Comment by komali2

5 days ago

> The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.

I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.

If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.

I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.

I don’t think John Carmack likes to tell people what to do, regardless of wealth.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052

  • I'm not sure that he doesn't like to, so much as that the position he ended up in as a result of the Oculus acquisition had no actual authority attached to it. He was functionally a glorifier adviser, to trot out at trade shows (and reading between the lines, this was a pretty frustrating position to end up in - he'd rather have had a real job, even if it was to build something he didn't fully agree with)