I’m an engineer at a grocery chain that essentially has a monopoly in most of Texas. The chain has a good and well earned reputation for the public but it definitely uses underhanded monopolistic tactics to maintain dominance.
As it’s grown and expanded you can definitely tell that the ethics and how they treat workers / customers has gone down hill. Maybe it’s all the Amazon managers they’ve absorbed.
I have not even a rank neophytes understanding but these situations always remind me of the Hindu Trimurti, the balance of three powering the universe. Creation/dynamics gives way to preservation/ossification which eventually is destroyed/decays.
In the Vampire & Mage tabletop, there's Wild, Weaver, Wyrm, a direct parallel, which was a very fun cosmological tension.
Anyhow, this just feels like the lifecycle of companies. The young companies are dynamic & growing, but over times most orgs tend to ossify - even as they expand still becoming more deliberate & managed in their ways, punctuated by moments of renewed chaos & flourishing again. Extracting & preserving rather than growing. Until until until.
1. An economy driven by physical commodities like oil are susceptible to corruption and stagnation.
2. Norways dependence on oil has prevented it from doing anything meaningful economically or technologically.
Bambu labs got me into 3d printing. It’s the most seamless and simple 3d printer and functions as basically an appliance. Huge leap for 3d printing and I suspect we’re closer than ever to making jt affordable and easy.
Really? It's been nearly 20 years since Reprap, it's hard to imagine it maturing any more. If I get one I'll probably treat it like a belt sander or something, a tool that sits in the garage with plenty of fresh air. Agreed that it's a little concerning knowing some people that sit in a closed space with a dozen of these running (at that point you can smell the hot plastic...) but using common sense with good ventilation goes a long way.
I currently have a detached garage that wouldn’t be a good place for a printer. If I had an attached garage I could see it being a different situation.
As far as development goes, it seems like there has been a lot of advancement in just the past 5 years. Seeing what some of the high end commercial printers are capable of, I think there is still a lot of development left for what home printers can do. The Bambu printers are bound to get some competition. There are also a few competing technologies, and I’m willing to give it some more time to shake out. It still feels very much like a hobbyist tool for people who want to tinker a bit. I want to design and print without a lot of fuss.
I replaced my old Elegoo Neptune with a Bambu A1, and what a huge difference! I hated FDM printing for years, but now I use it all the time. I'm upgrading my resin printer next year, and can't wait to see what advances have been made in that realm.
I was a non technical founder idealist. Then my friends told me I lacked the skills to be a business and a technical founder.
It was honest and useful. I dropped out of nursing school, went to business school and taught myself how to write code. I worked at some F500 companies for a few years (still there sadly).
But last week I launched my first product with a cofounder and it’s probably the best one on the market. My “technical founder” is much more technical than me but I’ve filled out a little of both gaps.
If you’re a non technical founder I can’t take you seriously. Unless you’re a walking pile of cash with a top hat, no sane technical founder would risk it.
Here’s a paradoxical take. If you build an AI you want it to be super intelligent and take power away from humanity. Why would you want humans to have power over something more intelligent and powerful than us, that’s called a weapon.
Ironic. The product I’m building relies on Haiku. It’s brilliant, cheap and fast. Their models are very capable and much more accessible to small companies.
What a strange response. When it first got discovered/was first produced, Cocaine was perfectly "legal" (that is, unregulated). Only was made illegal (for general trade and use) around 1920 or so.
Remember, the British State once fought China over Opium. Not, as "these days" one might think, to stop production there or imports/smuggling to Britain - but to force China to drop the legal ban on the stuff they had introduced. Imagine a drug cartel with a superpower's army. And welcome to history lessons.
Yes. I work at a very comfortable job with decent pay and benefits.
What burns me out is the bureaucracy, politics and having to deal with people who simply aren’t curious or interested about anything in the slightest leading the charge.
I’ve been working on a startup on the side with my friend for almost a year now and the work has rarely ever burnt me out.
I think this would apply to most people but really it’s just how capitalism works.
I think for some people the value of starting is business is having control of who you surround yourself with.
I want to work with ambitious, smart and kind people who actively want to build a better world. I wouldn’t mind working at a company like that even if the job was tough.
Unfortunately most companies are ran by greedy ambitious people with no wisdom or care for tomorrow. Long term is end of the year for these people and big picture expands only to the business they work in. The people you work with aren’t any better either typically.
Maybe I’m surrounded by the wrong people, but even amongst my educated peers their opinions are regurgitated. Not even from an interesting author but what they’ve seen online or in mainstream culture.
The only exception being my contrarian friend but his opinions aren’t any more intelligent, just different.
Has this really been any different since the dawn of modern propaganda though? The only difference is now we use it to sell goods not just political ideas.
I think the few who leave Plato’s cave on their own are far less than what we would like and those who remain will never truly be free. Their comfort lies in the cave.
It’s hard. I think people get sucked into the matrix. I had a friend who was a really interesting person. Had well thought out beliefs and we used to talk about philosophy, politics and science.
Eventually she got a high paying, high stress high finance job and eventually she had no time to really think about things. Instead it was easier to repeat talking points she saw on the news and spend what little time she had enjoying her money. We still keep in touch but she actively isn’t interested in our old subjects as they’re too stressful to think about. It’s a fair point.
My coworker is reasonably decent engineer and intelligent person. His motivation in life is to just make money to feed his addiction to video games, gambling and drugs. We’re friends outside of work so I encouraged him to break away from his vices but to him there’s not much in the “real world”. It’s not entertaining, optimistic or fun so he plugs in after work.
I have a lot friends like these. The funny thing about the cave allegory is that in modern times the world outside of the cave is much more chaotic, hateful and scary.
Yes, it's hard, I agree. I suppose this is why we venerate Socrates. For our part though, we need to be alive, to understand this unity of being and, to paraphrase Forster, live in fragments no longer.
As it’s grown and expanded you can definitely tell that the ethics and how they treat workers / customers has gone down hill. Maybe it’s all the Amazon managers they’ve absorbed.
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