gonehome

+1 tight vertical integration leads to better products, better defaults, and better user experience in the (vast) majority of cases across most product domains.

It’s sad to see them fail, hopefully someone else will be able to pull it off. I guess my $20 deposit for their faster e-bike is unlikely to ever come to anything. Maybe I should just get a used stromer.

It’s a new OS design that runs in a runtime with baked in networking and PKI lookup for encrypted routes between users.

I primarily use it today for chat (similar to IRC), and I locally host my own system. Every user is their own server.

I wrote up a longer form description here: https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...

Hopefully that’s helpful. It’s a little outdated now though. We’re doing free hosting for now at tlon.io to help the network grow (so it’s easy to check it out).

The (long) original technical intro to the ideas is here: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

There are some E-ink fans in the urbit community (disclaimer I work on this stuff) and it really lets you fully extend the retropunk feel.

I’ve got my Urbit running on a native planet hardware box (https://martiancomputing.substack.com/p/product-review-nativ...) plugged into my router’s switch that I can access from anywhere. The UI for groups also looks good on e-ink (mostly white and black, nice design) one of the devs has an e-ink phone that shows it off. It’s cool to really own the entire stack.

I had the original remarkable tablet mentioned in the post and it was really cool (someone was also using it as a browser to access urbit back then), the new tablet looks better too.

There was someone at the first urbit assembly (probably here on HN) working on cool new e-ink style tech that had some advantages without having to engage with all the patent nonsense and vendor lock-in that has plagued (imo seriously stalled) e-ink as a technology.

You can read a lot of the old discussions between the founders Madison, Hamilton, etc. and the type of abuse they were worried about and how they thought the structures they put in place would reduce risk.

I think it’s been working ok, but there are issues (issues they often explicitly predicted), see: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Add...

There is also an element of culture required among the population too that’s necessary.

> “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.

“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

> The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it.

I think it was more that a system will abused by the extent to which abuse is possible. Someone benevolent (in the book snowball who was a stand in for Trotsky) will get out maneuvered by someone willing to weaponize all available power (Napolean in the book, Stalin). It’s possible to have someone good for a time (there are occasionally successful monarchs), but the system is not resilient to bad actors.

Norms or good intentions are not enough, you have to look at incentives and what abuse is possible within the system.

The US is a more resilient system (trump failed to hold onto power despite best efforts), but even so it has weaknesses in places governed primarily by norms. A political system needs to be evaluated by its outcomes in practice, not hypothetical “best case” implementations that ignore incentives.

It wasn’t just basic social skills, I was asking some simple CS/data structure questions.

I think it's a big (and likely incorrect) assumption that all of (or even a plurality of) the people making these comments working in admissions are themselves white.

It's not just that they're not representative of an entire group of people, many aren't members of that group at all.

It's also not necessarily entirely on the admissions people - the argument made in that substack (and ultimately the conclusion of SCOTUS) is that affirmative action is a euphemism for racial discrimination.

Ultimately you have to be doing something like this somewhere if that's the policy since that's explicitly what it means, the internal comms just show the reality of the policy that's often not said in public communication (because imo it seems obviously bad to most people).

Yeah there's definitely a selection bias in an interview setting too, but since I was doing the same thing in both locations (career fair interviews as a company employee) there was more in common between the groups and me (imo) as opposed to undergrad peers/friends when you're an undergrad and students you TA when you're a grad student.

I just meant things like couldn’t afford tuition, don’t know how or can’t get loans, or couldn’t move from family, or w/e - someone who was accepted but didn’t go due to stuff unrelated to getting in (my dad was also in this category). Some large percentage of people think they’re middle class so it’s hard to know what that means without specifics.

A lot of elite schools do cover tuition now if your parents are below a certain income, but it’s imperfect and doesn’t scale with number of siblings etc.

My observation from doing hundreds of interviews at career fairs was the fancy schools (Stanford) had students that were way better at basic questions. This isn’t a perfect metric, but it’s signal.

If your peers in undergrad were your friends, you were probably selecting a non-representative group (smart people you liked) and your job as a TA shows you a more random sample (or even skewed negative, poor students grubbing for grades).

At least that’s my guess (selection bias).

Of course if I’m wrong there’s an even bigger opportunity in undervalued students, but I’ve done enough interviews to believe that’s not true.

Yeah, this is one reason why I think the outliers at state schools are undervalued. These heuristics are indirect and lead to inefficient selection, competition over the same scarce resources.

If you’re a startup there’s a strategic advantage in trying to look for talent where others aren’t and leveraging your own subject matter expertise to do so.

In moneyball the scouts selected on stupid stuff rather than on base percentage - if you know what to actually look for you can find stuff mispriced.

