What are the most interesting things in tech you've seen lately?
To me this resonates with the idea that FAANGs swallow up promising engineers and have them work on mundane problems to help generate revenue.
Certainly there are novel or interesting problems to be solved even in these mundane areas, but I wonder what we may be leaving on the table as a species - if many of these brilliant people were to focus their energies on other problems or research, what could we achieve?
Tangentially, are there positive (but not necessarily profitable) uses for the pile of cash that big tech is just sitting on?
Has anyone seen this in practice?
That reminds me of how 10 years ago, the smartest people in the world were working for investment banks on high-frequency trading to improve tiny efficiencies on stock market profits. And today they're working for FAANGs to improve ad targeting.
Both cases are really just shifting money around, not creating new technology or wealth. But apparently improving marginal efficiencies of administrative work reaps more short-term profits than creating new value.
Source?
We already have low latency, high bandwidth internet available in big urban areas. Starlink offers a real solution for the rest of the world (rural communities, boats, vacation homes, isolated industrial facilities, etc).
The era of being outside of internet coverage is coming to a close.
Same old, same old. People revisiting old tech (linear algebra, newton-rhapson, euclidean graph theory, bfs etc etc.) and rediscovering its value are getting rich with new and interesting projects, people chasing new tech pipe dreams getting scammed or scamming others. The scene hasn't changed much recently.
If the hardware were just a bit better, I could see it completely transforming education.
User-friendly apps have cropped up that enable people to easily save and invest their stable coins and earn interest, such as Argent (https://www.argent.xyz/). People are creating Social investment strategies around tokens and pooling their funds together on TokenSets (https://www.tokensets.com/), these are basically social ETFs.
There are no-loss lotteries that simply invest the pool of funds to earn interest and then one lucky staker wins the interest (https://www.pooltogether.com/). Decentralized funding of open-source Web3 projects (https://gitcoin.co/).
I can really go on and on, I'm not even covering some of the developments with Non-Fungible Tokens, gaming, governance, etc.
Here are a couple newsletters I recommend for following the space: https://thedefiant.substack.com/ https://bankless.substack.com/
Outside of the real estate company they are all gambling and coin 'investing' companies. I was bullish on ethereum and still have ~$11k from early purchases but I lost interest as it's all people trading alt-coins to trying strike it rich without creating anything.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
It can messed with as an amateur, it's steampunk (I also think cyperpunk). There's a lot of potential, Loon actually launching in Kenya seems like a big deal.
There's more people living in submarines than balloons which seems crazy to me. We'll talk about a balloon habitat on Venus, so lets start here.
Very cool link.
Today the news is trying to become Facebook before Facebook becomes the news.
You media consumption will be controlled by <5 companies... that's not so great.
ARM on the desktop would be one of the biggest things to happen in the desktop space, and it will be interesting to see if Apple succeeds with it, and if PC manufacturers follow suit as a result.
