I'm surprised and impressed that this works. I would've guessed phones have enough RF shielding and low-pass filters in the audio path to prevent this.
The financial gains from starting a startup have a wildly varied distribution. The analysis won't be very practical if we assume any meaningful exit at any age. Not sure how a "weak exit" is considered the most common outcome.
A good exit used to seem boring: we already know the family will be financially very well off. That said, it would be interesting to move away from deterministic modeling and build a stochastic version, where we explicitly account for probabilities of success as a function of age, integrate RSU appreciation, and incorporate target net worth.
I suspect there’s a net worth threshold at which, probabilistically, pursuing a startup becomes more likely to get you there than staying in big tech.
The signs of techno-feudalism have always been around in fragments (platform/cloud landlords, rent-seeking, gig work, ...), but the promise of hitting gold, the idea of democratized innovation, and the reliance on mass tech labour fueled the techno-optimism. Now, the heavily power-centralizing nature of AI and the shrinking reliance on tech labour have diminished the optimism.
It’s absolutely insightful for adults as well. Especially when paired with the other horsemen of the attention apocalypse “Dopamine Nation”, “Irresistible”, and “The Shallows”.
Returned my treatment of the internet from “the thing” to just another tool.
It's wrong to assume the owners will share the productivity gains with everyone, especially when reliance on labour will be at its lowest, and the power structure of a data/AI economy is more concentrated than anything we've seen before. IMO, the assumption that some form of basic income or social welfare system will be funded voluntarily is as delusional as thinking communism would work.
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