You could also say politics is downstream of other forces that are less global and more local. Some people choose to stay aware of their more local forces rather than the grand ones.
Then again, to play devils advocate, doing all the other stuff in a new way might also help your company break out of the cycle that typically impacts startups. It may be that the other things you do apart from your product are what make it successful.
I mean if you have a significant chunk of free cash sitting around there's almost no reason not to put a portion of it in 3-6 month Treasuries or something.
The return won't be much but it's better than letting the cash sit idle and evaporate due to inflation
In a competitive banking landscape the bank would do it for you, then just give you a competitive interest rate on your account. Is that not present in the US?
The question is why you'd use money you raised for anything but the reason you raised it. You've probably raised a shit ton more than I have, but hear me out - when one raises, there's generally a timeline of fund deployment from the startup's UoF, right? That's how it was done in my case - we tell the investor what we need, why we need it, and when we need it, etc. And then if the investor agrees to invest, it's not just a lump sum sitting in the bank - a good amount of that money gets deployed to help the startup fulfill its mission.
I get that if you're running super lean and you've raised enough to run lean for a while and use cash when you need to, but at the same time why raise more than you have need for?
I've seen VC's who care a lot about understanding how their companies are going to spend the money. And other VC's who don't even ask the question, or accept generalities like "hiring, scaling" with equally loose timelines.
Depends on the funding vehicle. If you're on a SAFE, and still a going concern, then I think returning investor funds would trigger a priced round and you'd end up converting at a (hopefully) high valuation
This comment really shows how far the SV VC culture still is from running profitable businesses with solid fundamentals. No surprise that I am hearing this on the same website where people come to act like hard-done-by factory workers whenever [incredibly bloated and dysfunctional FAANG] lays people off after facing the real-world financial realities.
For the love of God, no. Do not do that. The cycle begins when you take the money. How there are still people here that don’t get this, I don’t understand.
That chart is telling about the durability of this business, but do we actually know the precise point at which YCombinator as an entity sold out?
For instance, I know Coinbase may be down -22% from the IPO price, but that doesn't mean YCombinator lost money nor made very little. If they, for instance, sold off during the first few days of the IPO they would have made out quite well.
There's also the whole question of how much money did YCombinator put in vs what they got out.
Without knowing this, about all the chart tells me is YCombinator is not a predicated on building exceedingly durable businesses, but it doesn't mean they lost money on any of these investments either.
YC isn’t the “bigger fool”, their business model is great for them. Of course they made money at IPO. They don’t care about durable businesses. More than likely they sold at IPO.
I realize, but that's my entire point: the durability of the business as represented by these valuations says nothing meaningful about YCombinator startups other than they aren't building alot of highly durable businesses.
It's the baby boomer phenomenon. They reaped the rewards back then and are still reaping the rewards. The benefits have been following that age group through their lives. Its like a rolling window.
somewhat tangential, but most interesting phenomeon is the phaseshift non-boomers will undergo when they're around 45, surveying what's left, realizing how much they have paid into the system already, and desperate to claim the same rewards. it's a perpetuum mobile. if it needs to end, the young will have to wrestle it from their seniors _now_, because that gap closes fast.
Most developed countries are peaking in costs to young people right now. The people entering workforce now are getting a huge bad surprise, but the cost of supporting older people will start to decrease very soon.
So, if you are looking for some future phase shift, you are searching for the wrong thing.
Also, most of the developing countries will be in that situation in ~20 years. Most underdeveloped ones will get there in an extra decade or two.
the population bulge is at 50-60. with tfr as low as they are, we're looking at at multiple decades of a top-heavy pyramid. that's not disappearing anytime soon, it will take a lifetime.
Can you blame them for existing during early globalization, before over the financialization of everything? It's not like they actively took more than they "should have" from anyone directly, it's a consequence of their local economy and where it was at the time.
> It's not like they actively took more than they "should have" from anyone directly
And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before. We can thank them for creating a world where women get to vote but also criticize them for creating a world where everything costs a million dollars and all young people can earn is pennies. At any point in time they could’ve been like “this may not in my selfish interest, but it will ensure the future generations can have the same life as i do” and pushed for policies accordingly. But that didn’t happen.
Has any society ever behaved that way? It's already a push to get people to think of the middle/lower classes during the present.
I understand the desire to find an entity or group of people to blame, but they were acting in their own self interest at a peak time, they didn't know the party would be over soon, for many of them, it still isn't.
> And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before.
Some elements of the generation before. It's is exceedingly unhelpful the blame an entire generation for the actions of a few. There were some elite people with a plan, many more who bought the propaganda they were served, and a lot who had nothing to do with any of it.
Also, it's worth noting (to help build empathy) that you and me likely have been suckered by propaganda for things that the next generation will curse us for, but we just think we're being sensible and informed.
The least you could do is blame an ideological faction of that generation (e.g. neoliberals), rather than blaming the whole generation itself. Among many advantages, that names the problem in a way that can solve it.
> It's is exceedingly unhelpful the blame an entire generation for the actions of a few.
The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to. Shifting the blame to the actions of the few is an easy way to absolve yourself of the blame. Who allows the few to take those actions? How did those few come into power to be able to take those actions? Once the actions were taken, why were they not corrected if the entire generation disagreed with them?
