What I love about Burning Man is that it is an event where all the programming is created by the attendees. All the art, sound stages, art cars, experiences.. if you want something to exist in Black Rock City, then it is up to you to just go figure out how to bring it, solely for the benefit and joy of those who get to experience it. It is a tremendous amount of work, but the rewarding feeling of seeing your creation manifested into reality is worth it.
So much of our daily lives in society is consuming experiences that other people create: the jobs we work are defined by other people, we buy products created by other people, we eat food made by other people. For me, Burning Man is a reminder for the rest of the year to be the creator of my own experience in the world.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” —Jobs
That's an incredibly cynical thing for a man like Jobs to say, given his life, especially late in it, was mostly just ordering people to invent things, and then acting like a generational genius because the massive amount of people under his purview invented things.
Why do people keep saying this? The direction of someone driving towards a thing is just as important as people working on that thing. Otherwise we may not actually have gotten anyone working on that thing at all. It's like saying a director is not important and actors should just do whatever they want.
He is part of a camp called Playground (alongside other people). The camp collectively brings the speakers, AV, fire effects, generators and structures, sets all of it up, and Carl and other artists perform. He’s probably not setting up the gear himself but he is part of the collective that puts the show on. I do know that he plays Playground fundraisers during the year to raise the money to pay for the costs of the camp, which is a forum of contribution / volunteering.
That’s what they say, but that’s not how they actually operate. There’s not nearly the liquidity there (and probably can’t ever be) to actually protect against downside risks. This niche is already better served by boutique insurance.
Why don’t they deserve to see the light of day? Maybe the market gets to decide what “sucks” or doesn’t. More ideas in the marketplace gives users more choice.
Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an incremental improvement that was largely a matter of funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.
I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.
I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.
I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not see how technological change has occurred within your own single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful way to an individual's life trajectory until the last century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and with such significant future implications, it's impossible for me not to just stand in awe.
Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.
Then iPhone 4 came out in 2010. Google SDC prototype drove for 140k miles by then. It's 2024, and iPhone 4 is still sort of usable. Might run 0.25B LLM? Waymo is serving just couple small areas in US. There's no categorical successor to phones. No one other than Waymo achieved SDC.
Oculus DK1 shipped in 2012. VR is still a niche anime/gamer/anime-gamer product. AI bubble is correcting fast. Boom Overture supersonic jetliner isn't flying. Starship just landed for the first time, and it did land but appeared to have gone full banana soon after. Insane but it's not going into service for a little while. Brain-computer interfaces... meh. They were always stuck at immune response problem and that's why no one is doing invasive BCI, not because it wasn't invented back in 80s or whenever it was.
GP's claim is that things are slowing down and none of inventions are life changing big. Things are definitely slowing down and none of recent inventions are intercontinental teleportation certified for commercial services big.
TBH the last 10 years of my life I've noticed technilogical stagnation, enshitification, marginal improvments. The 20 years before that was an amazing wild ride.
