Nathan Rowe

This is actually a pretty cool idea. Having it as an option on each subreddit could be cool. Phones have a pretty reliable "Are you human" check that preserves privacy but verifies a human face was present to press send.

Thomas Henderson in 1832 measured the parallax of a star (Alpha Centari) for the first time against its background stars. He measured 20 trillion miles (real number is 25 trillion!). 5 orders of magnitude greater than the largest distance ever recorded. And he sat on that discovery for 6 years. For six years he was the only man on earth who knew the universe was 10,000 times bigger than any previous measurement implied. And then in 1838 and 1839 a bunch of publications came out and everyone on earth accepted that the universe is massive. About a century later the first distant galaxy was measured to be ANOTHER 6 orders of magnitude further away.

@NimaZeighami a great game

One thing I do is I tease things way in advance on my Twitter and no one ever gets what I’m teasing. Anyway, unrelated: The War of the Lions

@benhylak The reason I mention it is because Tyler Cowen mentions that one of his metrics he uses as a proxy for "stamina" is how young were you when you had your first publication. Younger implies hardcore endless energy. And side projects of substance are similar for coding.

@benhylak I'm about 2/3 done with this book on hiring: amazon.com/Talent-Identif… Really good. Much of it is obvious, but nice to see studies backing up intuition.

i mean 0 *real* side projects. because of ai, everyone can pad their resumes with like single-shot LLM written apps/sites/etc. that are hard to spot in a 30s glance.

My friend has been working on this game for literally 10 years. Possibly only 9 and a half. It's finally happening!

@Jonathan_Blow In this graph the growth rate is about 8% per year. Inflation adjusted it's like 4.5%. That's still ~2.5% over growth rate. so it will take about 50 years for the debt servicing to grow to the size of the entire federal receipts.

Any technically-educated person recognizes this shape and knows where it gets to from here, in a very short period of time.

@DFinsterwalder @RnaudBertrand Yeah I haven't been to europe since pre-uber, so I had no idea what it was actually like. I buy the argument that market regulations tend to entrench existing tech and large players, and make it impossible for smaller players to get off the ground. But Uber may be a bad example.

Neither of those companies bend regulations but ended up adhering to them. For example Uber driver have to have “taxi driver licenses”. Those are different from the us taxi medallions and everyone can make them, but it’s expensive and excessive. Takes like a year and costs thousands. They have to learn stuff like street names which is a pre-GPS legacy bs. Uber tried to break that and didn’t have the slightest chance. Now every Uber is basically a taxi. People are still preferring Uber (or things like share now) over regular taxis as they have bad apps or phone only etc. In fact Uber thinking they could just do it that way made it even much more difficult for them as they couldn’t get drivers etc. European companies like sharenow followed protocol and worked smoother.

