facethrowaway

This letter is clearly written with dumb, naive retail investors in mind. Anyone familiar with Palantir’s history knows that their first headquarters was a building they took over from Facebook. The two companies are intertwined in many, many ways.

Best investments of the 21st century:

1. Peter Thiel, Facebook, $500k

2. Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, $1m

No matter who wins the next election, Thiel and his buddies are guaranteed more contracts. Welcome to the new American plutocracy!

Yes. Since he is the Roger Stone of the PayPal Mafia, he’s not going to go away anytime soon.

Reminder to those who aren’t aware: Quora is a rich man’s hobby business. You aren’t going to get practical knowledge from their decisions.

What do they look like! How do they function? How did they retool to make them so quickly? How do they compare to normal ventilators? What’s the UI on their control panels?

This sounds like a fairy tale to me, with the governor covering for Elon. But maybe they did, in fact, retool in 48 hours and deliver a working product.

How is this some sort of prescient statement? There have been movies made about this exact issue for decades. On a societal level, it is a bug marked WONTFIX similar to preparing for asteroid impact, the next Big One in SF (come on guys, we arent prepared for it), the next volcano, large scale terrorist attack using chemical weapons, and so on.

It seems nobody has a memory to remember that Microsoft hobbled local governments attempts to build and use open source software instead of paying their tax. In a way, you’re basically thanking Bill Gates for redistributing a small fraction of the money he’s stolen from global governments through the Microsoft monopoly.

If you think this is a conspiracy theory go talk to IT staff who worked in the German government in the late 90s.

For reference, someone might want to post a chart of the gains the markets have made in the past 5 years. I would hardly call this a crash.

There’s a VC firm that already uses this model with their billion-dollar investments. It’s called Benchmark. Several of their former portfolio company founders can tell you all about how it’s worked out for them.

They didn’t actually have $300m, it was a commitment based on milestones that weren’t met.

Until the richest YouTuber isn’t an adolescent set up to prey on his peers with unboxing videos, these measures are all half-hearted attempts at keeping the cash flowing. More regulation is probably needed.

This is pretty tame and actually sounds pretty pragmatic and well-organized in a non-threatening manner, especially given the target audience (kids). Moderating for different countries’ rules is a requirement unless you want to get kicked out of lots of markets.

The real concern I have is in the fact that things below 50 views don’t get much moderation attention, which is the same across all platforms, and where we see the most risk for these platforms to be used to bully people within small social groups (such as at school).

Anyone who thinks Facebook doesn’t similarly optimize the content within Explore etc is delusional. It would be interesting to compare the information these companies offer national security organizations.

This seems strikingly similar to Travis Kalanick being paid to leave Uber. Is Benchmark involved?

> Mr Gates had made a $2m donation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s prestigious Media Lab at Epstein’s behest.

> “Although Epstein pursued Gates aggressively, Gates had absolutely no business partnership or personal friendship with Epstein,” the statement said. “Gates never socialised with Epstein or attended parties with him.”

Something about these statements doesn’t add up. The fact that there was another public statement seems to indicate they’re feeling that no additional evidence will come out that will once again contradict them, as it did the first time.

I am guessing this would lead to solar system-scale destruction? Putting a base on Mars doesn’t seem like it would do much to counter such an event if it headed our way?

Well, that’s one way to kill your credibility quickly. Even if it was innocent, they should have anticipated that someone would have found this and inferred otherwise, and preemptively disclosed it.

This is public key encryption software, not a toy. Don’t act confused when your users pick everything apart.

GoodRx has well-connected Silicon Valley founders and a good PR team. We now see lots of this sort of submarine PR from tech companies.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> Employees will have an option to see a health provider via a mobile app or website, and they can text a nurse on any health topic in minutes. If an employee needs follow-up care, Amazon Care can arrange for a nurse to pay a visit at home.

Have fun trying to get hold of an actual doctor. I understand that nurses are more than capable of handling lots of issues, but I doubt Amazon will publish a breakdown of the doctor:nurse ratio for this initiative.

Sometimes I forget that this is a community full of engineers, many of whom have poor social skills.

Invest less time in apps and more time in trying to understand your kids.

Do you ever read the New York Times? He’s on the board. He’s also connected to half of SV. Check his Flickr account for the portraits.

Once you read the Epstein interview with the New York Times writer, you start to understand that there’s probably more of these “unconventional thinkers” in tech connected to Epstein and his behavior than we are ever going to find out. The whole “being ostracized for an attraction to teenage girls is a very new idea” thing sounds exactly like a lot of what someone would hear at the late end of a Silicon Valley dinner party.

Anyone who is apologizing for this behavior or who thinks this is a “witch hunt” may want to consider using a throwaway name, because these comments aren’t going to age well. And yes, we will remember.

It’s a giant political dodge that has nothing to do with the underlying issues. You want to know what’s the real cancer, the real drug these dealers don’t want you regulating? The NOTIFICATIONS. That’s something everyone on the inside knows. The average person treats validating push notifications like a mouse getting cheese and will act out and continue to generate content to get it.

Look at the emails and push notifications these companies send out to regular people on a constant, daily basis, and you will find the cancer you’re looking for. Eliminating like counts and follower numbers is a nice idea that excites teenage activists but is pointless now that these companies have already built accounts with zillions of followers.

Sites using the like button are dumb to begin with, especially if they are in e-commerce. You’re handing your competitors an ability to do lookalike targeting of your customers via Facebook ads. This is one of the biggest advantages of that platform. Surprised nobody writes about this while gasping at Facebook’s profits.

Bravo to Chris. We need to see more of this.

Of all the FB lottery winners, the one who should be doing the most and avoids all negative press is Dustin Moskovitz. He votes his super voting shares whatever way Mark Zuckberberg wants, keeping Zuck’s power unchecked. The world needs to stop allowing him to pretend to be an accidentally successful founder of Asana and force him to own up to his responsibilities.

You just cited a newspaper owned by one of the richest members of the Communist Party. Not exactly an unbiased news source.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46353767

They were funded almost entirely by Sam Lessin, the husband of the founder, and his Facebook money. There is a massive conflict of interest there which they can conveniently avoid disclosing because it’s all arms-length.

I was surprised nobody brought that up when they were the main source of negative press about Snap. But, keep this in mind when you’re reading material from The Information — it’s the publication of choice for the retired members of the Facebook Mafia.