I have been hearing in the last week a lot of "Intel is doomed" and I wondered why. Now I Know.

Much later in life I discovered I was what is called a Sigma male and everything made sense.

I created my own company but was poor for a while(but very happy to do what I wanted). People probably felt sorry for me but I did not care about their opinions.

Very happy now. Not poor anymore.

You will be surprised how many people that became rich with startups have invested in real state. A lot of those investments are tanking now because of WFH, so they have something personal against it.

>When Microsoft "lost the mobile war" everybody was in the office still, no?

Microsoft lost both "the Internet" and "mobile" because they just could not understand it, like IBM could not understand a world with a computer in every desktop. It is a normal thing when your culture gives you success, the world changes, your culture remains the same.

Other companies appear that understand it and they win. If Google does not adpat, others will.

I would say risk aversion is the biggest problem by far. Google culture is also radically woke. Google is made by PhDs that always wanted to isolate from the world, they had always very weak customer support, everything was automated and had no contact with the customer so they ended isolated from the needs of your customers and lived in their own world.

On one side you see super brilliant people there. On the other you see total disconnection with the needs of the people because they were isolated on purpose.

Google was designed so people could almost live on campus, most of the time. So you could have 30, or 40 year old adults that are actually like children, not taking responsibility for their lives, isolated from the world most people live. How are you supposed to improve the world when you do not have incentives to improve it because you are not feeling the pain?

Your world is totally different from most people's.

This was obvious to me as an outsider. It is difficult to se culture from inside as you get used to it.

The old generation never understands. Science improves one funeral at a time.

I have worked remotely most of my life. We can work harder than anyone else precisely because we do not need to spend one/two hours a day commuting. We can focus without distraction for hours, control our working environment and do the deepest work.

But like anything else, you need to learn how to do it right and it will take decades before traditional companies learn how to do it.

As simple as that. I was looking at the numbers of one of our partners that has gone bankrupt in Europe. He made the brilliant decision to invest everything in Office space just before Covid. They expected to recover money after Covid, but it is not happening.

A lot of big guys invested there, specially politicians, and of course expensive taxes. They will do everything they can to delay the sinking.

My personal opinion is mandated flame retardants in foams, mattresses and cushions and other plastics. Smokers die less from fire but everybody else breath poison.

Of all the "arguments" used by hired Public Relations companies hired to spin "work from home" in a bad light, this is the most stupid argument I have ever heard.

This makes me uncomfortable as probably because of that it could be the most successful.

They have been testing it since then.

In China once their AI systems or whatever decides that you are using a VPN you will be punished by increasingly blocking your Internet for more and more time.

In the West there is a long History of institutions(like cities) that went against the abuses of the people in charge. You were a servant, you entered a city(burg) you became free, the city protected you. This happened for centuries. In China something like that happened at specific periods, but eventually the Emperor took all the power.

In China the Emperor or the Tzar in Russia could do anything. In Russia those that wanted freedom lost every single time. If a servant entered a city and the city did not deliver the fugitive, the Tzar will burn the city. The same happened with the Soviets. You want your own food? We will kill you all and send your children and wife to Siberia. Everybody else(not the Emperor) were servant. Now Xi or Putin are the new emperors, like Lenin, Stalin or Mao were.

I have lived in China as a privileged engineer/expatriate.

Basically most people have no idea what a country without rule of law(like China) is.

>If necessary anyone can be canceled. Or you can cancel them. You consider yourself a victim, a nobody, but people can get public and get a million views and could do real damage to those in power.

Anybody that does not want to have toner particles (that are carcinogenic) dust in their houses' air.

Over time all software becomes bloated as it is cheaper to buy hardware than pay developers. In the past paying people was worth it because you could do with cheap machines what only very expensive machines could do. Now cheap machines are very powerful.

In the Open source Arena it is also way cheaper in things that are not money: People are doing it in their free time and they do not want to pay with their free time nasty bugs as a result of writing low level instead of high level, functional and so on.

People must not forget that writing low level code, like in the past, is way more efficient but comes at a huge price: nasty bugs that are psychologically very taxing for a developer. Huge delays and overcosts.

As a company we write functional programming/high level code that is from 20 times to 100x more inefficient than what we could get with low level programming. We ship it anyway because:

1. It works and it is good enough. 2. Nobody will notice the difference and pay us for the enormous amount of work that will take to do it low level.

There are things in which we do very low level programming, but it gives us an edge over the competition, and someone pays for the work done.

If they don't sell millions, there is no income and the product dies, or it does have a big company like Meta burning billions of dollars at it from investors.

What Apple is doing is bringing a product to market with no compromises on quality. It will be much more expensive but if it is useful for someone they will pay. They won't need millions of users for breakeven but tens of thousands.

I bought and restored a second hand Lisp Machine (with hardware accelerated Lisp). It was über expensive, but was a dream at the time to use. Even today it has things normal IDEs do not have. It was super expensive but did things nobody else could do at the time and that was worth it for companies that needed those things.

Seriously I do not understand why people feed their brain with (mis)information given by obvious antiEV zealots.

Prices went so high, they do correct. This is good for consumers.

Some media are not your friends, they were sold to owners with obvious agendas. It could be "EV are the best"(so our boss could make lots of money selling "clean energy" to the Government, or "EV are the worst"(so our car manufacturer or Tesla short seller owner is happy).

A kid knows what she wants but not what the price that she will have to pay for getting it. Today they are interested in something, tomorrow something else, specially if it is hard work, like 3D. Young children have not the mental abilities to endure hard work. They should be playing and having fun.

