predicting that a startup will fail is.. well, you got a ton of probability on your side there. so it isn't a particularly impressive thing to be right about.
Unimpressive doesn't mean incorrect, sometimes it's good to take the side of the most probable. And yet at the same time I am reminded of this quote:
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw
I'm not disagreeing, just soliciting. Does anyone have examples of products that failed in the early stages because their implementation was too trivial?
There are a number of ways. Obviously Dropbox would be one case of "early and didn't fail" that could have been "early and failed", and we would have heard about it.
Whether AI training in general is fair use and whether an AI that spits out a verbatim copy of something from the training data has produced an infringing copy are two different questions.
If there is some copyrighted art in the background in a scene from a movie, maybe that's fair use. If you take a high resolution copy of the movie, extract only the art from the background and want to start distributing that on its own, what do you expect then?
Training seems fine. I learn how to write something by looking at example code, then write my own program, that's widely accepted to be a fair use of the code. Same if I learn multiple things from reading encyclopedias, then write an essay, that's good.
However if I memorise that code and write it down that's not fair use. If I copy the encyclopedia that's bad.
The problem then comes into "how trivial can a line be before it's copyrighted"
Fair use is a case by case fact question dependent on many factors. Trial judges often get creative in how they apply these. The courts are not likely to apply a categorical approach to it like that despite what some professors have written.
It's a huge shame that crypto has been so poorly-behaved as an industry that almost nobody is willing to touch it except for speculation. It could be useful but it's scared away most of the honest people.
The fact that people around the world are trading hundreds of billions of dollars of stable coins [1], with India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Brazil in the top five countries [2], not least of all for the purpose of "greater monetary stability" [3], I think points toward the revolutionary usefulness of its inherently non-speculative properties (as referenced in positive applications of crypto in above comments).
It really has been a shitshow of get rich schemes, and yet crypto keeps not dying, instead increasingly getting applied to extremely valuable real world every day use cases, which I think is evidence of the value of the inherent technology.
My point is that despite the incredible greed and desperation it not only doesn't die, its practical uses are growing. The numbers say that the actual value exceeds the grift.
The replies explain all there is to explain in that example. If each economist thinks that eating shit is worth $100 then, well, that's what it's worth.
It is fascinating that someone can tell an obvious joke with an obvious point, where the characters themselves spell out what’s wrong, and yet we can be certain someone will genuinely believe and defend that “no no, actually eating a random pile of shit you found on the floor makes sense and is worth it”.
Has it occurred to you, especially since one of the economists in the joke admits they feel they ate shit for nothing, that they actually do not feel the exercise was worth it? Have you never spent money on something, thinking it would be worth it, then afterwards realised it was a waste of money? Have you also never taken a job and then realised “I didn’t charge enough for the trouble”?
I’m reminded of a bit of news I heard a while back, where one teenager challenged a friend to eat rat shit they found on the street. The eater died shortly after, because the poop contained rat poison. I doubt any of them found it worth it.
More like not everyone agrees with the point of the joke. They didn't eat shit for nothing, the watching economist paid for the entertainment, why else would they have offered to pay to watch them if not for the entertainment? It's really no different to getting offered money to do a dare. The fact that they felt bad about it later is irrelevant, when the money was initially offered they both felt that they did get value from the act.
It's not an obvious joke. It seems closer to a puzzle in that the reader must discover that the $100 was for entertainment. This is a common class of puzzle where money changes hands between two people and results in a surprising conclusion.
A better gist may be the value of entertainment is temporary.
If instead it was just one person and they went to a movie theater. If you ignore the entertainment value it may just look like the person through away the admission cost.
It's a political joke that uses a rhetorical sledge hammer to make it impossible to defend a particular principle. Is it so surprising that someone will still defend the principle?
Creating some sort of genetically-engineered dinosaur-derived ‘dragon’ may be more plausible than actually reaching another star system. It’s not going to breathe fire though.
If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.
Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.
Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.
Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the 2012–2015 years, this is not correct.
With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.
That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what other companies copied too. To be clear, I'm not (just) talking about how heroku.com looks and works, I'm talking about the entire user experience including git push to deploy, so I believe you are agreeing with me here. That is why I said VPS with Dokploy or Coolify and so on have the same UX, both in the command line with git push deploys supported as well as (now, at least) a vastly superior website user experience, akin to Vercel.
Dokku is better. And neither is what Heroku's bread and butter customer needs.
But alas, my interest in painstaking explaining why self-hosting is fundamentally incompatible with a product who's value prop was "nothing to install" is waning.
You and I simply have different opinions on what Heroku's value proposition was, because, again, AWS was also right there and also was "nothing to install." Therefore Heroku was used primarily for its dead simple UX, something which is replicated even in a self-hosted environment, because, again, the value prop was never about PaaS or self-hosting, it was always about the user experience.
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