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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Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
What other eras would you compare it to?
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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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depatchedmode
@depatchedmode
Problem is that AI still sucks at things for which there is a paucity of high quality public domain knowledge. For example, I’m wrestling with it in rust to make a p2p private IPFS network. It helps (I’m a designer) but it still requires development of domain expertise. I’m gonna have to read the book soon.
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Shihao
@shihao
you can hack together an app pretty quickly with AI tools without understanding 90% of it. But of course it won't take you beyond the MVP phase.
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blobz-wtf.eth
@blobz
I don't know man, in the dot com era, while the tech was by today's standards incredibly primitive and in theory "simpler", it mostly didn't work at all. You had to jump through a lot of hoops to achieve any kind of scale or reliability. And like you allude to, it was nearly impossible to find any information to help you in the process. To do anything serious you had to build stuff up from the very lowest levels. Really big pain. Don't miss those days at all.
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Jeff Jordan🔮🎩🧀
@jeffjordan
Good
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