Success is almost entirely familial positioning and timing.
The Great Man is a myth that needs to die.
If you or any other person had wealthy parents who sent you to Philips Exeter and then Harvard and been friends and roommates with who Zuckerberg had been, you would be a wealthy banker, professional, or with luck-- Facebook founder.
My best friend in the Army was a Philips Exeter cat who rebelled against his parents and joined the military, married a stripper, drank and fucked his way across a couple of countries, divorced the stripper, got out of the military, went back home with his hat in his hand, got his mom and dad to pay for Marquette, and now he's the CEO of a medical device manufacturing company his parents started.
A modicum of competence, a willingness to engage in cut-throat business tactics to take more than most would think their contributions are worth, a good deal of runway/connections, a little risk-taking...and a huge, huge pile of luck are the only things that could have propelled Zuck to his empire.
Do you really think it's just competence?
A lot of other people also started businesses in ~2004. I worked with one yesterday, he's now a freelancing consultant who is well worth the $180/hour he charges for software development skills in the niche he's built in the last 20 years. He's technically brilliant, brings himself rapidly up to date on new tools, works hard and fast, and is also extremely professional when it comes to communication, finances, and scheduling - a rare combination. I haven't asked about his personal net worth, but he's talked about retirement in a few years, just guessing he's worth maybe a couple million?
Competence cannot be in any way correlated to empire and net worth if Zuck is worth 100,000 times more than my friend. From what I've seen and read from Zuckerberg, he's maybe 0.8x? 0.7? as capable or as intelligent. Maybe, if it's all a front and he's actually the most incredible human being ever, he's 2x. Or even imagine he's a so-called 10x worker. But there's no way that any human's contributions can be imagined to be worth 100,000x more than even an average person's labor.
I'll grant that maybe there's a floor on competence required to reach that level of income. Maybe Zuck isn't truly incompetent. But it's definitely not just competence.
Beautiful app, well done. Pleaaaaaaaase make this available on iOS. Bonus points if the desktop version could do syncing with my iPhone. I could finally treat my iPhone like an iPod!
I haven’t done a detailed comparison, but there’s been a free app called Decoupled [1] on iOS that supports various formats and loading music into it. The app hasn’t been updated in about four years though.
Yes, these things mutate over time. Their historical roots are interesting but have no bearing on their common usage today. A similar story for those who claim left-wing politicians in the USA are really "European centrists" -- possibly true, but pedantic and irrelevant in the context of American left-right discussions.
> Yes, these things mutate over time. Their historical roots are interesting but have no bearing on their common usage today.
I agree. I was just commenting on how the historical understanding is not more accurate for today's understanding and how his definition of historical was quite modern still.
> A similar story for those who claim left-wing politicians in the USA are really "European centrists" -- possibly true, but pedantic and irrelevant in the context of American left-right discussions.
I also agree, but I think that it is hard to know what politicians actually believe. I'm sure there are a number of communists in congress, they just aren't open about it and support more moderate legislation to not look radical. For all we know many of the left wing US politicians are further left than European ones.
Just looking at what they say and vote is not true to their beliefs.
Sources should really be evaluated on a multi-dimensional axis:
- Factuality (low -> high)
- Partisanship (low -> high)
- Political orientation: social issues (left -> right)
- Political orientation: economic issues (left -> right)
- Political orientation: foreign policy (left -> right)
etc.
Sources like NPR are decisively not centrist w.r.t social issues and partisanship. There has been a distinct change in their reporting over the last ~decade.
(also, I'm aware the left-right scale is very lacking. Economics itself has so many dimensions that left/right is meaningless there.)
It'd be nice, but I can't see it being effective at changing broad consumer behavior. Giving people more information to make a choice doesn't do much value when they're already making poor choices based on the already existing information.
Put another way, I wish we had the nuanced shit to sift through where some nice multi-dimensional analysis could save the day. But the issue is people are consuming shit that is demonstrably shit from the first whiff/taste. I can't see how having some pretty vectors to showing them where their shit lives in shitspace is going to be helpful.
I don't think anyone could (or even necessarily should) design a service like this for the masses. (Designing anything with the masses in mind is probably a way to end up with a mediocre product regardless, but I digress.) This would be more for people like us and the typical HN crowd: interested in truth and nuance for the sake of knowing the world accurately.
The problem with people consuming low-information, rage-baiting, distorted, highly-partisan slop masquerading as news is a problem I don't have the first idea on solving. The issue isn't even with the existence of the shit itself: that sort of content has always and will always exist, regardless. The issue is with (i) the volume of people consuming and accepting it, and more importantly, (ii) how much influence that garbage has on the national discourse and policy. For example, Musk consumes that sort of content and then feeds it into Grok (hello, MechaHitler), which then propagates to elected officials and the electorate and has real-world consequences in policy.
StackExchange is a massive, global forum which has to react defensively in order to maintain its high-quality knowledgebase against spammers, scammers, and the same questions being posed 10^N times.
The context here is about knowledge dissemination in local teams, groups, or organizations. Completely separate category, levels of trust, motivations, incentives, etc.
This is going to sound like a shilled comment, but for the past week, I've been using Motion [0] to manage all of my tasks and scheduling. My lifelong weakness has always been so-called "time blindness", and I cannot overstate how much of a game changer Motion has been for me in keeping me focused and on-track. Both for personal and professional tasks. It really feels like I've just put on mental "glasses" and can see where I am and what I should be doing with clarity.
It's only been a week, so maybe my opinion will change. Who knows. I'm half writing this comment as a historical record for myself to look back at in a year.
> There is frankly significant overlap between folks who struggle with ADHD and folks who are direct harmed or displaced by the use of AI generated images
Can you expand on this? I don't see the connection.
Anecdotally i've seen a ton of people online that do art ,taking commissions from people to draw specific things for them, that also often talk to each other about dealing with ADHD.
Not an artist or customer myself but just follow a good few of them.
What's worse is many of them would have had work they did scraped to train some models of the models displacing them.
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