I think you're really overgeneralizing what "infrastructure" means in this case.

Major pivoting is almost always a really bad idea. (I admit I'm doing a bit of weaseling using the "major" qualifier, but when I searched for examples online, a lot of the ones that came back weren't major pivots, just slight refinements of focus to find better product market fit). Pivoting usually carries a lot of baggage - better to just give the money back and start afresh most of the time.

They made a very specific, unsupported claim, and then when you requested evidence of that, they responded with a completely unrelated set of information that in no way supported their original claim, as if a longer response someone makes their argument more credible.

I don't know if it's AI slop or human slop, but it's total slop regardless.

Honestly, I was close to flagging this story because the title is deliberately manipulative - it makes it sound like the founder did a rug pull. But I was really glad to see the founder come in to these comments and just say we tried, but the market shifted under us. Happens all the time.

That seems like a giant paucity of imagination. I can easily name a lot of areas where AI is already having a large impact and it's not hard to imagine the impact growing:

1. Customer service. Yes, we all like to laugh at the silly chatbot mistakes, linked list reversals and Instagram oopsies, but a lot of companies are putting a lot of effort (and spend) into AI for customer service.

2. The legal profession is already spending a lot on AI, and it will only grow. Again, we all like to read about hallucinated case citations, but those are solvable problems (honestly I felt they were more human problems than tech problems to begin with) and there are so many areas in research and document summarization that AI is really good at.

3. Radiology. There are lots of arguments over whether AI will "replace radiologists", but that's besides the point. The largest radiology groups in the country already use AI software to check for specific missed diagnoses, and the expected spend on AI will grow, a lot.

4. Enterprise knowledge management. Services like Glean are popular and growing.

I can easily go on.

Most hugely transformational technologies in the past also resulted in giant bubbles that burst, because investors piled into lots of companies in the hope that their particular company would win out. Railroads, automobiles, telecommunications networks, the Internet, etc. etc. were all hugely important, transformational technologies that all caused giant bubbles that burst.

But Ed Zitron seems hellbent on saying AI is a nothing burger, and that's why the bubble will burst. But the latter doesn't necessarily follow from the former, and indeed the examples I gave show that the exact opposite is often true.

I believe that the AI bubble will burst precisely because it is such a transformational technology. AI may not live up to the ways its biggest cultists like to shout ("Feel the AGI flow through you!!!"), but similarly in the .com boom/bust there was tons of nonsense about how we'd do absolutely everything online, we were in a new "eyeball economy", whatever that meant, yada yada, yet I'd argue that in some ways the Internet was actually a bigger impact than originally envisioned, just not necessarily in the way that late 90s boosters envisioned it.

That said, I agree with your overall assessment that $10 million single-owner plumbing businesses are rare, for the simple reason that $10 million single owner anything is rare. If it were not rare, by definition you'd have a lot more folks worth $10 million (and, in this case, a lot more people lining up to be plumbers), and then $10 million would probably not be worth very much.

FWIW, while I think the comment makes much more sense in the context of that original video, I don't think Huang is making particularly good points in that interview. Like I thought the analogy with enriched uranium was a pretty good one, and at the very least Patel made exceedingly clear which points are analogous: namely, that it was powerful tech that had both civilian and military uses. That seems like a very fair discussion point when it comes to powerful chips. And Huang's response is just "Hey - that's a bad analogy", but I think his defense of it being a bad analogy is a poor one. Plus, I think it's false to say that Patel "betrayed a deep misunderstanding of technology" given that one quote he gave about why it would be a bad idea to sell advanced chips to China came from Dario Amodei of all people. I'm quite positive Amodei doesn't have "a deep misunderstanding of technology".

But back to the original topic, I still think it's beyond douchebaggery to make that quote your header in your Twitter bio, but it also fits with literally everything else I've heard from Andreessen to confirm to me he's far to the right on the psychopathy (i.e. "lacks empathy") spectrum. He's constantly dividing the world up into "winners" and "losers", and being a billionaire he's obviously a "winner", and if you propose any changes to society or regulations that would help lessen the naturally wealth-concentrating effects of technology then you're obviously a "loser".

I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.

Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.

So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.

So while I'd assume that yes, some graduates are more selective (as they should be, as they usually need to pay off student loans), a huge number of them are taking jobs that don't require their degrees.

JSON was definitely a huge improvement in simplicity and readability compared to XML for many contexts. Similarly REST a much better option than SOAP (and all of these are examples of the general over-engineered, design-by-committee architectures that came out of the late 90s/early 00s - see also the original EJB spec - before a larger trend towards simplicity and ease of use won out).

But it this case, a lot of the differences just feel like potayto/potahto, i.e. minor stylistic preferences. And I have been in jobs where more than 50% of my time was doing code reviews, and while often there were e.g. some linter rules or whatever that I found suboptimal, it was a lot easier to just go with it than waste the energy to have the battle over why I think for loops are actually OK.

> You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me.

These fuckers are grotesque caricatures in human skin.

I'm not saying that conventional commits are God's given best way to structure a commit message, but they are a defined structure, and I find it much more effective and important that some expectations be set around commit messages, and I think conventional commits are as good as anything.

Like the author is making a big deal that they think scope is more important than type. I may tend to agree, but I think the difference between "fix(compiler)" and "compiler fix" is not exactly a hill I'd be willing to die on.

The tech industry has tons of things that became standards even if they weren't optimal. E.g. if one were starting from scratch I think any sane person would argue JSON should support comments (sorry but Douglas Crawford's rationale for not including comments never made sense to me), better defined numeric formats, etc. But it was better in many contexts than what came before it, so it became the standard. I could believe that there is some other format that differs a bit from conventional commits that is a little better, but not really better enough to want a whole other competing way of structuring comments.

I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress.