Having strong friendships is one of the most important things for happiness and wellbeing. It's been especially hard to be social since the pandemic hit, and people in developing countries have become increasingly isolated.
Junto is an attempt at solving some of these huge problems - but starting small and in my own community.
I’ve personally struggled with maintaining close relationships in the past couple of years. With WFH becoming the norm in the tech industry, friends moving away, and the general fickleness of adulthood, I found myself deprived of fulfilling friendships that I once had.
I figured, in such a vibrant metro as SF, there must be people who I could be great friends with. Why was it still so difficult to reach them?
Meeting new people, especially as an introvert, can be a stressful experience. Not only are random meetups stressful, they’re very hit or miss in terms of compatibility.
Junto is an attempt at making the process as easy and reliable as possible. You’ll get to meet people who you’re likely to get along with, on your own terms. I chose to launch in SF, which is not only where I live, but where this problem can be felt most deeply.
If this resonates with you, consider becoming part of the first cohort of members. You can also reach out to me personally at hello@juntosf.com. Any feedback or criticism is greatly welcomed!
> All cloud features are opt-in. Data is encrypted at rest.
The most generous interpretation is this is misleading (I would consider it outright lie) given they currently also have telemetry which isn't even opt-out, it's always on. See last time this was discussed:
For many (including me), Apple products are real pocket computers that do everything we wish. Apple products are built with a set purpose in mind. I couldn't care less about side-loading or hacking random software onto these devices. You can't expect products built for the masses to be suitable for a minority use case.
But presumably "the masses" who use Android don't do a lot of sideloading either? I mean, I doubt they're getting adb and fastboot set up. Unless we just mean they're figuring out how to install F-droid or the Amazon App Store?
What about something like Fortnite? You might not personally be interested in the game, but surely you can imagine that some people might want to play it, and you can probably also imagine Epic not wanting to give Apple a 30% cut. How do you reconcile those two things?
Why does the commenter need to reconcile this? Their desire of using Apple doesn’t mean they need to all apps to run on it. Personally, I’m not a gamer and don’t care about Fortnite availability nor their cost of doing business on Apple. If Apple banned an app I cared enough to use, I’d probably vote with my dollars and change platforms.
Apple is fine if you do things there way. Unfortunately for those of us that know of better ways, it becomes a walled garden when we know there are better ones.
The problem for developers is "their way" can suddenly change without warning. There has always been anecdotes here and there about developers gettin app updates rejected for features that had been in their app for years and wasn't even the focus of the update. Sometimes they get resolved (seems the larger the twitter mob you can attract the better your chances - what a way to run a business) and sometimes they don't.
At what point do the scales of the value proposition tip to the point that more and more devs just write iOS off? How many times has that already happened that we just don't know about? I know of at least a dozen really cool apps I would have loved to have had but the devs didn't even bother because of the uncertainty of Apple's uneven application of their "rules".
bah. The cure is worse than the disease at this point.
Apple meets all of my needs for most of my routine life activities and I have a rack of servers for my other stuff. The weird Apple philosophy debate has always confused me as to why people expend so much mental effort arguing about.
It's just freedom of choice. If I was rich, of course I'd buy Apple products. Simply because it's cheaper time/money wise for me to buy SaaS products and digital goods than it would be to pirate them. And Apple provides a seemless and secure means of doing so. For non-tech people, I tell them just to use Apple. For people who download and click on every damn link (like my mother...) I tell them only IpadOS. I've never had to deal with malware on it because my mother can't install it unless it's through the App store.
I agree. Intense political pressure from half of the country would have immense negative consequences on whatever Fauci would try to accomplish. He would have instantly lost any credibility with half of Americans who listen primarily to Trump.
If Fauci divorced himself from Trump, and the two took opposite stances on masks, can we really conclusively say the public would be more willing to listen to the truth about masks? By playing "both sides" he gets to have greater influence, maybe not in the medical community, but certainly on the public at large.
If Trump took a harder stance on HCHQ and replaced Fauci with someone who was also pro HCHQ, do you think the public would be more likely to listen to Fauci who took an opposite stance?
If we take the premise of the article, that Trump was anti-mask and Fauci was pro-mask (although slower than we would have liked, either by mistake or by political pressure) - I'm referring to the truth being pro-mask, what Fauci, the WHO, and the CDC ended up advocating for.
All these traders are playing in a casino. Yes, the casino favors the house. Yes, people have figured out how to make big bucks by counting cards. The rules will probably change so the house keeps on winning.
To me, all this indicates that the only way to win is to not play. Passively investing in the market as a whole is the only way to win long term.
Disclosure: I work at a robo-advisor specializing in long term passive investing. My views are my own, and in no way associated with the views of my employer. This is not investment advice.
In my mind, another way to divide the two is about assumptions about efficiency. Passive investors assume that the market is generally efficient, and do not try to exploit inefficiencies to generate returns. Active investors generate returns from perceived inefficiencies (information asymmetry, etc).
That's exactly the opposite of not playing. Your money is still in and propping up the misbehavior in the system.
You must take responsibility for what and who gets empowered by your hard earned wealth. There is no other way around it.and a single datapoint leaving the system won't fix it. It needs to be a collective action.
Sadly, (and I hope I am proven wrong) we aren't so great at that.
What kind of indices tho? Every decision ultimately reduces all investment to active management. Like are you holding crypto indices or real estate indices, etc etc.
Yes, if your definition of active is that you had to make a decision, yes. Pretty much everything we do is active. In the same way that sleeping is exercise because your muscles move.
