100% agree. Only thing is, as the last few years have shown, if you don't jump into the cesspit but a majority of your fellow humans do, it affects you anyway.
we also need time, energy. and care to make and tend to our own gardens. I see more and more people even with jobs try to go into various hustles just to make ends meet. Let alone those who aren't in work and pushed into NEET-dom.
I love Stephen's writing, and this is so well written.
> I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice.
I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life.
I have been door knocking in a swing county in Wisconsin, and the first question we ask is, "what is the top issue you care about?" I've had one person say "the environment", and a couple have said, "what's happening in America right now." Almost everyone else answers "cost of living". So if you're waiting for things to change, you will be waiting a while.
Historically, something like 3.5 percent of the population need to be really engaged to make change happen, and the US isn't there right now, because we're all on our computers. The election coming up is an important one, so if you want to do something, start door knocking, become an election judge, sign up to be an observer at the polls, donate money. Indivisible is doing a lot of great, local, on-the-ground stuff, join your local chapter.
I think we gotta get people to see past the false dichotomy: part of their increased cost of living is due to climate change:
- your home insurance is more expensive b/c fire/hurricane/etc risk is worse in your state
- and you probably don't have flood insurance but the risks there are worse too
- your electricity bill is worse b/c you're using AC more b/c it's hotter
- climate change does have healthcare impacts, including expanded geographic range of a bunch of vector-borne illnesses, as well as acute issues during heat events. Even if you're not directly one of these patients, your health insurance costs will increase in part due to these risks.
- replacing key infrastructure which is damaged by extreme weather is expensive
- during extreme weather events, your ability to earn may be disrupted
- and every business you spend at also has increased costs due to the same factors, which they pass on to you
It turns out that multiple generations of emitting without paying attention to the externalities has created literal costs that we _all_ now bear, and these costs will continue to increase.
The reason so few people care about climate change is that so few people truly understand it. They can see the grocery and housing bills, but CO2 in the atmosphere is some sort of invisible bogeyman to them, even though it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.
I did a bunch of door-knocking, for Obama and Clinton, and it didn't feel like I was doing any good. Everybody had long since made up their minds.
It's not like these are hard choices. Either you view the differences as stark and obvious, or you think that it's all the same (and I'm never going to persuade you otherwise). I don't think I garnered even a single vote, and quite a few expressed aggravation.
There are still swing voters and it is worth fighting for them! Also helpful to just remind people they need to vote. Typically, there is less turnout in midterms.
I’ve come to understand the inequality crisis (which manifests itself as a cost-of-living crisis for most people) as one of the root causes for the poly-crisis we are living through.
For climate change, I can totally understand how a household struggling to feed their kids will reject messaging of the form „oh and btw you also need to stop driving your car and heat your home lest the planet dies“. Of course they will revolt against that.
To me, fundamentally, the west MUST solve the inequality crisis first before we can ever hope of solving any of the other problems. People need slack to care about the environment, their neighbors, peace, etc.
And the other aspect of it is fairness - people rightfully look at the top, say „well the billionaires are jetting all around the globe and no one gives a fuck, why should I cut my holidays?“
We need to fix inequality first, and I project that most other issues we have today will magically resolve themselves.
Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days and Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
I think 100k people for a club is pretty big. I interpret the Carlin quote to mean: "you're seeing a lot of people connected, you're not one of them". That the "club" is big enough that these connections regularly come up, is what I think he meant.
There was a lot of PR, but the money Gates and Buffet gave away, the foundations they created, the attention they drummed up for various charities and causes is certainly not to be scoffed at.
I'm sure they could have done more with less fanfare, but you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems", which seems unfair. They have undoubtedly changed more lives than I'll ever manage to.
>you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems"
No, this is the bar the general public sets for billionaires. They, ignorant of the scale of the problems, believe billionaires could afford to solve the world's problems. That is a widespread belief.
> M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory to multitask across demanding apps and run LLMs on device for secure and private agentic tasks. It also provides up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth — a 10 percent increase over M5 and a 2.5x increase over M1.
I meant that it's a difficult comparison between platforms without having all the details like memory latency, how the memory controller load increases latency (can increase by 4x on some platforms), cache latency, TLB entries, etc.
Extremely high bandwidth is great for copying data, but not as relevant for walking chains of pointers, where latency/cache/TLB entries are more important.
So just saying "high bandwidth == better" is true when other variables are the same, but they rarely are, especially in comparison to x86-64 offerings.
All of these are independent that it is a SoC with on-package DRAM.
I care about this issue, and Norway of course has built an incredible social democracy. However, Norway is also able to do this because it's just a much smaller country. The U.S. is absolutely massive, both in terms of population and in terms of land area, and it is incredibly diverse. A lot of the problems in the U.S. just go away if you don't have to worry about the same scale or diversity of people. I absolutely want the U.S. to rise up to the AI crisis, and we're having major issues, but in the grand scheme of things, the U.S. still does a good job given the scale of its challenges, and I'm not sure Norway would do better.
Massachusetts, the small state in the US, has a population 25% larger than Norway. The New Jersey suburbs of NYC, not even the whole state, has a population comparable to Norway.
Norway is cool, but it's not very useful as a guide for managing a country.
> He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks
It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.
> Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money.
This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.
