“Taste” is something that’s developed through repetitive exposure to differentiated items in a particular set, combined with extremely high abstract analytical abilities, and that’s something completely different from having marketing or personal branding skills.
I think you’re right that that’s the evaluation happening, but it’s totally misguided. If you’re indexing for differentiating levels of taste I would be very wary of empty vessel young influencers. Taste is built over years and years and imo requires a certain disdain for the crowd. Look at Linus Torvalds as a pinnacle of taste in code for example.
I think wrapper companies could do very well if AI does end up becoming having an impact near on the order of the internet or smartphones, which it may never.
A product that incorporates a foundation model could still require solving a hard engineering problem separately from the training and provision of said model. Someone who could, say, provide a reliable filter for copyrighted content from an LLM is providing real value and has a tangible moat.
Acting like Elon Musk is cringe for a lot of reasons but I don’t think it’s that out of pocket for a startup founder to admire him, even if all he did was SpaceX he would have an incredible legacy and story
Oh of course. I think folks are misunderstanding that I somehow dislike Musk. I do not. SpaceX and Tesla are bigger companies than Apple and Microsoft.
What I dislike is, other grown men trying to "act" like him and fawning over him.
Adderall is great at making me produce, but horrible at true “focus.” It makes everything other than pure output feel like a waste of time. In the long run, I found this to be a pretty detrimental way to operate. Good for getting something across the finish line but since I’ve stopped taking it I’ve been able to go a lot deeper into stuff and plug away at long term projects rather than just checking off as many “tasks” as possible.
Seattle/Washington has no elite or quasi-elite universities. That’s probably the #1 reason.
Compare it to Boston which is a similarly sized city.
Boston/New England has Harvard, MIT, BC, Tufts, Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Brown, etc. It’s the most educated region of the world with huge pool of founders and talent. Even though it’s not a tech focused place the way Seattle is it’s a better place to find young talented people willing to work for or start a new company.
UW computer science is top 5 or top 10 depending on the US News year. It often is one spot behind UCB. But there are only so many UW CSE graduates (getting in is really hard), and most of them go to FAANGs these days. Ya, they are mostly working class and don’t have to economic cushion to go out and start a company. In comparison, Stanford, MIT, CMU have much better resources to take risks with.
I in rarely meet people from UW these days and I live near enough to campus in Ballard. People from all over wind up here for some reason, which is bad for traffic but whatever. So not much UW, but a-lot of IIT and Tsinghua. Seattle doesn’t need to grow its own talent, they come for the weather and mountains.
You would be surprised how many people can tolerate rain but not extreme heat or cold. Mild climate means our average temperature is 55 and deviates by 10 degrees either way.
