I always assumed angel investing (at least as it emerged originally) was essentially philanthropy with the motivation being it gave very rich people a way to nudge things they liked into existence and provided them with a semi-cheap way to keep their network fresh with young, hungry, interesting new people. Bonus it might very occasionally turn in to a lottery ticket (but that wasn't the primary driver of making the investment).
This seems to be a big part of it, but is there a separate word for it? It’s definitely not philanthropy because it’s not directed at public good.
Economics must have made a term for this part of the venture ecosystem. “Seed capital” misses the significant social and class aspects of the behavior.
Historically, the term you're looking for might have been "patronage". Wealthy individuals supported artists, scientists, or explorers not purely for financial return, but because they believed in the person, the cause, valued the association, enjoyed the influence, or whatever else.
The only obvious mainstream "success" to come out of crypto is stable coins (Tether/Bitfinex is something like the 5th or 6th largest buyer of US treasuries ...and amusingly keeps all the yield from them). Ironically, this use case also happens to be one that doesn't really require a decentralised ledger (would work equally well with a few cross-border validators, ala DNS root server approach) and lends itself very well to tradfi involvement (since you need pegging to fiat).
For me crypto today looks like ~1998/~2000 ish internet. Big, powerful traditional entities have fully woken up to it and will now take it over and ensure whatever useful use cases exist will be controlled by them with profits also accruing to them. The speculative, lawless days of the crypto wild west (fuelled by oceans of QE & stimmy money); and promises of a satoshi enabled future are well and truly over.
In terms of ushering in a new decentralised monetary order, it has failed completely.
FWIW, I don't think you should cave on this. For me, your choice to use it over "hallucination" instantly elevated the insight of the lessons. I also think the authenticity of the voice of the lessons benefits from owning the decision to use it fully rather than compromising with the shorter "bs" version.
Not sure what category of ecomm sites you were scraping but I scrape >10million ecomm URLs daily and, honestly, in my experience the compute is not a major issue (8 times out of 10 you can either use API endpoints and/or session stuffing to avoid needing a browser for every request; and in the 2 out of 10 sites where you really need a browser for all requests it's usually to circumvent aggressive anti-bot which means you're very likely going to need full chrome or FF anyway - and you can parallelise quite effectively across tabs).
One niche where I could definitely see a use for this though is scraping terribly coded sites that need some JS execution to safely get the data you want (e.g. they do some bonkers client side calculations that you don't want to reverse engineer). It would be nice to not pay the perf tax of chrome in these cases.
Having said all of that, I have to say from a geek perspective it's super neat what you guys are hacking on! Zig+V8+CDP bindings is very cool.
fully agree here, using a browser for everything is the dumb way. You just usually use it to circumvent the blocking and then reuse the cookies to call the endpoints directly.
It might works if you need to handle a few websites. But this retro engineering approach is not maintainable if you want to handle hundreds or thousands of websites.
Memories. I had an unfiltered 100Mbit ethernet port, with public static IP, in my dorm room at Manchester Uni in 2000 thanks to JANET. It was amazing compared to the ISDN line at home (...which until then I had thought was the bees knees). It took almost another 15 years before I could get something faster at home than what I'd had at uni (!)
Password managers like Bitwarden allow you to store passkeys too. Ofc, that only works for services that let you create & use your own passkey, rather than force you to use one managed by them.
Fair enough, but how is your argument incompatible with transitioning away from fossil fuels and bringing in more environmentally aware regulations? It might not clean/reverse the damage already done but surely it helps to reduce the magnitude of future damage?
It isn't. Please note the last paragraph of my much-maligned post:
"There are legitimate and worthy reasons for which we should clean up our act. Climate change and saving the planet just happen not to be among them. Because it is impossible without violating the rules of physics."
As for reducing the magnitude of, as you put it, future damage, I very much doubt this is possible as well.
Loose quote from a research paper released by Google many years ago: Even if we were to deploy the most optimal forms of renewable and clean energy sources at a global scale, not only will this not reverse the problem, atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise.
Part of our reality is inescapable. For example, massive forest fires drive more CO2 into the atmosphere than lots of human activity. Around the world, there are fires in mines that have been burning for centuries (google it, you'll be surprised). Etc. We are kidding ourselves if we think that a bunch of measures that are but rounding errors at a planetary scale will have any impact at all in, as I like to put it, anything even remotely resembling a human time scale.
There are things we can do (and probably should do) that I think are likely to make for better and cleaner life all around without the fantasy of saving the planet or reversing climate.
One example of this is to seriously address the massive pollution created by container ships travelling our oceans every day. These ships burn bunker fuel, perhaps the worst thing one could burn. The stuff is horrible and the pollution it creates goes far beyond just CO2. I also learned that they contribute to something called "species pollution". They ingest all sorts of marine life into the ballast tanks at port A and pump it out at port B, transporting species clear across the planet, where they can and have done serious damage.
How to address container ships is a subject that requires serious discussion. It's a complex multivariate problem. Would all-electric ships be better? Massive hydrofoils (for more efficient transport)? Wind has been tried, it isn't as much help as one might think. Another optimization vector would be to eliminate them by distributing the production of material goods closer to their points of consumption. In other words, eliminate container ships (unlikely) or reduce the fleet by only transporting materials that cannot be sourced at the point of manufacture.
Again, these are complex problems. Their resolution, as a first step, requires leaving fantasy-land to then be able to discuss, evaluate and address reality. Only then will we we able to improve life, clean-up our act and live better. The value in these three desirable outcomes is self-evident to the point that they do not need to be justified by some fantastical imaginary doomsday scenario where all life on earth ceases to exist in, as some politicians have suggested, a dozen years.
I am all for being far better about how we behave on this planet. My problem is with creating a religion out of fantasies. Reality does not care about these things and keeps moving forward. It's almost like like stock market.
I am interested in learning about what you are referring to, but you linked his entire Substack and Twitter account. Would you please link a specific post?
