@glyph Did you quote post something?

[leah@blahaj.social]

@glyph @bitprophet yet we are only 24% into the century

[neal@social.gompa.me]

@glyph It's a great blog post, but I think we often recognize "big" things in retrospect rather than as they are coming. Nobody really considered the Internet "big" when it was first being put together. Nobody considered Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to be "big" either.

The behavior of VCs is based on this evidence. And I don't think they're wrong for it either.

Maybe this is it for "big things", maybe not. Who knows? Just enjoy the ride for the next century, I guess. 😄

[neal@social.gompa.me]

@glyph To be clear, your general advice about building small-scale things is still good. It makes everything a lot easier. Simplicity ironically often leads to clean and scalable software.

(Sometimes the problem domain makes that hard, though. 😦)

[lynnntropy@hachyderm.io]

@glyph It's obviously a very different kind of tool, but Homebrew solves this problem, no?

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@lynnntropy Nowhere near as comprehensively. Relatively little software is available as casks.

[mi@awawa.cat]

@glyph i keep thinking an example of things built for a too-large, non-personal scale is current state of Unix-likes and main distros thereof. It seems to me we now once again lack readymade installable setups suitable for hardened personal/small-business VM deployment, and we keep requiring lots of expert knowledge from anyone choosing to nowadays exist independently in the hostile web. Also replied on it elsewhere: awawa.cat/notice/B1qyfkwUVjGenI9fNI

[bitprophet@social.coop]

@leah @glyph the last 5 years easily count for at least 10 tho!!

[snoopj@hachyderm.io]

@glyph the main things I would have remarked on in this vein would be that footnotes 2+3 seem out of order to me, and ZIRP isn't defined (or a definition linked to)

Otherwise? Another banger. Especially like the call to action to be prepared for the free-money party in "AI" to come to an end, it's wild seeing how few developers going in for the technology are acknowledging this inevitability.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@SnoopJ thanks for the feedback, I did in fact fail to run my footnote fixing script this time. Not sure if I should update it given that it would swap the link targets now … but I can add an Investopedia for ZIRP or something:)

[snoopj@hachyderm.io]

@glyph yea, I wouldn't go to any trouble to adjust it, but I did notice it :)

[jmeowmeow@hachyderm.io]

@glyph Isn't "Story 1" (small team, speculative product) the classic case for portfolio funding across multiple bets, perhaps in some product area where your investors have expertise?

When a bet fails or doesn't zoom upward, you know something more about the management and staff and whether you might want them on a new project, or perhaps you have a story for merging overlapping proposals to better cover a segment. (my previous employer was two start-ups merged by private capital and sold to a larger company as a unit).

Story 2 does seem like "too much capital, not enough investment staff and expertise" and it leans toward cornering territory rather than creating new value.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@jmeowmeow arguably the entire *point* of VC is to finance story 1, because public markets are supposed to be holding the larger pools of capital and financing story 2 with large, mature businesses.

But public capital markets have fallen apart due to a toxic combination of pervasive fraud and highly gameable regulation. Most capital is allocated in barely-regulated private market gambling now, which means there's too much money in those markets, which makes VCs unwilling to bet on story 1.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@jmeowmeow What's happening with private markets right now is that when you're chasing story 2, what you're supposed to be looking at is the *existing unit economics* and scaling them up, with the benefit of extensive reporting requirements that allows sophisticated investors to evaluate the plausibility of that scaling, distributed across the processing power of the entire public market

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@jmeowmeow instead, we now have a version of story 2 where everything is made-up numbers on pitch decks that nobody needs to check. the dumb money is scrambling to get into these bets before they become "the next big thing" (c.f. my most recent blog post) and they're all scared they'll be left behind.

and "VC" is a bit of an abstraction here too, it's not just them, it's the whole system. a lot of the investment is just coming straight from megacorps as direct investment, no VC firms in sight

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@glyph It's funny reading this and thinking of all the "quantum applications" startups that VCs threw money at before belatedly realizing the absurdity of selling applications for devices that haven't been built yet.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@xgranade that is the main lesson that quantum mechanics teaches us, isn't it? "time is a flat circle"?

[cthos@mastodon.cthos.dev]

@xgranade @glyph “but but but First mover advantage!” I shout while shoveling money into the furnace

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@cthos @glyph Yup. Having speculative startups isn't even the worst idea (at least once you've accepted the very capitalism-brained idea that startups should be a thing), but the way VCs treated them like warehouses of rentable GPUs was... absurd.

[vladimir_lu@hachyderm.io]

@cthos @xgranade @glyph The Irish Moss smoke is much better than American Moss smoke 😉

[kwiersma@techhub.social]

@glyph I have been using Latest (https://github.com/mangerlahn/Latest) and it has been working pretty well. Doesn’t seem to cover all the apps I use though.