I just read this WSJ article on why Europe's tech scene is so much smaller than the US's and China's. I'm afraid that, like most articles on this topic, it largely misses the mark. Which in itself illustrates a key reason why Europe is lagging behind: when you fail to understand the root causes of an issue, you have zero chance to solve it. What makes me competent to speak on this topic? Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I founded and led HouseTrip which at the time was one of Europe's top startups. We were the first historical startup in which all top 3 VC investors in Europe invested. So I have a pretty intimate knowledge of the European entrepreneurship ecosystem and what it takes to create and grow a tech company in Europe. We were pretty promising as a startup. In fact as promising as it can possibly get. We had a similar concept to Airbnb (with some notable differences I won't bore you with), except we created the company 1 year before they did. Which means we were the first-mover - globally - with a multi-billion-euro concept, strong financial backing by the 3 top investors in Europe and, at some point, a team of 250 people with some of the brightest minds in tech in Europe. Everything we needed to succeed. And yet we didn't succeed: ultimately we were essentially crushed by our American competitor Airbnb in our home turf - Europe - and we had no choice but to sell ourselves to another American company, Tripadvisor. Believe me, I've reflected long and hard on how that could have happened. In fact after I left the company in 2015 I even spent 3 months in isolation in the Annapurna mountains in Nepal to reflect full time on exactly that 😅 And I then moved to China, where I spent the next 8 years and where I had the chance to study their ecosystem to understand why they're successful and Europe isn't. So all in all, I think I have some degree of legitimacy to comment on this topic. The WSJ article says that Europe lags behind due to the usual suspects, the reasons you constantly hear about: too much regulation, fragmented European markets, limited access to financing, a culture that isn't conducive to the startup grind, etc. Some of those are true, but imho all are secondary. Take excessive regulations for instance, which gets mentioned all the time. If they were such a hindrance to startups, why would American startups succeed in Europe - like Airbnb in our case - and European startups not? We all face the same regulations 🤷 Or take fragmented markets. Same question: how could US startups successfully conquer these fragmented EU markets when European startups can't? Because that's the real elephant in the room, and really the story of the European tech scene since the advent of the internet: US startups have shown a remarkable ability to capture European markets despite the supposed barriers, making many of the "usual suspects" explanations for Europe's tech struggles very unconvincing. In other words, logically, any explanation where both US and European startups face identical barriers fails to address the fundamental difference in outcomes we consistently observe. Based on my experience, the key problem faced by European startups can be summarized in one word: patriotism. There is virtually none in Europe, and more than anything that's what's killing EU startups, or preventing them from developing. It used to drive me absolutely nuts at HouseTrip. What a startup needs first and foremost, especially a consumer-facing startup like we were, is marketing, to become famous. At first, when I created the company and before Airbnb was even a thing, I used to pitch the company to the media and the general response I would get was almost one of contempt, as in "why would I belittle myself to write about your startup? And furthermore, who would be stupid enough to stay in an apartment when there are hotels? You guys have no future..." And then Airbnb got launched and the American media started their thing, hyping the company like it was the greatest innovation since sliced bread, like they were national heroes, giving them hundreds of millions in free publicity. That's when European media started to take notice. Not of us, god forbid, but of Airbnb. The concept was promoted by Silicon Valley, see... so now it was valid. So I went back to pitch HouseTrip to European media. This time around I was met with a different kind of contempt: "So you guys are like Airbnb? Why would we cover a European copycat when we can just write about the real American original?" Luckily I'm not violent but lets say those moments really tested my civility 😅 All in all, we arrived in the absolutely grotesque situation where, despite Airbnb not having yet set foot in Europe, they were already a cultural phenomenon there, promoted by European media, for free, when the European original - yours truly - had to spend millions on paid marketing (mostly to Google and Facebook, American companies) to achieve a small fraction of the brand recognition. Which means that, insanely, Airbnb was probably doing more business in Europe than we did before even opening an office there, simply on the back of the free publicity they were getting. How on earth can you even compete with that? This dynamic was at play with general European elites too. I remember very clearly having dinner next to a legendary European entrepreneur and investor - who I won't name, a man who supposedly, on paper, is dedicating his life to furthering the European tech ecosystem. We naturally got to talk about HouseTrip and he literally told me, and this is an exact quote: "you know I don't really like copycats, they really hurt the European ecosystem." Another big test for my civility that night... And even if we had been a copycat, so what? That's how China got started, there's nothing to be ashamed of. You need to learn to walk before you can run. In fact if you study the history of innovation you'll find that every major tech power, including the US, started by imitating and adapting others' innovations before developing their own. Speaking of China, again a country that I know in depth for having lived there for 8 years after HouseTrip, I've come to the conclusion that patriotism, a deeply rooted mindset of sovereignty, is truly the magic ingredient behind their success. Contrary to popular belief, they don't do it in a stupid way by just banning competition. Those cases are actually very rare and only occur if the companies in question violate Chinese law in pretty egregious ways. Most of the time it's the exact contrary: they welcome foreign companies and competition, but create conditions where local alternatives can thrive alongside them, giving Chinese users and businesses legitimate options to choose domestic champions. Which means you end up with, for instance, Apple doing well in China but simultaneously allowing the rise of Huawei or Xiaomi. Or Tesla doing well in China but simultaneously allowing the rise of BYD or Nio. Etc. And China is, interestingly, more comparable to the EU than most people realize. It is, again contrary to popular belief, extremely decentralized when it comes to doing business, with various provinces competing against each other much the same way EU countries compete against each other. But they do it in such a way where, again, the overarching sense of Chinese sovereignty never gets sacrificed at the altar of provincial competition. And where the ultimate goal is to develop Chinese champions which can successfully compete on the global stage. So there you have it, the dirty little secret behind Europe's lag. We're essentially witnessing a "colonization of the minds" whereby Europe has structurally internalized its technological inferiority, celebrating American startups while dismissing its own homegrown companies. Why does this barely ever get talked about? Think about it: do you seriously think that the Wall Street Journal would start advocating for, essentially, policies hostile to American tech dominance? Much better to focus on the usual red herrings like too much regulation or fragmentation which, conveniently, would primarily result in clearing obstacles for American tech giants to dominate European markets even further, rather than nurturing homegrown competitors. This article is, in itself, an illustration of the "colonization of the minds".

@DFinsterwalder @RnaudBertrand Maybe companies can grow big in the US without facing those regulations, and then use their big size to overcome regulations in EU? To some extent that's what both Uber and AirBnB had to do even in the US. Grow big enough that local jurisdictions demanded reform for Uber/AirBnB

@RnaudBertrand “Take excessive regulations for instance, which gets mentioned all the time. If they were such a hindrance to startups, why would American startups succeed in Europe - like Airbnb in our case - and European startups not?” Thank you! I can’t hear this argument anymore!

