If it helps, some of the most successful people I know made their achievements by taking a risk on their current capabilities. It's obvious to say, but the best way to grow is to be in a position where you have a good growth opportunity - and inherently, that means you'll be swimming in a slightly bigger pond than you're comfortable in.
I don't know anything about the specifics of your situation, so definitely discount this advice if it's not applicable - but remember that every high level / successful person had to be, at some point, wholly out of their depth in order to rise to the occasion!
> Founded in 2016, Neuralink has devised a sewing machine-like device capable of implanting ultra-thin threads inside the brain.
I know people get elective surgeries all the time (plastics, etc), but I feel hard pressed that this company is going to convince people to open up their skull for some promise of cool technology.
Even if it is successful from a technology perspective, the chicken and egg problem they'll face with developers is an order of magnitude or two higher than with AR/VR headsets. It's already an uphill battle without having to convince people to open up their brain, I just can't see this gaining any adoption unless there's a surgery-lite path outside the skull.
I think you underestimate what people with disabilities are willing to try to lessen their disabilities. This isn't for making people pretty, it's to (potentially) help people lead mostly normal lives. Similar things that are currently on market are way more invasive than what Neuralink wants to offer, so it would already be a major upgrade, and look mostly normal from the outside.
erm, if their latest "cranioplasty w/ eCoG" thing that's being rumored is real, that's way more invasive than the current deep brain stimulation or utah array systems...
Unfortunately, that's always the promise. To make the better world. But the money and investment will quickly and increasingly focus elsewhere once the concept is proven.
I can think of quite a few initiatives which have taken in countless billions of dollars, cancer research, Alzheimer's, Dementia, Cystic Fibrosis, etc.
Nothing sexy about that at all, just helping people lead normal lives.
Those are all 'good' causes by definition with gradual progress.
Here, the snake oil is in the comments similar to 'Neuralink will help disabled people'. But Neuralink so so wide spectrum that, if it works, it will spawn multiple different industries. And capital will find it's way to the most lucrative applications, as it always does ... and those applications won't be 'helping disable people'.
The first time I visited NYC, I was appalled that so many people just casually live in the stink of street trash 24/7. They just don't see it as an issue, strangely
The first time I visited NYC was for a job interview. I wanted to live in an urban, walkable city with plenty of cultural and business opportunities. The trash situation was a primary factor in me choosing another city and another job.
I get that many many people in NYC don't see this as an issue, or don't see this as a solvable problem. As an outsider it is absolutely disgusting, and forever lowered my opinion of the city.
~20 years ago I visited Toronto for a Debian conference in the middle of an outdoor workers strike. I wanted to visit Chinatown, but the heaps of trash bags that hadn't been collected left a stench that I couldn't stomach.
Spadina Chinatown has always been notorious for that. Back in the 90s, it was intolerable on garbage days even when there was no strike. Lots of expired seafood in bags out on the sidewalk etc.
Nothing like rotting squished crabs baking in hot humid 85f summer smog.
I'm building a GraphQL based headless CMS currently, ~2 months away from an official launch. It's currently wholly lacking official documentation but feel free to give the index page a peek and see if it's something you'd be interested in trying out!
(or if you just have general feedback or learnings from your own experience, I'd love to hear that too!)
Yup! That's the avenue we took. A React app as an editor, content blocks are represented as a large JSON structure. That structure is stored in a DB via Drupal. (The editor is actually jacked into the Drupal page editor). We use GraphQL as our integration service. There's a shared "blocks" library so the editor can do the layout, store the JSON and the front-end website can interpret that JSON and use the same library to rebuild the component structure. I will say that it's a neat system. Some folks are VERY attached to it. I don't feel it fits the business needs so I'm investigating other options.
Best of luck on your CMS! I'm always intrigued by what others build - so please don't take my experience as any sort of criticism - I'd love to see your project succeed!
I feel like there's also a case where the opposite is true, e.g. that there's already proof that businesses are willing to pay for solutions in the space. As long as you have a differentiating factor to the big players (ideally via something they couldn't easily shift to), my knee jerk reaction is that it's still not a bad call to launch in the space.
I focus on very small markets with specific needs not met by industry norms.
The problem I see today is that the big box stores are replacing what had previously been regional retail buyers.
The homogenization of big box board rooms needs vs. Regional cultural needs has narrowed the manufacturing focus to the average.
My theory is that just in time manufacturing will move to the "garage stage". The retail price of American high end refrigerators and stoves may not reflect the cost of materials and quality of thought that went into the object.
My plan is to develop a platform of appliances that is more efficient than existing offerings but available in specific sizes. Think of it like ordering custom furniture. The result could be a refrigerator that fits the space exactly using the finish materials of choice.
