I'm a startup founder doing startup right now. I'm experiencing burnout, by which I mean, after half a year of working 6-7 days a week 10-16 hours a day I really needed an 8 hour workday to get my focus back. Specially after working non stop for two weeks for a demo for McDonald's with only 6hrs sleep per night and then two devices fried because of a messed up 5v connection so we missed the demo. Went to bed at 20:30 today because the startup hustle is real. No rest for the .. startup founders.
Want to have one day of 8hrs of work only so I'm fresh tomorrow to visit a car factory and to write two papers in the weekend.
I just started a relationship though, you do get used to the sensation of falling down a cliff trying to build a plane as you fall while eating glass and barely being able to walk out of exhaustion because it needs to be ready tomorrow so you're the only office on a Sunday night at 3am with the lights still burning while knowing that if you cannot borrow money within 4 days you cannot pay rent.
It's an acquired taste :)
I agree that SaaS is a dead end. I had a talk with two of our investors this week who run a SaaS company trying to convince me to stop hardware and go 100% to SaaS because it's such a great business model. But for that I think you're too late. The only new SaaS I consistently see people trying out are AI SaaS.
Because of that I'm doing SaaS with AI but combined with physical devices. I do think manufacturing is going to grow in the US and Europe, simply because factories need (way way) fewer people. Regardless of tariffs, protectionism, etc., the playing field has changed. Labor cost has become a tiny fraction of manufacturing cost. Offshoring makes no real sense anymore.
Therefore I make real physical AI, cameras and robots, to help people, well people and bigger people like McDonald's and car factories, build ultra-low-labor factories. That's what's going on in the US and in Europe right now, not SaaS. But the principle is the same: Startups just move to where the money / growth is.
I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US.
I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.
Universities always make things open source. I also make everything open source that I make for the university.
It's because you cannot make money with it anyway and the university often allows it, so then it's really good for your CV.
In Europe there is also a lot of stuff open source, and I can honestly say there is no plot by the government to destroy the United States. I don't think Linux is a plan by the Swedish government to destroy the USA.
Most Chinese people in my experience also don't really have any country outside of China on their radar, unless they are in some trading business. China is just so huge compared to for example the US, they really live in their own bubble. It's not something they think about on a monthly let alone daily basis is my personal experience.
And if you want to do a commercial spin-off from your university work, it might be easier to put it all out as MIT/BSD/Apache and then start a completely independent company than to deal with all the paperwork.
This makes life easier for competitors, so it's definitely a tradeoff, but it's the right tradeoff in some circumstances.
I think this is greatly overstated. Generally it's just sheer volume of capital and dedication to building a business that dictates market advantage, not any given persons' knowledge or know-how (though that's obviously worth paying for if you have the capital). I'd argue the primary reason why proprietary ownership of software exists isn't to make life harder for competitors but rather to make it harder for folks to figure out what they're actually paying for and bypassing the fees to actually fix (let alone improve) the software.
From an employer's perspective: Why hire someone if they're going to be remote? Then I might as well hire someone from Brazil. Almost the same culture, 1/8th the price.
What's the difference for me as an employer if someone is remote from 10km away or 5000km away?
It's great that you feel like you're more productive at home, but it's still capitalism with supply and demand, and there are much cheaper remote employees with exactly the same webcam stream.
> What's the difference for me as an employer if someone is remote from 10km away or 5000km away?
There is not - hence there are about 1.5 million software developers in the United States and approximately 1 million just in India alone. Probably another million in other countries across the world (I have 26 on my team working from the Balkans for US company).
already at present there are more devs working offshore than onshore and that trend will continue to grow
You would get laughed out of the room if you limited your customer base to only those within commuting distance of your office, but for some reason with employees, the model is different? You want the broad market TAM but the local employee control.
Certainly, if you think you can hire in Brazil, why have you not attempted to do so yet? The only way for you to know for sure if this model would work is to attempt it. I do wonder if the US is going to begin to tariff goods coming in from outside of the country, if they will also start to look at offshore labor to penalize economically.
Offshore labor is already penalized: For tax purposes under Section 174, costs for US devs must be amortized over 5 years, while costs for offshore devs are amortized over 15 years.
And yet, many firms continue to offshore to Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, and India for technology labor (Africa as well for ML/AI data labeling). Lots of room for policy to run here.
I work at a firm where Brazilians took over engineering management and I see the end results of VERY poor engineering culture and a tribal knowledge is rampant. Sloppy engineering and a lack of empathy in user experience and insular thinking, as they are isolated from current approaches to scale, toil elimination prevalent in Silicon Valley approaches.
I cannot agree less, C++ is the best and always will be. You youngsters made up this new dialect that can also compile with the C++ compiler. This is like people putting VS Code in dark mode thinking they're now also working in the Terminal like the Gods of Binary.
