specifics like "this one section of this one song" or even just songs that feature certain instruments or similar sounding vocals.
I have been wondering recently that if the cost of just throwing everything out and building it from scratch again gets low enough, maybe maintainability becomes less of a priority? Can we just embrace the thing like those Zen carpenters who build wooden fire shrines do where they just accept that the thing will keep burning down and they make a discipline around getting really good at rebuilding it?
Granted, the load bearing thing here is whether we’re actually getting good at rebuilding up to any sort of standard of quality. Or if the tooling is even structurally capable of doing that rather than just introducing new baskets of problems with each build.
Funny thing about Steve Jobs is that he actually didn’t deliver a single home run until his return to Apple late in his career.
The Apple II was Woz, the Mac was okay but mostly got shepherded into what it was by the other Apple leadership, the Lisa was a flop, Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby, NeXt went nowhere until the Apple acquisition.
The guy had somehow managed to make a successful career out of shipping very opinionated, interesting, and cool products that were commercial failures. If you were going purely by commercial performance you would not have picked him, you’d be picking him based on that ineffable reality distortion field of his that makes you BELIEVE everything he’s doing will change the world.
Did you forget Pixar? Jobs transformed the company with his extremely bold bet on Toy Story. They were doomed to obscurity without this big bet and now all children's movies are made this way.
For people like Schmidt I think the hype is a true belief. You can see it in his posture and tone while being booed by the entire crowd. I’ve only seen that kind of self-satisfied smugness from evangelical religious nuts right before they tell someone they clearly regard with disgust that they’ll “pray for them.”
Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted in anything the technology or methods do.
Btw. they were booing him before he even got on a stage. There was a leaflet and a student action to boo him not because of his AI stance, but because of his ex accusing him of abuse (sic)
Yea, it's the smug grins from these guys that I can't stand. It's not enough that they won and they know they won, but they have to rub everyone else's noses in it, too.
I was about to say, it may not be fun for YOU to not be able to play any spells but making you submit by choking you out is fun for ME. Prison decks were always my jam.
How long have you been at it? Because some of us grew up writing letters with pen and paper, sending them to people in the mail, and getting something back a week or two later. You just have to actually sit down and READ closely what people are saying, sometimes multiple times, to make sure you are clearly understanding what they’re saying rather than skimming everything you encounter for information to extract.
It is actually quite easy to communicate a problem in the middle of a wall of text. You simply refer to the phrase and then explain why it doesn’t hold. It is also fine to simply present your perspective to people without invitations to “discuss ideas.” You can open a discussion if you want, but if I’m telling you something then you can rest assured that those are the things I believe to be true, and if I am uncertain about any conclusions I will include caveats to indicate uncertainty. You have free will and are perfectly capable of taking or leaving anything being said to you.
reply