A bit off topic, but I absolutely love the little robot on the author's main project's landing page (https://rerun.io/).
I normally condemn mouse hijacking, but this implementation will be allowed.
Rerun is pretty dope, but I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that it's the "author's main project"? There is a whole company backing it, with no affiliation that I could find, apart from the author being an occasional contributor?
They mentioned "... and my visualizer tool comes with an MCP server ...", with a link to the rerun project. I guess it makes more sense that his visualizer tool uses rerun...Sorry for the confusion from my side.
I don't know what kind of experiences and apps this UI/UX mode will enable but it's one of the most innovative and coolest AI model demos I've seen this year.
"In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
I'd argue that both of these would be highly beneficial for all kinds of students, founders and non-founders alike.
Starting a startup could be generalized for all students to having a dream or goal, taking ownership of it, and making it happen. A startup is just one possible path, pg is probably too specific here, I would agree.
Having more free time to work on my own projects is probably the freedom I missed most at university. I think learning to choose what to work on and making something happen would benefit future workers, teachers, doctors, and engineers just as much as entrepreneurs.
It's a trade-off in terms of time and other resources, since parts of the existing curriculum would have to fade away. But I think it's a good starting point for change and a good direction to move in.
Most engineering classes include projects, but they're presented as homework and/or "something you can show an employer."
And "building things" isn't enough. Many projects have zero commercial potential.
I don't think PG is wrong, but I also don't think he's right. I think if universities wanted to do something with startup culture they could filter the more motivated and talented students into incubators of their own - not through some kind of overly academic post-grad degree, but literally a startup school where the university provides resources, subsistence, and access to funding, in return for a share of project equity. The "teaching" would be more about finding customers and handling finances and less about managerial MBA nonsense.
The big win for students would be "You don't have to worry about food, rent, or basic running costs."
Post-grad research overlaps with this, but is more fundamental. The emphasis here would be more on projects with immediate income potential, not on technology that could be commercialised in the future, possibly.
The problem is academic culture is very different to startup culture, so the startup school would need a much looser relationship to its parent than a typical academic department.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. One of the best frameworks I have encountered, and one I point people to whenever I can, is the AI Fluency framework by Anthropic, Prof. Joseph Feller (University College Cork), and Prof. Rick Dakan (Ringling College):
This framework provides a more abstract way of thinking when working with AI systems. Especially valuable to me is the pattern of the 4 D's: Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence, which I have now internalized whenever I use AI systems. It helps me understand my own and others' (mis)use of AI systems a bit better.
To get a better sense of the scale, if you are viewing this app on a 4K display, with the planet measuring about 2,000 pixels across Earth’s diameter is approximately 12,742 km (7,918 miles), so each pixel represents about 6.37 km (3.96 miles).
A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.
There's already so many starlinks in some bits of LEO that a single sat breaking up will lead to a runaway chain reaction that breaks up everything in that orbit quicker than the debris will decay out of it:
> The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km.
Whether the pixels are not representative of actual size, seems like putting lipstick on a pig. When I look up at night, I can't see the night sky without several satellites interrupting my view. Even a brief 10 second glance, will produce at least 1.
Their is no communication need that is greater than our need to understand space and space weather. If the satellite operators can't stop destroying the night sky, their launch permission should be removed, so as their old satellites fall, new ones won't be allowed to launch.
Further, if the federal government won't intervene (looking at the U.S. because Starlink). Then states should make those satellite receivers illegal.
reply