> It's hard to think of a scenario where there's a child technical enough to run Gemma 3 locally but somehow unable to access any other written erotica.
The reason you're struggling to understand is that you're thinking about this logically.
Adult content is obviously freely available to any child or adult with minimum technical skills. What makes LLMs different is that it's "the new thing" and people respond differently to "the new thing".
I watched my mother spend 30 years building her company...it's hard enough to build a manufacturing company in 3rd world country. Applying Western labour standards would make it impossible.
The way out of poverty is to through. You need to create enough value to be able to afford the airconed offices where everyone sits on an Aeron with a macbook pro.
As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.
Whatsapp is an outlier in many ways and comparing them with any company will make that company seem bloated. As for the comparison, Whatsapp has no monetization model, no marketing and a simpler product.
The AirBnb angle is completely misleading. It seems for a marketplace like this to momentum you need talented drone pilots as quickly as possible. Currently the quality of the sample footage is terrible e.g. 2 out of the 4 videos look like they have had no color correction done and the drone is very jerky.
In junior school I had a friend who was considered a little weird. One day during break I came across him repeatedly hitting his head against a wooden wall. He wasn't doing it especially hard - but I was certain it was hurting him. When I asked him why he was hitting his head against the wall he said, "It feels good when I stop".
This author is basically the drug addict version of my junior school friend. They're both idiots - but one was 8 and the other is a respected author.
Actually this kind of thing gets fairly complex. Consider for instance a scenario where the government was sponsoring an event like this - would that be OK?
Or consider a company that has a table reserved in their cafeteria specifically for black men. Would that be OK?
It seems as a society we've decided that a certain basis of discrimination is fine while others are not. For example having a table exclusively for executives is fine, while one based on race or gender is not.
It appears the author doesn't realize that VCs are normal businesses trying to turn a profit. If there was a profitable opportunity to find "99.99% of talented, unknown founders" by accepting cold emails, then some VCs would start doing it.
I would guess the reason they don't is because the authors assumption is wrong. If you're a talented, driven founder with a growing startup then it's not really that hard to get a meeting with a top tier VC.
The problem with accepting cold emails is the sheer volume. Unless there is a standard filtering process, partners will waste too much time with crappy startups.
A solution to this would be to create a standardized format (kind of like the YC application) which founders could submit to multiple VCs. Fortunately, AngelList is already busy solving this problem.