Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time:

> 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story

Now contrast this with the current academic reality — "publish or perish" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture that "depends" (arguably in self-inflicted manner, that's not 100% the case) on quarterly repots.

ASML is just a recent story, but if you look back, you'll see that most revolutions have a similar pattern of people crazy enough to deviate from the herd.

The rest— the immense financial risk, the 5000 suppliers, etc. came as a result of having the ability to see through all the noise and the grit to to follow through when everyone calls you an idiot for not doing something "useful"

The only point about bootstrapping is that there's no "natural" bootstrapping. You're either not bootstrapping because you "own" (one way or another) one of the sides, or you're faking it. Any other "strategy" is a pipe dream meant to get to the bootstrapping-not-bootstrapping graveyard.

So I wonder if what the article is pointing at wasn’t actually the inability of merging iOS and MacOS fully more than anything.

First, it can’t have an exact length because it’s not a static thing, but a process. Second, as opposed to fractals that can be zoomed in forever, our measurements seem to hit some limits, so the reality is not quite like fractals in this sense.

Of course, it all makes sense if you think about it. What’s perhaps more interesting is we can’t “really measure” anything absolutely and the whole idea of absolute measures becomes rather tricky once you get to physics. In fact it gets philosophical and disputed and you realize that nothing is quite certain, nor quite agreed upon.

I think Quanta Magazine does a good job making justice to these things though.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47630956

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> Overall, the work lacks a self-consistent and transparent accounting of resources, making its central claims difficult to substantiate and leaving a strong sense of sensationalism and hype, rather than honest scientific exposition.

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