This blog post and all the comments in response feel very tautological. I think Marc has a fairly simple point here, which is don't spend time dwelling on the past. Learn from the past, take away information about how things can be improved, but then make a plan (for whatever it is that you are building/doing) and move forward with that plan.
In the podcast, he basically lays out that the A16Z thesis is that there is not enough technology, information, and intelligence in the world, so they are going out and investing in companies/ideas that can make an impact in these areas. That requires learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. Seems like a very sensible and positive approach to me.
Introspection is the conscious examination of one’s own mental, emotional, and cognitive processes to improve self-awareness. I think Marc's critique here is a lot of what can be learned about past mistakes is outside of an individual's own failings.
I was recently reading a post about how the Claude Code leak and Boris Cherny had the following to say..
"Mistakes happen. As a team, the important thing is to recognize it’s never an individuals’s fault — it’s the process, the culture, or the infra.
In this case, there was a manual deploy step that should have been better automated. Our team has made a few improvements to the automation for next time, a couple more on the way."
When complex systems fail often there is more than one thing that went wrong. Uncovering what those things are is important, so that you can address them and prevent them from happening again. Once fixed, it is on to the next task and no need to dwell on the past.
You are right, a simpler way to frame it is: Marc is not anti introspection but post introspection in that there's something beyond introspection. The author seems to have made an uncharitable take for easy virality.
People have been doing self-examination for a long time, but Freud's use of psychoanalysis is a fairly modern phenomenon and it's benefits are dubious. Modern therapy looks increasingly like pseudoscience. I expect biotech/AI advancements to make much of modern therapy irrelevant over time, as we obtain fine-grained control over the actual processes in the brain causing various afflictions.
modern therapy has nothing to with Freud, modern therapy approaches are empirically tested, and show efficacy comparable to medication, but sure other than that whole modern scientific approach... its definitely just pseudoscience
the only pseudoscience you mentioned is the idea that mental "afflictions" are entirely biological
For sure Freud and modern therapy as practiced today are very different. Freud influenced the language, structure, and goals of talk therapy more than the exact methods most therapists use now. Modern therapy kept many of his clinical observations about inner conflict and relationships, but dropped or revised a lot of his more speculative theory.
Since mental illness or other trauma is entirely contained to the brain, you can in fact say that the problem is entirely biological. We are starting to see the tech industry make real inroads to biology. Neuralink, gene therapies, AI designed drugs, etc. All of these innovations will decrease the need for therapy, which at best you can say helps people learn to live with conditions, but never permanently fixes the problem.
> laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and ABLE to enforce them.
The 'able' part is the critical insight. Laws are too often passed that really have no ability to be enforced, but end up adding bureaucratic processes that law abiding companies have to follow. This also implies that governments need to actively clean up existing laws, which almost never happens unless there is enough support to pass a new law to actively supplant the old one.
There is also that international problem. If an South American is frauded on an US American platform, by an east European using an African fake chatter: Which legislation, which court is applicable? Which oversight authority should handle this?
I don’t think this problem is that hard to solve, it just requires political will that doesn’t exist. The solution is to make it the platform’s problem. If the platform doesn’t want to deal with fraud, they don’t get to operate in that jurisdiction. Sue them into submission. If they don’t care about that geography, then there is now a gap in the market for a more local business to fill.
> I don’t think this problem is that hard to solve, it just requires political will that doesn’t exist
This is equivalent to saying "I don't think the problem is hard, it just requires an a simple solution that doesn't exist". Problems are hard problems specifically because simple easy solutions for them don't exist.
Okay, so what's the best solution? What's even just a better solution than Docker? I mean really truly lay out all the details here or link to a blog post that describes in excruciating detail how they shipped a web application and maintained it for years and was less work than Docker containers. Just saying "a far far simpler solution is to just link statically or ship dependencies adjacent to the binary" is ignoring huge swaths of the SDLC. Anyone can cast stones, very few can actually implement a better solution. Bring the receipts.
The first half of my career was spent shipping video games. There is no such thing as shipping a game in Docker. Not even on Linux. You depend on minimum version of glibc and then ship your damn dependencies.
