100 karma · joined May 1, 2018
Today I saw a substack article on HN's top list from Jonathan Haidt, another guy in the same political spectrum complaining about social media and societal change.
My impression of substack is that, it is the platform of the disgruntled. Substack is a niche player, and never will be mainstream.
Their advice is not worth it because advice is free on YouTube. Let's take PG; he often gives a lot of general and specific advice; he is a great writer and a fascinating mind. I enjoy reading his articles; they are outstanding, but they aren't any different from the many YouTubers giving advice. Unless you get personal time with YC staff, their services are not unique.
Do you need to be Peter Mckinnon’s apprentice to learn photography? No, likewise you don’t need YC.
Meta on other hand could care less about John Carmack’s opinion as it has no impact to their business. In short John Carmack’s opinion was ignored it had no impact for a large company.
The mistake John Carmack is making is that he thinks his views are special, they are not.
I have a few friends who are into passive real estate investing, they claim they own an apartment complex. What they did is they gave money to a group of guys who pooled money got a loan and then bought an apartment complex under an LLC. My friends owns 0.001 percent of the LLC with no operational control of the apartment complex. My understanding they are called real-estate syndicates. It is a scam if you ask me. I don’t think most investors will get good returns on their investment.
E.g. Musk said in the past he will draw the line at legal speech. Assume that Ye (Kanye) posts his early morning rant next week, and it is critical of several groups of people based on religion or race. That speech is legal, but highly problematic, is Musk owning Twitter going to make a difference in the way Ye’s problematic speech is handled in the future, I think not.
There will be pressure from platform owners like Apple and Google as well. If the moderation is weak Apple could decide to remove the Twitter app like they did to Parler.
Elon buying Twitter isn’t going to set the bird free, for sure it made the cage a little bigger.
Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.
Similar story with ByteDance and Musically, how many of you have used Musically before Bytedance bought it and re-branded it as TikTok.
Had Figma been part of the Adobe Suite I would have at-least downloaded it and tried it. As great as Figma is, reach of their product is limited, Adobe is giving Figma‘s technology the reach they would have never gotten as a standalone company.
Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption.
My condolences to British people who held the Queen at high esteem. But frankly world is a bigger place than Britain and America. Not everyone from the British former colonies will appreciate the Queen. if they express the feelings about the monarchy in a respectful way; do you see an issue?