I think it's kind of like Burning Man, where everyone's favorite experience was their early days when they were young. As you get older, you complain it's gone downhill and the new generation is going for all the wrong reasons.
I find people's view is based on how much they're personally "winning" financially. If they're making money, then daily life seems more about building. If they're not making money, then the oppressive cost of living makes money seem all-important in the culture (which, in fact, it is and has been for generations).
SF and the Bay Area are constantly shuffling through and recombining ideas. What generated money relatively easily in 2010 would've started becoming low value in 2018, rapidly approaching an asymptote of relative uselessness today. 2018 is about the point where you needed to be pivoting to AI if you really wanted to remain part of the city's "upper class", where money feels like it doesn't matter because it's abundant and automatic. 2010 was the era of mobile apps.
I think it is interesting how now, a lot of the selling to individuals regarding AI is the ability to do what was popular in 2010 (building apps, websites, games) is easy now due to AI. I know so many people who have made workout apps, CRMs, planners, etc. that are baffled by why their work isn't picking up traction (keep in mind, we aren't in SV).
Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.
You can still get traction for your workout apps, CRMs etc with the right market research (you need to find a niche) and the right marketing.
There are gazillions of candy crush remakes, but Royal Match, launched in 2021, still made it to the top in revenue. It was not thanks to some existing monopolist pushing it, but thanks to a) ginormous marketing budget and b) relentless execution and experience of making mobile games before, i.e. you know what works, what doesn't, how to extract maximum amount of revenue, etc.
> It was not thanks to some existing monopolist pushing it, but thanks to a) ginormous marketing budget and b) relentless execution and experience of making mobile games before
Er... so you don't need to be a monopolist, just have a massive amount of existing capital and deep understanding of the field?
An LLM can build novel things if guided by a human with a novel idea.
The issue is that simple and novel can also be copied easily (anyone can just point an LLM at the target and ask it to build a local personal version). The days of making money from this class of app are over.
Novel and very complex ideas will still make money, but outside of gaming are usually niche markets.
Novel and moderately complex apps will have to build their own moats to prevent copying - heavy server side rendering, server logic processing, and an idea that can't be re-implemented on simple CRUD architecture.
> Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.
We're already there. It seems like every intern I see has built a custom chatbot with a RAG pipeline integrated into an internal application.
And every legacy SaaS is paying millions in consulting to add the same to their app.
> This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.
Another perspective is just that SF's culture has been declining for decades. As someone born in SF, I'd agree.
I think the focus on building things is the wrong framing - that seems to be still there. But this AI wave is centered around automation, which has a different flavor to the previous cycles (1970-2010), which very much felt much more positive sum and less hyper capitalistic.
I've just been reading The Making of Prince of Persia (highly recommend [1]) and it's amazing how the journal feels exactly like today's startup scene. But everything is dated 1989.
I think there was a time when people who generally went for MBAs started going into CS and other majors angling to get into a tech company. There was also a coincidental proliferation of tech “bootcamps.” I think that’s when things tilted away from technology as a way to improve things to a vehicle to greater riches.
Another theory is that things has gotten worse as more and more petite bourgeois prospects for class travel lose faith in the invisible hand and turn to pure grift.
And when it comes to culture as festivals they are very much victims of getting hallowed out and sucked dry.
And for me 10 years before that - not in the bay area but in my CS program at UCSD. Going into the junior year in '96 there was a clear inflection point, we suddenly had a flood of finance bro types all over the CS lab as the dot com bubble was quickly inflating.
I think the real watershed wan't bitcoin, it was the internet bubble, before that the rule of thumb was you couldn't go public without 5 consecutive quarters of profit - you really had to build something real - suddenly you could do it on hype alone and the focus turned to that
It’s always been a travesty, it was just harder to see through it because back then morals hadn’t been completely dismantled by the last 15 years of whatever the US has become
A bummer? Jim, even whilst failing, is living a life better than 99.999% of humans that have ever lived, and surely better than 99% of humans alive today. He has access to SOTA medical care, pharmaceuticals, ideal human weather, healthy and nutritious food on demand at the push of a button, etc.
Tech startup is one of the few remaining ways still allowed for plebs to build wealth unless they're born into it, because digital stuff isn't influenced by real estate feudalism.
Also why generative AI scares people who want to build wealth with tech, as it removes a vehicle to create moats to build wealth and concentrates existing wealth that can avoid having to hire labor. At least the illusion of meritocracy and skill (versus connection and luck) leading to wealth is evaporating.
As long as there is money people will come just for that. That's where we got tech bros, like finance bros, instead of just a bunch of nerds making cool stuff.
As far as I can tell, the paper never actually mentions the companies who aren't publishing papers. Open AI, Anthropic, and hugging face are all specifically mentioned as companies that do publish papers. Just FYI for anyone else who reads "AI's top startups" and immediately assumes OpenAI and Anthropic.
From a quick skim, the paper does a really bad job at answering the question in everyone’s mind when they see the title. Like, OpenAI is at the top in terms of citations, but as we all know old influential papers tend to accumulate more citations, and there was a period when OpenAI was, you know, more open… Are they still contributing now, post Altman pivot? No idea from the paper (maybe I missed it). In fact papers after 2025 are explicitly excluded, and we’re probably more interested in access to the cutting edge.
