Sadly this seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. Almost all the right wing populist parties in different countries seem to be heavily connected to MAGA and co in the US, and want to try and push the same things in their own countries.

And even without the whole social media thing, we see an alarming trend where 'issues' seen as controversial in the US end up becoming controversies in other countries too, even if they're basically irrelevant on a cultural level/were perfectly fine for years or decades beforehand.

Add this to political figures from these parties being seen with their US counterparts on a fairly regular basis, and it generally feels like world politics is quickly becoming Americanised.

They see the American experiment of populism as validating, and the fact that in America it is mostly been pulled off by bunglers is interesting too. And the fact that you can get such traction with very few ideas and mostly just labels like “woke” makes the whole thing seem like magic.

Money

Eh, I question the list here. Why? Because they're all startup founder focused sites and communities.

Unless your product or service is aimed at other founders, or a techie focused audience in general, that's not where your customers are. Advertising there is like a game developer marketing their game to other devs or a writer marketing their book towards other writers.

What you really want to do is figure out who your audience actually is, figure out where they hang out online, and promote it there. Niche specific forums, subreddits, Discord servers, social media communities, etc.

That said, there's no real harm in advertising in these places, and other founders can give you useful feedback.

I've always wondered what the people in these videos/making these videos think of this extra traffic from articles, sites and subreddits like this. Do they ever randomly go on YouTube, then freak out when they see a ton of notifications from people they don't know? Are there people involved here who see the popularity of some random clip, realise there's a business/channel opportunity involved and go all in with it?

What it's like seeing some random seemingly unlisted/unedited clip you posted suddenly get thousands or millions of views from random people online?

Gonna be a bit controversial here, and say that sometimes the opposite can happen. That someone becoming successful can give them the confidence to share ideas they wouldn't have shared otherwise, and give ideas that people would have otherwise written off as 'ridiculous' a level of extra credibility in the process.

And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ideas put forward by successful companies and business people (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else) would never get off the ground if put forward by a random individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that make the world better off.

At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything, popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.

So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it can equally make you more likely to try them since your status gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to tell you no.

Sure. And I'd say the culture of the country and expectations there probably play a part even between places with similar income levels.

For example, someone with a very entrepreneurial mindset is probably going to want to be born in the US, and ideally close to a city like New York or San Francisco. You can certainly make it as a founder in Europe or Asia or Australia or what not, but it's a lot easier to get the funding needed to become a household name in the former, since (at least for a while) there were companies and investors willing to throw a ton of cash at crazy ideas rather than a moderate amount at proven businesses.

Similarly, if you're particularly interested in a certain industry, you'll ideally want to be born in a country where said industry has a decent foothold. Video game developers are all over the world, but it's hard to deny your odds are probably better in that industry if you're American or Japanese.

This. People seem way too keen to assume every questionable decision or random mistake is part of some super complex 4D chess game, while the real answer is probably a whole lot more mundane. They write like this because that's how a lot of people write in general, elite or not.

I see all these example emails and such and my first thought is "oh, so how many of my relatives write emails and text messages then".

It reminds me of the whole "scammers use bad English to find easy marks" concept. Yeah, maybe some do. But again, it feels like people giving them way too much credit for what could easily have been an accidental situation.

Like, you suck at writing English because it's not your first language and you've got no professional reason to do so, and try scamming someone on the other side of the world with those skills. If the recipent is smart or internet savvy, they'll ignore your message. If they're not smart/are overly greedy/aren't internet savvy in general they'll fall for it.

So, why would you try and improve your English skills in that situation? As far as you know, they're good enough to get you money from gullible folks elsewhere. You're succeeding at what you want to suceed at, so you don't really think twice about it.

You can certainly try and find some psychology related reason behind every random disrepetency and questionable decision, or assume that people are often pretty dumb and do pretty dumb things, and that they won't stop doing those things unless they've given a reason to.

Technically speaking? Sure, most of the companies I've worked at aren't exactly doing rocket science. Creating media websites and doing work for clients as a marketing company are things that have a very low barrier to entry.

The challenge is that in most of these cases, success is based on trust and long-term reputation building rather than pure technical skill. And doing a good job in either industry requires a lot more time, resources and effort than a single person may be able to provide.

So, while I could definitely spin up some very similar sites, creating the actual content at a level of quality that people would even bother to read would be a chore, as would finding an audience in general.

Depends on what you're using AI for. Programming purposes? Most people aren't too bothered by that all things considered. Making assets like art and music? Yeah, people really dislike that, and there's a huge stigma against games featuring such assets on platforms like Steam.

Even if you manage to ignore the ethics issues and controversy, AI generated assets have the issue that they can be difficult to work with for a game developer, since these tools don't really make it easy to keep everything consistent across a game with thousands of resources. For example, if you made a 2D platformer with a pixel art aesthetic, AI generated graphics probably wouldn't work that well there. They'd look generic, show various signs of bad pixel art practices that would make them stand out as unnatural, likely not match the style for other assets in the game, be difficult to modify while keeping the same look and feel, etc.

Creating one piece of artwork with generative AI (as ethically dubious/controversial as it is) is 'manageable', since you don't need to care much about stylistic consistency, edits, etc. Creating all the assets needed for a game with such a tool sounds like a nightmare.

Yes true, I have not even tried out the AI imaging tools for game dev specifically, I can imagine there are issues though. As for programming, I use it as a tool to assist, I haven’t gone full bore vibe coding for multiple reasons, one being that I want to learn the engine well and I feel like that is much harder vibe coding.

I mean it makes sense. Keep in mind that:

1. There's a lot of competition in many elite fields, and a decent percentage in both groups aren't going to make it anyway.

2. Being good at something as a child doesn't mean that's your passion or the thing you want to devote your life to. Plenty of these prodigies may want to get into different fields they're not naturally gifted at instead.

3. Being really good at something as a kid can make it hard to learn the discipline needed to stay on top when things get tougher. I'm not a prodigy, but many of the things I did well at in school/college are things I did worse than expected at in unversity, since I wasn't motivated/disciplined enough to get everything done on time.

4. Some fields require physical capabilities that a child prodigy may not grow up to have, like certain sports.

It's interesting to hear this, because my machines have basically never been locked down. Okay, in some companies that's because the company had us use our own PCs, so they didn't bother to do anything to restrict what they were capable of anyway.

But even when a company gave me a 'free' computer to do work on, they never really locked it down that much. We could still install programs and browser extensions and visit just about any site we wanted, and network security was basically non-existent. We didn't usually need a VPN to access our email or workspace, and much of the time they let us access work email on our phones or personal devices like it was any other account.

This was when I was working for two large organisations, one media company and one fintech one.