I think we're all aware of the number of vehicles out there having the strongly reinforced solid hardtop plus the heavy-duty luggage rack, who never seem to be carrying any luggage up there. Obviously to mitigate a potentially more damaging brontosaurus incident.
It does if the person driving sucks at using it. I've been driving OPD since 2018 and friends that get sick in Teslas driven by Uber drivers have told me they didn't get sick and wondered what I was doing different. The difference is I know how to use it.
I remember reading this back in 2015, but how is this not just the age old conservative (don't do more than needed) vs progressives (lets try some new risk things) debate? As much as I can relate to a more conservative choice when choosing tech that might power a giant consumer company, sometimes using riskier tech in a startup makes more sense to get the real innovation flowing...
and the idea of "Choose New Technology, Sometimes" just feels like a little cheat to get away from the bigger issue with the overall thesis. In this way, the idea in this blog just feels so out of touch.
It’s not about conservative vs progressive but about “safe, battle-tested, stable” vs “could be amazing future-tech”; and the idea of having a small number of innovative technologies, in particular where they matter, is about allowing yourself to spend all those thought-tokens on areas that matter.
You don’t want to be innovating your logging tech or your database if the old will work because you might spend 90% of your time trying to get your new, creative logging solution working when you should be spending it on the creative part of your business.
I might be missing something but conceptually, “safe, battle-tested, stable” vs “could be amazing future-tech” IS about conservative vs progressive... am I missing something?
Good point, I suppose conservative is the right word there. Its broader meaning has been a bit louder lately, so I didn’t think of it the right way there.
I feel like there's a common theme in business advice like this, the bullshit jobs thesis, general alienation of workers, that individuals have a lot of tunnel vision and don't understand the place of a firm in capitalism. The reality is we don't know what strategies will and won't succeed. The system overall works to the extent it works because a hundred thousand monkeys throwing shit at the wall are bound to hit a few targets at least a few times, even if the vast majority of them miss. The larger economy and investment ecosystems are set up under the assumption that most products will never see a single user and most companies will fail. Most employees will spend much of their careers working on projects that get scrapped. It's not much different than life itself. Evolution has no master plan. Most organisms never reproduce. Most species barely make a blip in any ecosystem before going extinct. It sucks for the individuals, but the larger collective goes on and thrives. Life itself does fine. The economy at large does fine, in spite of the ebbs and flows of the business cycle with its bubbles and recessions. Everything still works out in the long run. It's not only okay to fail but it's crucial to the long run success of our collective endeavors.
The vast majority of business strategy is just the lucky survivors assuming in retrospect they were smarter than everyone else. I've been seeing it my entire life, not just in business but in the military, in politics, in sports, in entertainment. Some project leader has one success and coasts off of that forever, failing over and over again afterward because they keep getting rehired, reelected, or re-invested in by inherently conservative investors, hiring committees, team owners, voters, party leaders, who blindly assume winning a Super Bowl means you must have known what you were doing, no matter how many random bounces going your way you had no control over it took.
This is unrelated to this article, but I see such simple titles posted on HN often and given how many articles I read per day on HN, I don't know if it's worth me reading or not until I click it. I wish we had a feature on HN that semantically defined who the intended audience for an article is, specially for such opaque titles. Something like the following (used gemini for this):
Here are the 1-2 tags defining the intended audience for each article on the front page:
Five frontier LLMs disagree on 67% of 1k real-world fact-check claims
Tags: AI Researchers, Machine Learning Engineers
YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
Tags: Digital Content Creators, General Tech Consumers
A Eureka machine that thinks like nature and explores what AI cannot
Tags: Computer Scientists, AI Researchers
AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes
Tags: Linux Users, Hardware Engineers
I analysed 20 years of my chats
Tags: Data Enthusiasts, Hobbyist Programmers
I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Tags: Tech Entrepreneurs, Product Managers
Super confusing... seems like some sort of in with the VCs that can pull this program's guests was enough to create a new podcast that is now seen as influential. My best is, this was a side liquidity event for the openAI VCs that had somehow invested into the podcast, looking to get some money out of openAI stake.
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