Though the most popular anime by far around the world is shonen. Which caters to the typical male teen/pre-teen audience, but also adults and is typically characterized by action, typical underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world.
E.g. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, etc.
Everyone likes a good retelling of “A Hero’s Journey”.
That’s why properties like Star Wars rose to prominence as well:
> underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world
Right, but my argument is that there are many niches in the market where there is no competition, and startups should try to find that and then creates moats with IP, data, etc. There are many situations where startups don't have direct competition, because they are inventing something radically new. Often true in life sciences, for example. You're right that in those cases they are in a race against time, since someone will eventually come along, but they can go for years without a direct adversary.
There was another post a while ago, that showed how all the money in Tech was gathering people from all other professions like Finance, Law, etc. And that's how tech workforces ballooned in the last decade, and exploded during the pandemic. Now a lot of that is being dialed down, with cost controls.
But, it's a result of where the money lies. And has been done in industries and periods past. Tech realized that every company needs to be honing their product strategy, it's not cool that your tech is awesome, but you need sell it. I think this group structure is more useful than the legacy agile/ with a scrum master model. PMs can steer the ship and handle all the roles of a business analyst, scrum master, and to some degree maybe even merge with an engineering manager (might be going towards that), but perhaps it was a good idea to separate engineering and product/business decisions.
A decade of government spending on critical infrastructure at low interest rates was missed.
Edit: Want to add also, the rich got richer as monetary policy flowed into capital markets, while inflation increased hurting the poor the most in the last couple years.
Seriously, it's no longer even funny to us Europeans how bad your infrastructure is. I always thought it's because the population density is much lower in the US, but I don't believe any more that it is the primary reason.
No, it is due to population density. If your country has 2× or 4× the amount of road area per capita but not correspondingly more taxes per capita, the infrastructure is going to suffer. Strong Towns ( https://www.strongtowns.org/ ) has many articles on this topic.
I imagine they do consider eventualities, but some things are extremely unlikely. Could someone set off a nuclear bomb under the bridge? Sure. Is it likely? No. Could a tanker truck full of gasoline catch on fire and sit directly under this bridge? Yes. Is it likely? No.
It’s generally a good idea to look into events a tad more than just reading a headline before running around posting about them.
This is especially true when the headline seems to confirm one’s beliefs about something. In fact, most of the USA’s problems if not the worlds are in a big part due to people having that level of engagement.
When it comes to adtech, I don't immediately think of Big Tech, but they are in fact the largest aggregators of data which feeds into the system. I always wondered why there isn't enough government pushback or regulation to limit this. I guess this post is maybe part of the reason.
I think in the public sphere, many don't think of Big Tech as privacy intruders, even with Facebook's public failures, many continue to use their services. I'm not sure if most people care or don't care. But when Apple took the initiative to limit 3rd party cookies by asking it's users directly whether they wanted to allow it or not, the majority chose not to allow it. Which shows people don't want their data to be tracked.
On a related note, I don't think I've ever clicked on a banner ad on a site, or any twitter/youtube ad, etc. There's certainly an element of marketing that's brand awareness. But all the other metrics about click rates, and purchase intent, etc- I have no idea how this all adds up to the massive numbers that Big tech pulls in from ads on the Internet.
> but they are in fact the largest aggregators of data which feeds into the system.
Feeds into what "system".
Do you really think Google/Amazon/Apple/etc are handing over your Name+Phone number to say Spokeo [1]? I just don't think you get it. Your phone company is the one that is selling your data to anybody not FAANG.
It's easy to say some "ad-tech" are doing X, but actually get a whiteboard out and start with say Google and list what products of theirs collect what data. Then list the process by which say the USG buys its from Google. I'm very interested in what names for the processes are going to be because I really doubt you'll find any for the ad-platforms.
I understand US carriers and ISPs are the most guilty parties that are selling data to third parties. Maybe not intentionally, but we have seen in the past when third parties get access to user information hoarded by Big Tech for e.g. Cambridge Analytica.
Even the data that is collected by Facebook + Google, are mostly non consensual and we don't know what they do with it. Or it's like the classic gun to your head, to use our "free" services aka, if you don't pay for it, you are the customer.
Seeing the interview with Chris Lattner on Lex Fridman podcast on developing Mojo, and how he's learnt from developing Swift, or LLVM is very interesting, and how the path they've taken with Mojo is different from Python. It also seems like a lot of languages especially the new ones are converging with the best features from past languages which also makes sense.
This is super ambitious, but a great project to work on to better your understanding. And I applaud you, especially as an undergrad student( I assume as you stated final exams in the post). I wish I'd done more projects like this back when I was starting out. You are way ahead of where I was lol, I barely did any projects outside classes. And you got some attention on HN. Good stuff!
E.g. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, etc.