No sane poor person would buy a used Mercedes. Parts and repair would cost more than the car. The only people that would think a $1000 Mercedes is worth it would be rich.

Depends on the Mercedes. There was a time where Mercedes made cars that had a reputation for reliability similar to Toyota's today, and those cars are still fairly reasonable to keep running. The problem is that they're now becoming collectors items. Anything from the last 25 years though? Best to look elsewhere.

A W123 mercedes (late 1970s-early 1980s) is an exceptionally well built car. Reliable, easy to work on yourself if you're handy, parts not expensive. At this point they're getting hard to find and prices for decent ones are climbing but for a long time they were a great car and easy to find for low thousands.

You could say similar things about older BMWs. People leave notes on my 2004 Honda CR-V asking if I want to sell. A Honda civic I put on Craigslist took less than hour to sell. Repairability of any used car is becoming increasing problematic. Nursing an old automobile past its prime is becoming a lost art:)

I've owned two Hondas and I would not touch another one. Both had transmission failures at under 200K miles. They actually are designed so that you can't change the filter without removing the transmision from the vehicle and splitting the case. I will say that the engines seem good.

Its W123. Build like a tank, things that break are easy to repair by hand in the driveway.

def self_improve_more():

     if self_improved():

          self_improve_more()

     else:

          see_tony_robins_and_buy_tapes()

Post WWII built SV - it has always been the case.

Sometimes I would ask stakeholders about some idea or nifty feature we were considering implementing. The answer was usually positive and enthusiastic. I'd then ask if they would use it and how it would help them. Silence....

Being untethered from reality is the natural state of humans;)

"What if I made X?" is basically Product Development Antipattern #1. Most feedback you get here is incredibly low signal. The stakeholder you're talking to isn't a technical person in all likelihood, so they probably aren't visualizing what you're describing in the same way you are. There is a high probability that they are telling you it sounds great as social lubricant or because they don't really understand what you are talking about and don't want to look dumb. Not to mention that positive response is the path of least resistance for most people -- the hard work of thinking critically about an idea so that you can locate potential flaws requires caring in the first place, and most people assume positive feedback is what you want to hear anyway.

There are so many VC's and so much money today the demand for "Founders" is high. One way to increase supply is to manufacture what you need - much like Korean K-Pop bands. Band members start in a Bootcamp. They learn to dance and get a vocal coach. As their fan base grows they start to disrupt and displace older bands that are aging out. The industry as a whole does well but individual band may or may not. Do they produce new and innovative music? - meh. Let's face it - a "Founder" with the right fan base can get valuations over a trillion:)

I do think it is kind of funny when VCs talk about how they can tell who will be a successful founder. They are picking the people who get to call themselves founders so it is close to tautological that who they think will be successful matches who ends up succeeding. You don't get to see the counterfactual world where the non-funded people get given money and then you see what personality distribution the successes from that group have. The problem probably is worse now since there are fewer IPOs and more companies exit in private transactions where it's not clear how much economic value was actually created vs how much is just what the investors agree the business is worth.

When I originally started in this business it was truly exciting. VC's where the only place to go to fund truly unique companies and products that were highly risky. Disruption was often a byproduct not a goal. The goal now - collect as big a war chest as you can - disrupt something that already exist and may even be working well - own it all because you have the biggest war chest and can.

Use of Claude for coding increases the number of commits, merges and pushes. Add in difficulty in getting RAM, Disk Storage and Servers. A dash of high energy prices, data center angst and tariffs. A pinch of diverting resources to all things AI. You get legacy systems that cannot keep up with demand for expansion.

Data centers are the next Dark Fiber from 2000. After VCs and private Equity fund them there will not be sufficient demand because AI will inevitably not entirely live up to all the hype. The fire sale will eventually begin. Then Google, M$, Apple and Amazon will buy them at a discount just like Google snatched up the dark fiber after 2000.

Only worse: internet infrastructure (routers, fiber, ...) depreciates over multiple decades, not mere months. What's inside those data centers matters more than them being built: today's cutting edge inference chips or GPUs may not be so useful if either hardware or models evolve in the slightest, and in some way, we should hope for that if we want to be optimistic about the future of AI/LLMs.

Fiber is good for a hundred years, nothing in a data center will last ten.

Humans are a bunch of hairless monkeys that have evolved to scam each other rather than hunt and gather food from Nature.

Right on. This only works if you compare it to another extremely aggressively valued company.

If you don't want to abide by the conditions of a gift - don't accept it.