Startup = disruption = threat to existing control.

If you love control and have control, why would you want to create fertile ground for startups?

(This was meant as devil's advocate, not my personal point of view).

That's short term thinking.

You can't stop innovation across the planet, you will lose control over time as adversaries continue to innovate and subsume antiquated control structures.

All the people in charge currently are banking on being rich, enjoying society as they have made it, and then dead before it personally affects them.

I dunno about the last part. Rich people under 60 seem to be under the impression they might live forever, either biologically or digitally. Within our lifetime we see people trying to make their digital twin their legal heir.

I get the longevity angle (even if I think it’s not possible or even desirable) but digital twin I don’t understand. It’s like a different person altogether. Even if it was possible to completely clone a persona digitally it would not be you but someone else.

Much like grooming a natural heir, you can hope that someone will keep your legacy going, make decisions you would make, run your business, and so on.

I can see it as a rational strategy if you're worried successors won't be up to the job.

I totally agree with the ridiculousness of it, but that's not going to stop people with outsized egos from trying. Or companies that are trying to ride the coattails of a cult of personality.

Nah it’s more complicated than that. They need to lie to themselves first. They need to build a scaffold of logic that proves and justifies there actions before they do it.

Hitler for example thought he was justified. And so do all the people who claim global warming isn’t real.

Yet it’s a mistake companies and societies repeatedly make, because human brains are wired for zero sum games and paranoia. When you have it, the instinct is to clutch and guard and hoard not grow and expand.

When a company or a society is threatened the usual response is to double down on things that accelerate decline like killing novelty and innovation.

These things worked when we were small primates fighting over limited food sources on the savannah. Our brain stems don’t know what millennium they are in and still run those programs.

> That's short term thinking.

Which is exactly what our system encourages. You don’t need to think beyond the next quarter / election cycle. You’re only in it to extract as much wealth in the short-term as possible and secure your chair before the music stops playing.

Everything that is happening in the US screams short term thinking. It feels like the scramble after a leveraged buyout.

Funny that you mentioned an LBO, which is a strategy that requires long term success to succeed.

Currently the biggest US companies are throwing hundreds of billions into an uncertain bet that may pay off in a decade or so while everyone around is screaming "bubble" at them.

It looks like long term risky bet on new technology to me - exactly what you want those rich capitalist do.

Oh I completely agree.

As someone who was in the same boat for a long time, I only clicked with Blender once I had a real need for it: In my case, creating an ad-style video for a product I’d created in Fusion.

I’m not sure there is any point trying to do what you can in parametric software in Blender. Despite both being capable of a range of 3D tasks, they have remarkably little in common.

I think what's interesting/telling is you view (3) as less desirable.

Alternatively, you could have spent that half hour on the train exercising your own creativity to try and satisfy your curiosity. Whether you're right or wrong doesn't really matter, because as you acknowledge it's not really important enough to you to matter. Picking (2) eliminates all the possible avenues that might have lead you down.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that you're approaching the criticism on the basis of axioms that represent a narrow viewpoint: That of someone who has to be "right" about the things they are curious about, no matter how trivial.

I think one of my personal core values is that curiosity should never be left unsatiated if ant all possible!

I spent my half hour on the train satiating all sorts of other things instead (like the identity of that curious looking building in Reading).

> Picking (2) eliminates all the possible avenues that might have lead you down.

I don't think that's the case. Using GPT-5 for the Cake Pop question lead me down a bunch of avenues I may never have encountered otherwise - the structure of Starbucks in the UK, the history of their Cake Pops rollout, the fact that checking nutritional and allergy details on their website is a great way to get an "official" list of their products independent of what's on sale in individual stores, and it sparked me to run a separate search for their Cookies and Cream cake pop and find out had been discontinued in the US.

Not bad for typing a couple of prompts on my phone and then spending a few extra minutes with the results after the research task had completed.

Now multiply that by a dozen plus moments of curiosity per day and my intellectual life feels genuinely elevated - I'm being exposed to so many more interesting and varied avenues than if I was manually doing all of the work on a smaller number of curiosities myself.

> I think one of my personal core values is that curiosity should never be left unsatiated if ant all possible!

I don't disagree: I just posited that there are other ways to satisfy it, and that there is an opportunity cost to the path you've chosen to satisfy it that you don't seem very aware of, because your curiosity and desire to be correct are tightly coupled - but that doesn't actually have to be the case. It has its pros and cons.

Now I'm more of an "it's the journey not the destination" guy, so accelerating the journey doesn't appeal to me as much as it used to, because for me its where I get the most value. That change in my perspective is what motivated me to comment.

But anyway, you clearly enjoy it and do great work, so all the best with it!

Weirdly I’ve been building something along those lines for the last year. Not SQLite backed, but fully local and native (and also does non-local integrations, which you can also script yourself). Should be ready in a month or so if you’re interested!

Interesting thanks, I wasn't aware of container2wasm. I do wonder what the output sizes are. They don't mention compatibility with CF's runtime, it is more restrictive than any of the ones they do!

I wrote up my experience trying to do this in case it helps anyone else! There's a boilerplate repo at: https://github.com/saus-app/wasm-cf-boilerplate

Yes, like everything: Nylon might be my favourite example of us never being able to use innovation in moderation.

We do, you might find legal sentencing guidelines to be informative, they’ve already been dealing with this for a very long time. (E.g. It’s why a first offence and repeat offence are never considered in the same light.)

The problem is that a lot of the most influential FOSS only exists because of VC capital (or other dysfunctional markets), either because they sponsor projects directly, or they pay the salaries of the people who happen to do it themselves. FOSS has become a form of economic dumping that could be causing more harm than good. If Google couldn’t “dump” Chrome for free, or Facebook couldn’t “dump” React for free, maybe browsers or front-end frameworks would be regular, functional, competitive markets. Making it “FOSS” is just an inoculation against what would otherwise be considered an anti-competitive practice.

Or maybe it’s like Toyota and EVs.

Toyota at least invested in building a battery supply chain with Idmetsu Kosan years ago, and is working on battery tech national projects within Japan.

Apple hasn't done the same kind of homework yet, as Siri has largely been moribund nor will Apple be the reciever of significant state funding and subsidizes for R&D the same way Toyota is.

Well if you want to continue the analogy, I could say: Apple at least invested in a SoC architecture years ago has already put it in a different league as far as AI capabilities go.

So to say they haven't done "the same kind of homework yet" seems quite presumptive. Only Google has done anything remotely similar with TPUs and certainly not on the deployment scale that Apple has done.

FWIW I don't care either way, I don't get emotionally attached to corporations, I just think the entire framing of the original post is very reactionary and naive, and I continue to think that the comparison with Toyota is an apt way to illustrate that.