When they grow up and have friends and are happy in a healthy enviroment then they can endure healthy hard work later.

Simplicity and immediate feedback is the most important thing for a kid. Forget Unity, Unreal or other environments that require at least a 14 year old and complex rational skills.

I volunteer teaching young children things like 3d printers, mill machines(they can not access dangerous machines until they grow up, but they can design things)... Most children are just going there so they play with their friends. 1 in ten will become an engineer.

I will just use Pico8 or Scratch to focus on the design of the game and SIMPLICITY. Teach him basic skills like writing and drawing and basic music and sound, and basic programming so they can introduce real life asserts there, in 2D..and specially game design, to design fun games prototypes.

Start doing something basic that is funny in 2D. If he does not loose interest, raise the bar. Since and repeat.

This is like if he wants to be an Orchestra director. You start teaching him the musical notes, having fun with melodies, then harmony...

Games are designed with minimal proof of concepts, that have no textures, sound recorded with the phone, with a basic dynamic of the game. You test that your basic prototype is fun. Only then you add textures and better sounds, or sophistication.

3D modelling, inverse kinematics and Mocap, painting and assigning textures in 3D, it is just so hard and little reward for a kid, with long periods of delayed gratification.

Look at what happened in Venezuela. The country had great engineers extracting oil. Then Chavez happened and started "redistributing wealth" and putting its generals into stealing as much as they could putting his (incompetent) families and friends on all companies like PDVSA, controlling the gold mines and everything else.

They extracted as much wealth as they could for their selves in the shortest amount of time.

All the great engineers and doctors and technical people leaved the country. PDVSA output remained stable for a while, while the infrastructure laid by the engineers lasted until it started collapsing by lack of maintenance.

I went to Venezuela two months ago. It is accident after accident. Oil spill after oil spill by obsolete infrastructure and lead by incompetent people.

Now a small country like Guyana extracts as much oil as Venezuela.

>based on how inefficient the government is,

If you believe US or any western country's Government is inefficient, you have to see socialist countries to really see orders of magnitude more inefficiency.

In Russia, China, Venezuela or lots of other countries in the world have at least 50-60% corruption rates. You pay X millions to develop radar defense systems and most than half of the money goes to corruption.

Sometimes it is the Government(China) itself that forces you to accept bribes so it has a weapon against you in case you become too powerful for the people in power.

Oh man,What a piece of bullisht! comming from what was a respected medium in the past like the BBC.

There are some people that believe that millions of people could have died because of the illnesses coming from Europe, that at the same time came Asia and Africa as they are united. To say that those people were killed on purpose is a piece of sht, and propaganda without proof.

Not to mention the 50 million that is absolutely outrageous. Not even the British and North Americans(now US and Canada)native extermination had such high numbers, and that was on purpose("the only good Indian is the dead Indian" founder's fathers quote) and using technology available in almost 20th century.

Spaniards and Portuguese in 1600s were very small numbers and technology was more advanced but not that much. They conquered South America with the help of native tribes, something that is well documented.

And the queen of Spain made native Indians that had baptised by law equal to Spaniards. Something that people in the USA only made in the middle of 20th century with Indians, Mexicans(from conquered territories like California) and black people.

If you have good intuition on what the needs of the people are, even on things that do not exist yet, you can design your product or service accordly. You could also choose the right people for the job.

People like Steve Jobs or Elon are great at understanding markets. i.e Steve knew that people would be using their smartphones on they pockets and that having scratch resistant screens was essential while the rest didn't care. I had a PocketPC and TabletPC and Microsoft cared so much and invested billions in things that few people care while being against most user real needs.

They are visionaries that have to imagine a future that does not exist yet. The kind of people that can do that, like Elon or Sam usually can see the future as real as it already exist and can be overoptimistic as for them it is obvious that something is going to happen as for them the future is as real as the present.

Elon saved Tesla from bankruptcy choosing a pathway to mass fabrication of EVs. The original Tesla vision was exclusivity and using Lotus car frames.

What separates Elon for everybody else is that he risks his own money on what he believes in, not someone else's like Sam. He is a risk taker like nobody. This is what I hear from people that know him personally.

Which company or individual has nuclear weapons? Could send you to war like Russia in Ukraine to die? Could print as much money as they want. Can raise arbitrary taxes and people have to pay or you just incarcerate them. Can send you to prison. Spy everything you do by force.

Governments can kill you, rob you, kidnap you, spy you, without consequences.

I don't know any individual or company with as much power as Governments have.

The British made most of their capital(that financed industrialisation) from slavery trade and piracy in the Atlantic. It made huge profits and industrialisation paid off giving multiples of the inputs for the first time in History.

That also financed the "colonising of half of the world". But this colonisation came very late.

>dispensing with Catholicism early and inventing modern capitalism came precisely because our society was so hierarchical.

I am reading a book that argues that Europe's success comes from all the competence of different powers fighting each other and none of them taking over the others. The Muslims and later the Ottoman empire tried to take over Europe. The Spanish or Napoleon tried to take over Europe and UK, but they could not, because the others joined against them. Napoleon tried to conquer Russia. Then the British tried to take over as well. Austria, Bismarck and Hitler tried to conquer Europe. Then the Soviet Union.

Even the Roman Empire could not take over the British islands and Germany.

This is different from China, where different groups take over of everything. Centralisation and stagnation happens as a consequence.