I recently used Typst and their own collab solution for a paper we worked on. While some features are still lacking it was a pretty good experience overall.
I felt this on myself as well when I tried to use copilot. Especially when it was later in the day. I still use it for some boilerplate code / building visualizations that feels like boilerplate, but turned it off for any real important code. Atm I find most value in AI in discussing design decisions and to evaluate alternative approaches to mine. There it really had a huge positive impact on my workflow
I doubt that the dogshit is so much worse than it used to be. Unfortunately, I also contributed to this. When I was 13 or 14, I scripted a little tool that allowed me to write one tech news blog post and generate multiple versions of it by simply swapping phrases, adding practically zero value. You'd be surprised (or not) how much of a tech news blog is repetitive wording, mainly to fill yet one more adsense banner after a new paragraph. It was not based on AI, but the core principle was the same as the example in the article.
I published each version on a separate WordPress blog covering roughly the same topic, chose random pictures, set random publish dates close to each other, and signed them all up for Google News. This non-AI dogshit dominated a small tech niche, making a decent amount of money at the time for a 14-year-old. I am pretty sure I was not the only one coming up with that idea at the time.
This was already back in 2008/2009. At the time, I posted about my approach in online forums to ask for coding advice. Through those, I got to meet the creators of two more organizations that used a similar approach for PC gaming news pages.
And this was for the German market only. So I am quite sure that it was more common in the US at an earlier time, as they are usually ahead of us.
Can someone explain how Sam is able to run so many things at once? I am working on my startup and I barely find time to scroll HN during my toilet breaks.
Universities don't generate their operating budget on tuition alone. They need to use a mix of grantmaking, IP commercialization, investments, Federal tuition support, broadcast licenses, and (in UMich's case) some state government support to keep the lights on.
In UMich's case, the State of Michigan only covers 3% of the entire funding for UMich. The university needs to foot the bill for the remaining 97% on their own [0].
That's where endowments come in. By trying to be savvy with the rate of return on your endowment, you can create a self sustaining budget for your institution.
Also, UMich Ann Arbor's yearly budget is $10 Billion, but their endowment (aka their piggybank) is only $17 Billion. If they raided their piggybank, they could only keep the lights on for 2 years at most.
> professional sports organization or the vestigial academic departments
Professional Sports is self funded by the athletics department.
What's a "vestigial academic departments". For example, Computer Science was "vestigial" in most universities until the 1970s, often being a wonky major in the Math or Physics department. What makes you an arbitrator for what field is more important than others?
Which universities in Australia? Most of the student accommodation is independent (especially ones associated with the sandstone unis, see https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/broderick-revie... for why that's sometimes a problem), and there's no requirement to use student accommodation. International student tuition is a major funding source, but I've never heard of accommodation being much of a money spinner.
They do. They also own lots of intellectual property and will provide some amount of financial support to startups that grow out of the university commonly. At the end of the day, they have endowments and they want to grow those.
Specifically, regarding property, at schools I’ve attended they owned real estate in the city around the campus, not just the campus itself. Part of that is investment and part of it was looking to the future for when they run out of space on the current campus to build new facilities and need to grow the campus
We don’t think of pension funds as hedge funds either but they also invest heavily to grow the fund.
Lets go back to the beginning of YC. You can find a photo of the very first class. In that very first class, you'll see the AirBnb guys, the Twitch guys, the Reddit founders, and Sam frickin Altman.
When you have 18 years of connections with virtually every successful YC startup, and happen to run the most disruptive company of the past 15 years, money and influence seeks you out.
Good answer. He basically fostered a reputation for having access to the connections you need. Same time, that don't mean he'll entertain any old idea. I thought he was lunatic for taking over at OpenAI and thought their idea was crazy. But he knew better than me.
Agree and you have a very reasonable comment, and I’m not sure why others don’t agree.
Just one possible correction: the AirBnB guys were about 4 years later than the 1st batch. I don’t think any of them were in the 1st batch with a different startup like the Twitch crew.
My bad. Yes they weren't in the first batch. But hot damn being in that first batch was pretty big. Being the right place at the right time is incredibly important. Also, to be the specific kind of person to do YC so early on should probably not be undersold either.
Agree with you again. It’s not just timing and location either. It’s also your Alma matter in both education and the firms you worked at. If you create a resume for the typically YC member, over 90% of them went to an Ivy League level school and worked at a FAANG, MAGMA or whatever firm has great mindshare or prestige
Being in the first batch wasn’t being in the right place at the right time. Look at all the failures in that batch.
YC succeeded in collecting all the companies that were going to be founded anyway, but were too inexperienced/naive to get real VC money. YC took a big cut of all of them for peanuts.
And they exploit those types of founders to this day. It’s a sweatshop wrapped up in a cult of the fruit-fly startup. The odds of success are low, but YC has a share every lottery ticket, so they come out ahead even though most everyone they support fails.
Altman realized what a great business that is, so he wisely pivoted away from his failed startup to exploit startups instead.
He is just the face. He gets paid for bringing attention and creating a forward momentum to the companies. He has access to highly placed individuals too and that’s more important than you building an actual product in our economy.
> Law 7: Get Others to Do the Work for You, but Always Take the Credit: Get others to do your work for you. Use their skill, time, and energy to further your ambitions while taking full credit. You’ll be admired for your efficiency.
Your jobs are to found the company and Be The Founder, just imagine how many more companies you could found if you had people to do the former. (See also: Elon Musk.)
As a local, I'm really looking forward to when this madness is over in a few days, so we can finally use the metro again without that ever-present puke smell.
We also switched to Pulsar after running some benchmarks for our use cases. We use these services primarily as worker queues for image tasks that require low latency. And Pulsar turned out to have a 20x lower latency than Kafka in our setup.
Absolutely. I built my motorized one about 6 years ago (bought the motorized legs and wood top for a total of 450€ back then) and I still use it on all home office days. The key is having a rubber floor mat with some knobs you can play with to stand comfortably. I can also recommend getting a walking pad. I usually have 10k steps before lunch with a 2.5km/h speed only that lets me still type perfectly.
I primarily got my desk because I was tired of having bad posture and back pain. But since I also started working out heavily at the same time I built the table, I can't attribute the desk only to alleviating any pain I had. It definitely helps though with good posture.
I'm also happy I got a smart version that can remember 4 heights. I had another (much more expensive) table at my previous workplace that didn't have it. And it was a pain switching from a seated to standing position.
I agree. Even just a bunch of RTX 3060s go a long way[1]. Also, in the case of my startup we can use our local storage vs uploading dozens of terabytes of data to the cloud and deal with data privacy issues.
