Daniel James

Beardy Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky argues we are ~clockwork ('Determined' 526 pages), grand-beardy occultist Alan Moore believes we dwell eternal in an immutable 4D crystal ('Jerusalem' 1266 pages)... here's the Twinnies (1:36), proof for everyone, no beards required.

@shakoistsLog @joelgrus I'd vote mid, then -- the very rich can be very weird, in particular if they are projecting anxiety heavily onto their kids, pushing them to tick boxes and 'succeed' in a world whose terms will have changed when they graduate

@joelgrus hmmm mid as in ehhh it’s fine it’s where i went to school and some kids are great and some are dumb. vs very rich community of well adjusted families idc about test scores that much

serious question for people with older kids: do i live in the best school zip code in the state but 40 min drive from both sets of parents and siblings or 5 minutes from them but in a mid school zone and try to figure something out. 3 kids. oldest 4

@samswoora I did this when my children were born. QoL win but locked up capital that could have climbed various 100x+ investment windows over the last 14 years, with similar operating costs to renting (e.g. property tax in my loc is brutal and unfair, mortgage etc.) Irrational in retrospect

I need to buy a house i need to buy a house i just need to buy a house

@Jonathan_Blow @CJHandmer SF, too ☹️

@CJHandmer Dude there are mosquitos in Berkeley now. It's crazy.

SoCal has the best climate on Earth and for the last 15 years invasive mosquitos have been spreading, making it very difficult to actually be outside, risking disease. Official guidance is "err, eliminate standing water". It's 2026. We have crispr, gene drive, and a local pest control budget that's high though to run a space program. Who do I have to fuck to get these mosquitoes extincted? They aren't native, they're displacing local species, they spread disease, they don't have rights. Kill them all!

@markdotdev Thank you! We're still working on it ;)

@capncleaver Dude, I loved puzzle pirates so much in high school. I still think about it often and how fun and truly unique it was. Thank you!

Today I was in an SF cafe with polished concrete floors feeling sad about leaving plush Vienna where I spent the past 6.5 weeks surrounded by beautiful historical architecture and eating complex cakes…but then in this cafe I met a dude building a hotel on the moon (right after I’d gotten a tour of my friend’s nearby office where his team just built a fully autonomous, electric truck). The majority of people in Vienna have never ridden and don’t believe self driving cars are real — since I’ve been back stateside I’ve basically only not driven in Teslas and Waymos Going from Vienna to SF feels less like taking a flight — it’s more like a Time Machine

@Jonathan_Blow @auderdy Fair enough, though I hope you stay in one of the neighborhoods when you visit :) NOPA / Divisadero for example is much 'nicer' (certainly fancier, ymmv) than it was in late 90s / 2000s. Even St Pete's has some less salubrious areas, no?

I think you are just willing to put up with a lot more than I am. SF from 1996-2008 was just tremendously nicer than it is today (I was just there last week, end up back in town 3-4x/year, so not hard to monitor the situation). Yeah it's had an uptick, so it's not at the absolute bottom, but the place where it is now is far from a place I would want to live in.

@jhong Another aspect to this is that Amazon seems to do about 10x Tesla + SpaceX revenues and operating income (P/E of ~30 vs. ~300 for Tesla), more like Berkshire, although lower margin (for now.)

@capncleaver ah ok yea i guess amazon might be more analogous than spacex simply because they are arm's length investments whereas spacex is likely just rolling up elon's own companies.

Alphabet owns a large stake in Waymo, SpaceX, and Anthropic, as well as all of Google, Youtube, and Android, just to name a few alpha bets. They are the closest thing we have to being the Berkshire Hathaway of tech. Put all of Elon's efforts together (as he's starting to do) and we have a second one.

@jhong Probably, although I think their datacenter capacity is similar, G has more for internal use. Zoox is cheaper than Waymo but may yet compete. Mostly I was comparing to Tesla + SpaceX + X + ...neurolink? My bet is on Amazon (and Alphabet.)

@capncleaver i dunno, i think the scale of alphabet's bets are much larger than amazon's but maybe i'm wrong

@Jonathan_Blow @auderdy It's really not a complete dump, the neighborhoods are thriving and pleasant, even downtown & SOMA is much better than a few years ago. The TL / 6th St. is still a bit grim but it's been that way forever and isn't so hard to avoid.

@auderdy It's just such a lost opportunity that SF is a complete dump. It could (and should) be a great city.

@DStrachman What's your method? Do you use treats?

My value added service is that if I visit your startup and you have a puppy, I will talk shop with you while we also do obedience training.