I think the distinction is artificial. The kind of strategies robo-advisors use aren't really that different from any other investor. For example risk parity, "smart" beta (getting exposure to risk premia factors) are all things robo advisors and traditional fund managers do. What's the difference?
The reality is that companies at an early stage don't have validation of their idea yet. That is priority #1. The scaling part comes only after you know your idea has merit. It's also "the easy part". With the right allocation of resources and talent, most scaling challenges can be solved. The same cannot be said of creating valuable / interesting products.
The right approach is to optimize for speed and flexibility. Make it as easy as possible to validate your idea. Make it easy to tear down and rebuild in a "scalable" way if you're lucky enough to make it past step #1.
This implies that you exclusively use digital tools, so my first question would be: have you tried using pen and paper for things?
It's really hard to give compelling examples of where pencil/pen and paper are going to be better than digital tools because everyone is different. If you want to try it out, I recommend simply keeping a pad and a pen at your desk and when you're stuck on a problem try writing something down. Whether it's mapping it out, quickly jotting down some assumption or thing you noticed etc. It won't be suitable for everything but there's something... visceral about writing with a pen that I find indescribably helpful in working through complex problems. This was how I got started with this process, at least.
For a more concrete example, I spend a lot of time in my current role thinking about high-level solutions to problems. Things that need to serve multiple different teams' needs, replace existing solutions (aiming to solve their most obvious pain points), sometimes have non-obvious simple solutions, legacy complex solutions that everyone is used to and just kind of accepts etc. These designs come from months of discussions with different people, thinking, theorising, research into existing solutions etc, but one thing I have found absolutely invaluable throughout this process is the pen and paper on my desk. My notebook is full of unorganised notes that I jotted down when a lightbulb came to me one day, rough sketches or mappings of solution ideas, brainstormed lists of features etc. Most of these don't see the light of day, but as they get refined they move to more permanent, collaborative (as necessary) mediums. I do this progressively by flipping back through my physical notes and reviewing/extending/transferring them as necessary.
> My notebook is full of unorganised notes that I jotted down when a lightbulb came to me one day, rough sketches or mappings of solution ideas, brainstormed lists of features etc.
This is to me the biggest benefit of using pen and paper, but it requires shifting your attitude towards pen and paper to treat everything you write as disposable. Just freely sketching out ideas and using paper as a place to dump thoughts without concern for quality, formatting, or even having them be cohetent, is probably the most productive way for me to solve problems - so much so that I have switched to using large post-it notes, rather than a notebook. The good notes stick around for a few weeks, and the bad ones go straight into the bin.
If I can express something through writing (as with the cases you mention), there is no faster, more convenient tool than a note taking app + keyboard. It's instant, archived, editable, and globally available (where there's internet of course).
If it's an idea that needs to be visually designed (shapes, graphs, space), I find that I can mostly do this by redefining the problem in a way that can be written down.
There's a small percentage of time where having a diagram is truly essential to my workflow. I'm not opposed to whiteboarding in these cases, but it's not as vital to my process as the author implies it is for them.
> indescribably helpful
I tend not to be convinced by things that are indescribable. What I'm understanding is that it's a tool that makes you happy. That's sometimes a valid enough reason to do something.
I've never drawn seen anyone draw a system diagram using any tool more quickly or better than they could on the back of a napkin.
If you start from the get-go trying to wrangle a UML diagram or Lucidchart, then your mind is immediately guided to do only the things the tool makes easiest.
That's why when you're inventing something from scratch, a pencil and a piece of paper are best. Of course, if your handwriting is messy, go back and use a tool later for your colleagues' sake.
In my experience, pen-and-paper helps me resist the urge to “just get started already”.
I don’t know why, but when I’m in the design-phase with a keyboard in my hands, I think I get too excited about building things and go straight to the text-editor to “hammer out the details” in code.
Away from the computer, I’m much more likely to complete a thorough design. And pen-and-paper remains my favorite tool for working on ideas that are too big to fit in working-memory.
For example, when proofreading writing, it's easier to catch mistakes when reading the document aloud and jotting down the needed edits on a printed copy of the document vs just reading it on the computer.
Or when doing something like data base schemas, drawing out a rough version of what you need so you have something basic to reference vs just a mental model.
For me, one of the virtues of pencil and paper is that I can go outside, sit under a tree, and think. I think differently there than I do in my cube. I can't describe exactly how I think differently, but I do. Some problems are easier to think about there (and some aren't).
I think this one is very much up to interpretation and will vary widely between people.
As for me, I spend way more time thinking and planning and picking apart ideas than I do writing code. Often this involves a pen and paper. Better abstractions come from planning rather than diving in and writing code.
This is naive. The point is that code is a well defined system with clear rules that can be expressed through logic and mathematics. GPT is suited to approximate systems where the rules are not well defined. Until AI can actually learn the principles of logic, it may not be useful for code generation on a meaningful scale, other than things just like simple auto-completions.
Not only that, AI would also have to learn the principles of system design, performance, security, readability, maintainability. That's what makes "good" software. It's a far stretch to say that AI could achieve anything of the sort based on current abilities.
It's clearly not if you read the rest of that sentence, that's my metric for it to be useful. My metric for it being good is much deeper. Which is why I questioned what you responded with.
We are already at the point of useful and context aware code generation anyway which is why I've found everyone on this thread questioning it to be kind of funny, Microsoft was demoing complex generations a year ago. So we're well on our way.
Having strong friendships is one of the most important things for happiness and wellbeing. It's been especially hard to be social since the pandemic hit, and people in developing countries have become increasingly isolated.
Junto is an attempt at solving some of these huge problems - but starting small and in my own community.