I have spent too many decades thinking about this but I have finally have my small run manufacturing facility (FabLab) set-up. I think it will be another 2 years before I get a product out the door.
This is an epicenter of the thinking. I personally think they are overcomplicating some aspects. I'm sure at a school of higher learning it needs all times of overthinking.
Let's say I buy a condo with one of your made-to-fit appliances. Will you be available to refinishing it?
Also, I'd love to hear more about your fabrication and design pipeline. This kind of work sounds utterly dreamy to me. I used to work in hardware as a SWE and loved the mix of programming and hardware work. I've also longed to start a business, but am somewhat at a loss as to what even to do.
I haven’t worked out all the details that is why I headquartered myself in an 8 unit mixed use studio apartment. My initial plan was to work out each appliances details in batches of 10. If something were to sell out I could make more. Once I got my CNC I realized I had outgrown my barn…. found an old model school. Spent all my development money to flip the plan. I would create 7 Studio apartments to cover my expenses and act as my market testing.
Currently I’m focused on my own 7 Apartments. Every big leap in living started by adding a new service to the kitchen.
fire, running water, electricity,….
Controlling the default installation for 8 kitchens should provide with a rare design freedom.
Finally I think I will be writing manifestos on technology and design. I have set myself up to only need to produce artifacts.
view.cogs.com
I have been at it since the 90s. I have answers to your question but I dont want to get into it here.
I think both you and the author are kind of dancing around this point:
It's fine to choose a large market, as long as you niche down your specific offering with a differentiating factor specific to that niche which, in effect, shrinks your market.
A solo biz can't reasonably compete with Salesforce in the "B2B CRM" market. But a solo biz can prosper in the "B2B CRM for personal injury law offices with < 10 employees in the US", as a totally made up example.
I think he’s saying large markets can cause you to scope creep as you want to reel in more and will need scaling which is usually difficult with one person business
If you target a niche in a large market then you are targeting a small market. Create serial MVPs targeting those niches until you find product-market fit.
Sci-fi extrapolation: I like the idea of there existing a few super smart LLM's trained on raw human data that function like generals, 2nd-order smaller models that are like lieutenants, eventually down to AI entirely trained on AI -- grunts that lack a lot of context but achieve a single purpose through language.
I've given server components with Next.js an honest try in my personal projects, and honestly, the pain of using them far outweighs the benefits.
I MUCH prefer the pattern of getServerSideProps seeding data on-page-load and working with it via context providers. The fact that data loaded in with server components cannot support reactivity of any kind means you have to litter your code with "use client" wrappers that take in their parent data as initial state, then introducing client reactivity on top.
That^ also means that any time you drop into "use client" you drop any SSR benefits anyway. I agree with a lot of this article that the transition feels forced, and I can't help but hope that Vercel commits to supporting pages style routing indefinitely.
Here's an example, the pattern makes it almost impossible to highlight a currently active route in a navbar. Literally a basic building block of web applications: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/43704
Oh man as a non fe person this is so overwhelming. I just got the hang of page based routing in nextjs and I still feel like I am walking on eggshells. Frankly all I want is TO render a next/jsx page into a jinja style template that I can render with backend of choice (golang) while leaving some ajax loading on the page when needed. I don't need my entire application to be a single page (don't get me started on understanding routing). May be that's why I can't appreciate consumer apps.
IL still have to "migrate" my existing apps no - sure I could use htmx for. Ew projects but I have so many inflight which is where I was wary of the change. Is there an easier way?
Fwiw I've been using react on the frontend and php on the backend for like 8 years now. It's a multi page app. It's fast. No issues. If you want to swap php for go it'd be just as easy.
Interesting. How do "break down" react to be multipage. With next atleast the folder based layout (and the [id] naming convention) I found helpful. Disclaimer I'm still a react noob.
In webpack, if you use a simple dynamic `import()`, it will compile all the files that it might possibly match. Then in PHP I just pass down the name of the script I want to load plus a bit of server-side data and render it. You can fiddle with the webpack settings about how aggressively it will code split or re-use libs. I recommend throwing all the vendor/3rd party party stuff/rarely changing libs into a single package and set a long TTL. Then the first time a user visits it can download all that junk and from then on they only have to re-download the bits that you change. For me, I might change a few pages a week. For my day job, we deploy once a day, M-Th, so even then if a user visits 100 pages in a day, they only pay for the JS on the first click of the day, and only the parts that have changed for the most part.
Client component still get SSR benefits. They just happen to be included in your JS bundle. This makes sense in the context of your example – you do expect the active route link to change during a client-side navigation.
That's kind of a really "meh" thing if you develop web applications and not websites. The static parts aren't that large, and the app kinda useless until the dynamic parts are there. So that doesn't really justify additional effort.