Maybe in the future the generations will blame my generation for a bunch of wrongs, even if I personally may not have contributed to those wrongs, I will still share the burden of not doing enough to prevent it.
> The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to.
That's an illusion. I think what you're really doing is putting unreasonable demands on the entire baby boomer generation, then blaming them for not succeeding at an impossible task. I mean, seriously, you really think, say, some boomer factory worker in Ohio is to blame for not foreseeing the effects of some 1980-era policy on 2026 or even 2006? They didn't have the benefit of the hindsight that we have.
It sounds like you're really holding tight onto blame, but what good does that do you? It solves no problems, and at best, alienates people from you.
Yes. The effects of 1980s policy was talked about endlessly and everywhere, to the point childhood me understood the coming effects. I used to joke to my parents my generation was going to create old people homes attached to factories to make them pay us back.
You _can_ blame them for several high-impact things they willingly did or at least supported, e.g. benefiting greatly from public spending yet successively voting to restrict it later on; f*cking over the real estate market and squeezing younger generations with extreme rents/prices; refusing any kind of social reforms while it has been obvious for decades that current models don't scale; decoupling of productivity from wages; and last but not least racking up huge carbon debt that later generations will pay dearly for.
There are 67 million baby boomers in the US. How can you rationally blame them all? Roughly 20% of the population.
Saying the "boomers ruined everything" is not sophisticated, we can't move forward from a blame game, we have to diagnose the actions and actors that implemented them, but of course this is much more challenging.
Ancedotally, I know plenty of poor boomers. Have you seen who works at a Dollar Tree lately?
The popular dialogue that boomer=rich and greedy, millennial=poor and exploited is not productive, it's a fabricated generational war that distracts us from the real issues.
My parents are poor boomers, but if they had to live as I do, they'd be rich boomers. They have no financial discipline and burned through cash like crazy. If they would have saved even a little bit in the 80s and 90s, they'd be in a much better situation.
What I have enjoyed about programming is being able to get the computer to do exactly what I want. The possibilities are bounded by only what I can conceive in my mind. I feel like with AI that can happen faster.
The examples that you and others provide are always fundamentally uninteresting to me. Many, if not most, are some variant of a CRUD application. I have yet seen a single ai generated thing that I personally wanted to use and/or spend time with. I also can't help but wonder what we might have accomplished if we devoted the same amount of resources to developing better tools, languages and frameworks to developers instead of automating the generation of boiler plate and selling developer's own skills back to them. Imagine if open source maintainers instead had been flooded with billions of dollars in capital. What might be possible?
And also, the capacities of llms are almost besides the point. I don't use llms but I have no doubt that for any arbitrary problem that can be expressed textually and is computable in finite time, in the limit as time goes to infinity, an llm will be able to solve it. The more important and interesting questions are what _should_ we build with llms and what should we _not_ build with them. These arguments about capacity are distracting from these more important questions.
Considering how much time developers spend building uninteresting CRUD applications I would argue that if all LLMs can do is speed that process up they're already worth their weight in bytes.
The impression I get from this comment is that no example would convince you that LLMs are worthwhile.
The problem with replying to the proof-demanders is that they'll always pick it apart and find some reason it doesn't fit their definition. You must be familiar with that at this point.
I looked closely enough to confirm there were no architectural mistakes or nasty gotchas. It's code I would have been happy to write myself, only here I got it written on my phone while riding the BART.
See this is a perfect example of OPs statement! I don't care about the lines, I care about the output! It was never about the lines of code.
Your comment makes it very clear there are different viewpoints here. We care about problem->solution. You care about the actual code more than the solution.
>not include leaked secrets, malware installation, stealth cryptomining etc.
Not sure what your point is exactly, but those things don't bother me because I have no control over what happens on others computers. Maybe you insinuate that LLMs will create this, If so, I think you misunderstand the tooling. Or mistake the tooling with the operator.
I recently had cursor basically make me a web interface to detect skiers in a live stream at my local mountain. The stream shows skiers coming off the lift with their back towards the camera. I wanted to know the average lap time of skiers to better estimate the lift line wait time since the lift itself has no camera.
It did a really good job with some prompting for fixes along the way. Turns out, it's really hard to individually ID people who are basically wearing the same thing and with similar colors.
All that is to say, I used it for an hour to see if my idea would work and be feasible.
Rapid prototyping has always seem to me as the most viable use for generative AI, especially in software. Being able to quickly produce something that is just functional enough to determine if its feasible or if it would properly meet the customers needs before then taking the time to build it correctly would resulted in a lot of saved time and money.
To take it a step further it would be super cool to so rhiw figure out the roadway system from the map data and use the buildings as masks over the roads and have little simulated cars driving
100% - I originally wanted to do that but when I realized how much manual work I'd have to do just to get the tiles generated I had to cut back on scope pretty hard.
I actually have a nice little water shader that renders waves on the water tiles via a "depth mask", but my fine-tunes for generating the shader mask weren't reliable enough and I'd spent far too much time on the project to justify going deeper. Maybe I'll try again when the next generation of smarter, cheaper models get released.
that's right - it worked very nice, but the models to generate the "shore distance mask" for the water shader weren't reliable enough to automate, and I just couldn't justify sinking any more time into the project
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