@jtoresson @automin Rapid iteration is key to making a good game. Using AI for code (not debating art) allows you iterate 10x+ faster. Please drop $20-100 on a Claude Code subscription and try to build a game (web, Roblox, Unity, whatebbs) yourself before you mis-advise indie devs again.

@automin That's one way to kneecap potential revenue and open yourself up to all sorts of legal fuckery, Paul. It's like saying thank God the painters have access to diarrhea, that way they can get shit on a canvas faster. Doesn't necessarily say anything about the fiscal viability no?

If you're starting development on a 4-5yr project and haven't sorted a seed round or angel investors to cover that runway, scrap the project and start something you can finish in <18 months.

@1thousandfaces_ Serious companies have a secret room for napping

the seriousness of a job is inversely correlated with how much your boss cares if you take a nap at 2pm

@jhong Yes, very much so, also the corollary: I don't want them to wind up in a place full of box-ticking 'high achievers' whose parents have shoved them bodily through the achievement pipeline towards careers that will no longer exist. Wherefore art thou, hackers?

Random thought: my college experience was great but in reality I mostly just read books to learn. I didn't personally get much out of class lectures. Everything I accomplished later, I really could have gone anywhere (or maybe even nowhere). The main value of college for me was making friends who were also smart and liked to make shit. But due to how admissions works today, those kids are spread out more than ever. I've noticed a lot of super smart kids who like to make shit don't even get into top schools anymore. So it doesn't really matter if my kids go to a "top school". What probably matters more is that they find and become friends with the other kids at their school that are also smart and like to make shit. And if they don't then they can just move to silicon valley or wherever those people congregate, and they can make friends there at random hackathons or whatever. I believe this mentally. but emotionally it's still hard to adjust.. and this is before even considering AI.

@JeremyNguyenPhD @viemccoy Heh that's a big question. I like a lot of explainer sci-fi (Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Doctorow) which isn't everyone's cuppa. Here's the mostly comic book pile I most recently left for discovery by teenagers and remained untouched.

@capncleaver @viemccoy if you feel like it, I'd love to hear about some weird and beautiful books you can recommend

I have an addiction to buying physical books (for a plethora of reasons but mostly I want to live in a library) and I've realized I can now justify any of them very easily by just saying "I'll read it to the baby 🥹" at which point my wife melts and doesn't question further

@JeremyNguyenPhD @viemccoy Sadly I have been pursuing this strategy for sixteen years and it's not working, my weird beautiful books are mostly ignored. I feel that I should have forced the habit, somehow, but that sounds silly, too.

I read so many wacked out books from so many different disciplines as a kid just because they were lying around the house and my parents were doing PhDs and my mum also is very open minded with way out there stuff. It means I have such an excuse now for buying all kinds of books that have been important to me so that my little guy has them lying around in case he feels like reading them when he's older.

@devahaz @thdxr Aye a lot of it was carpet baggers, blue shirt bizdev dudes, bbq dot com free shipping, 'I make web scenes', 'html engineers'... but even basic code + db (no php! m$ explorer broke js! people used Oracle!) was 'hard', so there were some hackers in the mix. What was your startup?

@capncleaver @thdxr But it just wasn’t a startup hub where lots of engineers worked was my point, that came long after dot com era

@devahaz @thdxr Aye agreed small handful of 'actual software' but imho 'was really even a thing' and set SF as the spot for the next wave. The growth for Organic etc., e-groups blue haired kids, pets dot com, the impossibility of finding an apartment and for lease offices by 2001 were fr

@capncleaver @thdxr Nah, small handful of actual software companies there. Macromedia and autodesk the two big ones. The startups around South Park were mostly web design firms, agencies, and other creative/adjacent firms. Source: had one of the startup software companies and knew all the rest.

@devahaz @thdxr Nah, the late 90s dot com saw a lot of startups, centered on South Park but even in the less salubrious bits of west Soma. They left nicely renovated offices and embittered formerly wealthy ravers, many of whom clung on until the 2006 pickup. Source: was there.

@thdxr FYI startups in SF wasn’t even really a thing until like 2006-2010 era when the city finally started taking off as a tech hub

@blader Especially in the context of mb having leaked its entire login key database 🙄

can’t believe zuck actually paid $200 million dollars for moltbook that’s like a fifth of an instagram

@demiurgently It *is* a bit wrong tho

when i was 13 i hung this anarchist flag in my bedroom & i distinctly remember thinking “my 30 year old self will think this is wrong & stupid”