To celebrate fortnite freedom day, I played a battle royale game on my iphone. Now time to retire.

@BraytonKey You're already up to 1! Not bad!

Goals.

@balajis But any product you're competing against made outside the country has to pay tariffs on $1.2M rather than just $1m. So $366k. They have to charge $1.566m while you only charge $1.5m in local markets. I think any portion of production you can onshore now adds some price advantage

Yes, because it is targeted directly at the sector of the economy it's supposed to help. The US factory must now pay (say) $300k in surprise tariffs on a $1M shipment. It's like a pre-sales tax. Vendor must pay before they can sell the finished product. x.com/XFaure/status/…

Ironically, one symptom of deindustrialization is that many commenters have never actually managed a physical business. So. Suppose your US company imports $1M of high quality parts, and adds in its own components to produce finished goods sold for $1.2M per batch. Your gross profit is $200k per batch. But wait! Suddenly a new 30% tariff is imposed on that $1M of parts. You now have to fork over $300k to customs before you sell anything. That’s cash you probably don’t have. Oh, and even if you do sell everything, you’re now losing $100k per batch. With a sinking feeling, you realize your profitable business which you somehow managed to keep in America all these years has suddenly become unprofitable. You post online about how bad this is but get shouted down by an angry mob, convinced that capitalists like you should die. You can’t tell nowadays if they’re on left or right. Moreover, you don’t have the time, money, skills, or tools in house to build that $1M of parts yourself. You are being asked to do the equivalent of growing a maple tree when all you needed was a little maple syrup. So now you are faced with several tough choices. (1) First, you may need to go into debt or fire people to quickly come up with the $300k in cash to pay for these surprise tariffs at customs. Even if the tariff might go away, it might not, so you have to get the cash somehow or risk having your shipment impounded. (2) Next, you might need to reduce quality to stop losing $100k on each batch. You could order the lower quality $750k parts, grimace and pay 30% tariff at customs, and hope you can build and sell for the same price of $1.2M per batch despite the lower quality. (3) Alternatively, you could keep the quality parts at $1M and instead raise prices to $1.5M per batch to get back your original margins of $200k per batch, which you need to pay employees after all. But that’s a big hike that your customer will probably not welcome, given that he’s likely dealing with his own tariff shock. So: these tariffs don’t really give an incentive to build in the US. Because it’s far more expensive to build a screw factory than to pay even high tariffs on a foreign screw. Instead what they likely mean is debt, layoffs, lower quality, and higher prices for any US company that buys parts abroad. Just to understand how common that is:

@AlanNoon It's a shame all the major social media companies have an iron grip on the feed and won't allow you to run alternative curations. That would be a really cool product

At this point, I would pay for a monthly subscription for a “nuke” feature: an AI driven cleaner that wipes any and all references to a person from my timeline.

What does one have to do to ensure they never, ever see a particular person come across their timeline ever again? I’ve muted every variation of this person’s name, Twitter handle, channel… everything I can think of. And yet he bubbles up in my feed all the time.

@benhylak June sounds ambitious... But sometime in 2025? I'd give 51% chance, sure.

anyone who believes that tesla will have fully autonomous robo-taxis by June is insane.

@pvncher @eatpraydiehard Is the implication here that coding is not a creative act?

@eatpraydiehard Yes. Especially when editing files it is essential

Normalize adding temp controls to chat apps. Let me set temp to zero on ChatGPT and Claude pro

@voxagonlabs @wookash_podcast It was very interesting to hear about how you feel your way through physics intuitively and struggle with the math! Great interview, thanks!

I had the great honor to be on my favorite gamedev podcast , the @wookash_podcast. It's a long one, but it covers most of my career in the games industry with a focus on physics simulation. Also make sure to check out the other episodes, there are so many good ones!

@benhylak Mike is the absolute best.

very, very, bullish. think what you will of the vision pro, mike did a great job.

@DFinsterwalder @Jonathan_Blow 5! is pronounced "Five Factorial"

@Jonathan_Blow One of the problems with this is that at its core its ill-defined without parenthesis. Using multiplication before addition is basically just a convention and doesn’t come from axioms or definitions. Most people use this convention, but technically this is not wrong.

Everyone talks about exponential returns on capital. But something I haven't heard explained very well is that there's also exponential returns on experience. You need to manage 10 people before you can manage 100. And then 1000 and then 10,000. Keep compounding experience.

AI Music is good. Or perhaps AI tools in the hands of someone diligent can make good music?