Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Feels like an era of engineering grinding Sorta the opposite of the dotcom boom era when there was a monolithic and simple new technology that any idiot could build on and many did Now it’s 5-6 very distinct technologies that idiots can’t even begin to grok and takes a kind of high skill dedicated grinding to build on I hope the rewards are correspondingly bigger for the higher effort input One plus is that all kinds of engineering are now orders of magnitude easier to learn and tinker with due to good online resources and AI copiloting and much cheaper parts (for hardware) In the dotcom boom you had to go to paper books. Mostly poorly written, phone-book sized, and obsolete in 6 months. You had to get paper catalogs and order parts by phone. Jury out on whether this plus makes up for the tech itself being much harder.
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miguelito
@mc
Yep One challenge is the capital stack isn't there —> VCs are largely absent at innovation in the atomic world b/c they've been bred for bits in the zero-rate world Their irrelevance in the world of atoms is why some of the loudest VCs are pursuing a strategy of rent seeking
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