Unrelated to article, but I had a call with Jean when she was running Akita pre-acquisition, and she was so thorough and thoughtful. We didn't end up buying Akita for various reasons, but I remember walking away thinking, this person can not fail.

she seems a force of nature for sure. appreciate you sharing

This is how I feel about Jeff Barr at AWS.

Where are the puzzles that open the door to the linking book?

Comparing web3 to nuclear energy is so hilariously laughable.

I've got a Power Mac G5 sitting right beside me if someone else wants to buy it and get into this G5 floppy website business.

Me too. We could start a webring! I just need about 27 more USB floppy drives.

But where will you put are the Warez?

Yo, are you serious about that? This feels so interesting.

That’s more the Zip drive era isn’t it?

Yup

What's the argument against Chia?

I fully agree with the article, but perhaps naively am optimistic about Chia.

I see it as a comparatively ethical alternative to other currencies.

It's inherently evil?

Now let's take this to the extreme: What if you mined cryptocurrency by burning medicine? The more you burn, the richer you are. Clearly that's evil, as it rewards you for destroying the world.

In a perfect world you would mine cryptocurrency by making progress in peace on earth, good will towards man.

But if you can answer this: What useful resource, that's expensive to produce and has an environmental impact, do you want to incentivize destroying in order to further your greed?

Can you think of anything? Is it not by its very nature evil?

But consider even what happened under Imperial rule in India: Locals were rewarded for every dead snake they proved to the British. What happened? Obviously they started breeding snakes!

So now you have MORE snakes! You actually made the problem worse!

proof-of-space is actually proof-of-e-waste

either way, it's literally wasting something to show commitment, and that's bad for every reason in the essay

It may reduce the environmental issues, but now miners will just go from hoarding GPUs to hoarding SSDs.

I miss it so much.

This was misleading, they made it sound like they were inside our solar system.

Almost a Clickbait

Funny, I happen to have this open in another tab.

https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-...

Love that post, although the "CEO of the product" title has never really resonated with me. A large difference between being a PM and an actual CEO is that both CEO lead via influence but the CEO has final authority. Day-to-day that's not a big distinction, but when sh*t really hits the fan it is a BIG difference :)

Sadly less applicable now with the explosion in the number of PMs accompanied by the responsibilities that developers haves ceded away to them.

Early in my career (~20 yr, and obviously ymmv maybe I just had good ones) product folks knew their business, customers, market, and the capabilities of the business as well or better than anyone else in the building. They could pull off the “ceo of the product” role well. Some of them were hard driving, others had more of a mr Rogers vibe and somehow always had on a sweater and a big mug of coffee in hand, but they made sure people around them understood what was to be built, why it was to be built, and had a “player coach” feel. These days every sub-project has a PM and there just isn’t the need for the PM of old anymore.

I see a lot of problems popping up in organizations that have someone trying to be the type of PM that their coworkers don’t expect them to be.

One of the greats! It's amazing how well "Good PM/Bad PM" has aged. =)

Wait, what aged poorly about it? I don't know if you meant that but the disclaimer at the top says it did:

>>Warning: This document was written 15 years ago and is probably not relevant for today’s product managers. I present it here merely as an example of a useful training document.

I'm saying it's aged well! Despite the author's caveat, I think it's still accurate in a lot of ways.

Thanks for confirming. I skimmed it and I couldn't tell what he meant was no longer relevant; nothing seemed obsolete (in any obvious way to a non-PM like me). To his credit, it seems like he wrote the principles in a very general, abstract manner that didn't become dated with changing technology.

This hits way too close to home.