I read the article and kept wondering what the author is trying to convey. It reads like a checklist compiled into an essay with no wisdom nor rationale baked into it. mostly vague and generic -- like a human transform applied to an llm output.
> There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them.<p>One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack.<p>One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
<i>For example, if you opt in, we'll tell you how you're doing compared to other users. The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others.</i><p>The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by misunderstanding to the point of incoherence? Who's getting hobbled running on "vanilla models", do we have examples?
I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users".<p>For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
Given the impact some YC startups are having on society at large I think a better question than "How" is "Why". Do we really want Flock to become even more powerful?<p>Even in the cases where the answer is "yes"; I believe that working backwards from the why could provide a more elegant path to accomplishing said goal.
Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd.<p>Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify.<p>It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
I’m glad there’s a lot of people commenting negatively below to PGs modus operandi (rationalizing maximum greed in seemingly thoughtful measured essays that make him seem like a kindly philosopher instead or digital robber barron)<p>Like Ayn Rand, and PT Barnum before them VCs and Tech Bros will be looked at with great hostility in next years as having destroyed society with their brand of hyper-capitalism all in the name of “disruption”