The more recent half of my career has been more focused on ML and now robotics. Python ML is absolute clusterfuck. It is close to getting resolved with UV and Pixi. The trick there is to include your damn dependencies… via symlink to a shared cache.
Any program or pipeline that relies on whatever arbitrary ass version of Python is installed on the system can die in a fire.
That’s mostly about deploying. We can also talk about build systems.
The one true build system path is a monorepo that contains your damn dependencies. Anything else is wrong and evil.
I’m also spicy and think that if your build system can’t crosscompile then it sucks. It’s trivial to crosscompile for Windows from Linux because Windows doesn’t suck (in this regard). It almost impossible to crosscompile to Linux from Windows because Linux userspace is a bad, broken, failed design. However Andrew Kelley is a patron saint and Zig makes it feasible.
Use a monorepo, pretend the system environment doesn’t exist, link statically/ship adjacent so/dll.
Docker clearly addresses a real problem (that Linux userspace has failed). But Docker is a bad hack. The concept of trying to share libraries at the system level has objectively failed. The correct thing to do is to not do that, and don’t fake a system to do it.
Windows may suck for a lot of reasons. But boy howdy is it a whole lot more reliable than Linux at running computer programs.
Given that distributions are the distributors of packages and not the upstream developers, I think static linking is fine as is dep-shipping. The now dead Clear Linux was great at handling package distribution.
Personally, I think docker is dumb, so is AppImage, so is FlatPak, so are VMs… honestly, it’s all dumb. We all like these various things because they solve problems, but they don’t actually solve anything. They work around issues instead. We end up with abstractions and orchestrations of docker, handling docker containers running inside of VMs, on top of hardware we cannot know, see, control, or inspect. The containers are now just a way to offer shared hosting at a price premium with complex and expensive software deployment methods. We are charged extortionate prices at every step, and we accept it because it’s convenient, because these methods make certain problems go away, and because if we want money, investors expect to see “industry standards.”
We know there is a real problem, awareness is not the issue. (I've been aware of it since the mid 90's) It is ignored by large industries and governments. The incessant pounding of the useless drum of individual action continues to go absolutely nowhere. We need government and industry to take action not individuals. I will no longer placate this idea that individual action is at all useful.
> The incessant pounding of the useless drum of individual action continues to go absolutely nowhere. We need government and industry to take action not individuals.
It's the incessent pounding of your drum that goes nowhere, of course. Lots of people acting individually is what makes things happen - including in government. They won't act unless people demonstrate they are serious about it.
> I will no longer placate this idea that individual action is at all useful.
The problem is not that individual action is not useful, it’s that governments and companies are actively discouraging it, because every success for climate change is a bad news item. People buying less cars? Climate change win, economic problem. People buying less stuff, consumption down? Huge climate change win, very bad economic news. Even on progressive news outlets they’re doing it.
Here in Europe even before Trump’s second mandate it was clear governments didn’t really want individual action to take off. And it’s even worse now. Because short and mid term it’s a choice between climate and GDP. And western governments and companies are fundamentally incapable of long term action that is painful short term.
I would agree with you, except that the government (eg. in Germany) even battle climate tech when it’s good for the country and the economy. WHO wouldn’t want to be energy independent?
And yet, the Conservative Party in germany once killed the entire solar industry (who then moved to china); and is about to do it again, now! Both times we are losing about 50k jobs in that sector.
The question is: why would they do that, if the economy is oh so important to the conservatives?
This happens even today. If a knowledgeable person leaves a company and no KT (or more likely, poor KT) takes place, then there will be no one left to understand how certain systems work. This means the company will have to have a new developer go in and study the code and then deduce how it works. In our new LLM world, the developer could even have an LLM construct an overview for him/her to come up to speed more quickly.
Yes but every time the "why" is obscured perhaps not completely because there's no finished overview or because the original reason cannot be derived any longer from the current state of affairs. Its like the movie memento: you're trying to piece together a story from fragments that seem incoherent.
In the podcast, he basically lays out that the A16Z thesis is that there is not enough technology, information, and intelligence in the world, so they are going out and investing in companies/ideas that can make an impact in these areas. That requires learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. Seems like a very sensible and positive approach to me.
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