I expect they are thinking of the "Safe C++" proposal P3390. This proposes to provide the syntax and other features needed to grant (a subset of the future) C++ the same safety properties as safe Rust via an equivalent mechanism (a borrow checker for C++ and the lifetime annotations to drive it, the destructive move, the nominative typing and so on).
Much as you might anticipate (although perhaps its designer Sean Baxter did not) this was not kindly looked upon by many C++ programmers and members of WG21 (the C++ committee)
The larger thing that "Safe C++" and the reaction to it misses is that Rust's boon is its Culture. The "Safe C++" proposal gives C++ a potential safety technology but does not and cannot gift it the accompanying Safety Culture. Government programmes to demand safety will be most effective - just as with other types of safety - if they deliver an improved culture not just technological change.
That sounds significantly more like C++ trying to be a dialect of Rust, rather than the other way around. I don't think that was the GGP's main gripe.
But more importantly, Safe C++ is just not a thing yet. People seem to discount the herculean effort that was required to properly implement the borrow checker, the thousands of little problems that needed to be solved for it to be sound, not to mention a few really, really hard problems, like variance, lifetimes in higher-kinded trait bounds, generic associated types, and how lifetimes interact with a Hindley-Milner type system in general.
Not trying to discount Safe C++'s efforts of course. I really hope they, too, succeed. I also hope they manage to find a syntax that's less... what it is now.
I don't think Safe C++ has a Hindley-Milner type system? I think it's just the "Just the machine integers wearing funny hats†" types from C which were passed on to C++
In K&R C this very spartan type system makes some sense, there's no resources, you're on a tiny Unix machine, you'd otherwise be grateful for an assembler. In C++ it does look kinda silly, like an SUV with a lawnmower engine. Or one of those very complicated looking board games which turns out to just be Snakes and Ladders with more steps.
But I don't think Safe C++ fixes that anyhow.
† Technically maybe the C pointer types are not just the integers wearing a funny hat. That's one of many unresolved soundness bugs in the language, hence ISO/IEC DTS 6010 (which will some day become a TR)
No, Safe C++ does not have that type system. I was just trying to emphasize the amount of, let's be honest, downright genius that had to go into that lifetime specification and borrow checker implementation.
For C++, it'll be about cramming lifetimes into diamond-inheritance OOP, which... feels even harder.
Safe C sounds like a much, much more believable project, if such a proposal were to exist.
> Why not just use the Chrome render engine directly from Rust?
This is what projects like Tauri (in Rust) and Wails (in Go) are doing[0][1]. Utilizing Webview to develop applications, but they still don't support mobile, Tauri mobile is in beta.
Basically Tauri and Wails are on one side (HTML/CSS) trying to approach cross platform by supporting mobile platforms, while Flutter and Kotlin Compose Multiplatform started from the other side.
So it depends on your needs, web-first or mobile-first, and what platforms matter to you. So far Flutter is in the lead offering the most polished experience when it comes to supporting all platforms (Web, desktop, iOS, Android).
They used to be based on Skia but now they have their own renderer (Impeller). That said rendering is only a small part of a UI toolkit, there's a ton of other stuff e.g. how to interact with system libraries, integrate with UI paradigms (e.g. tray icons, gestures, responsiveness, widgets).
There's too much infrastructure on top of the render engine to replicate. Flutter is backed by Google and has a fairly large ecosystem of community packages.
See Freya - which uses Skia - the render engine Flutter used until a while back.
Want to have one day of 8hrs of work only so I'm fresh tomorrow to visit a car factory and to write two papers in the weekend.
I just started a relationship though, you do get used to the sensation of falling down a cliff trying to build a plane as you fall while eating glass and barely being able to walk out of exhaustion because it needs to be ready tomorrow so you're the only office on a Sunday night at 3am with the lights still burning while knowing that if you cannot borrow money within 4 days you cannot pay rent.
It's an acquired taste :)
I agree that SaaS is a dead end. I had a talk with two of our investors this week who run a SaaS company trying to convince me to stop hardware and go 100% to SaaS because it's such a great business model. But for that I think you're too late. The only new SaaS I consistently see people trying out are AI SaaS.
Because of that I'm doing SaaS with AI but combined with physical devices. I do think manufacturing is going to grow in the US and Europe, simply because factories need (way way) fewer people. Regardless of tariffs, protectionism, etc., the playing field has changed. Labor cost has become a tiny fraction of manufacturing cost. Offshoring makes no real sense anymore.
Therefore I make real physical AI, cameras and robots, to help people, well people and bigger people like McDonald's and car factories, build ultra-low-labor factories. That's what's going on in the US and in Europe right now, not SaaS. But the principle is the same: Startups just move to where the money / growth is.
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