This substack quotes some of the relevant bits: https://colemanhughes.substack.com/p/10-notes-on-the-end-of-...

Copying here actual conversation (revealed in the lawsuit) between admissions officers at UNC:

“I just opened a brown girl who’s an 810 [SAT].”

“If its brown and above a 1300 [SAT] put them in for [the] merit/Excel [scholarship].”

“Still yes, give these brown babies a shot at these merit $$.”

“I am reading an Am. Ind.”

“[W]ith these [URM] kids, I’m trying to at least give them the chance to compete even if the [extracurriculars] and essays are just average.”

“I don’t think I can admit or defer this brown girl.”

“perfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th”

“Brown?!”

“Heck no. Asian.”

“Of course. Still impressive.”

“I just read a blk girl who is an MC and Park nominee.”....

“Stellar academics for a Native Amer/African Amer kid.”....

“I’m going through this trouble because this is a bi-racial (black/white) male.”

> “On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money.”

This does fit my hypothesis that the outliers at state schools are likely undervalued in the market by recruiters. The averages at selective schools are a lot higher (work a few career fairs where you ask basic technical questions and this is obvious), but everyone is competing over them and the outliers at state schools are people like you with extenuating circumstances. Since the actual education product isn’t that different (though there is some difference), there’s probably opportunity in trying to recruit the best students from state schools companies tend to ignore.

It’s a similar problem to the scientific journals that extort scientists.

The elite universities are not primarily selling education they’re selling prestige. In academia it’s worse because prestige is the metric for getting grants and status since the pay is bad.

It’s also not great in private companies since institutional prestige is used to filter inbound interest, but it’s better because at least there are other ways to prove ability - it’s just harder to get the opportunity.

The prestige is also available for direct sale - I think you could pay $5M for a building or something and your kid could go to Stanford (I was told this off the record by a student that worked in admissions) That was the irony with the whole “famous people cheating their way in” news cycle, the schools were angry they were getting a discount on the fee (and probably that this hurt their prestige).

Schools like Harvard also hold spots that help their own prestige, in Lisa Brennan-Jobs (great) book Small Fry she talks about her Harvard interview and the woman was basically an ass ignoring her until she mentioned her dad founded a computer company. When the interviewer realized her dad was Steve Jobs she literally got up and left for a moment, then came back with an entirely different demeanor. Lisa expected it to help (she was counting on it), but even she was surprised by the obviousness of it. She was accepted.

If you read the admissions content that came out in the affirmative action SCOTUS case you can see how messed up it is. [0] This kind of high status selective scarcity creates perverse incentives.

If the goal was actually educating smart people, the behavior of the institutions would be different (probably more ISAs and such), but that’s not the primary goal and the behavior reveals it.

[0]: https://colemanhughes.substack.com/p/10-notes-on-the-end-of-...

I’ll +1 this too - it’s very good and he’s a good teacher, it’s enjoyable to read.

When I worked a low paying support job there were the coworkers that complained about the people coming in and there were the good coworkers and they rarely overlapped.

Same is true in retail or in this example imo - the worst employees are the ones that behave this way and rationalize their bad behavior.

I don’t buy this - I’ve seen good support people solve problems despite system inadequacies.

The guy in this story who said “your AirTag may be there but that doesn’t mean your bag is there” is the opposite of that type.

Maybe they left a note in the file, probably they did nothing.

I think generally it’s better to never lie outside of a few rare corner cases (mostly around avoiding violence).

Those corner cases have basically never come up in my life (stuff like the SS coming to your door and asking if you’re hiding Jews).

Most of the times people justify their own lying they’re wrong to do so imo.

Did he at least apologize after that? Sometimes being embarrassed like that can turn a person nice, but sometimes not.

Hopefully in the future he gives you less of a problem.

The employees deserve to be thrown under the bus for this imo. I’ve done support work, if any of them gave a shit they could have helped her, but they didn’t.

Stuff like this suggests major cultural problems across the entire org (which includes employees like this). Probably major changes required to fix.

DBS hardware seems to work - does it also have these issues or are you excluding it for some reason?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_brain_stimulation

No idea if accurate but there was this which is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337

> “ Specifically they were one of the last believers of long-forgotten Russian theory of superconductivity, pioneered by Nikolay Bogolyubov. The accepted theory is entirely based on Cooper pairs, but this theory suggests that a sufficient constraint on electrons may allow superconductivity without actual Cooper pairs. This requires carefully positioned point defects in the crystalline structure, which contemporary scientists consider unlikely and such mode of SC was never formally categorized unlike type-I and type-II SC. Professor Tong-seek Chair (최동식) represented a regret about this status quo (in 90s, but still applies today) that this theory was largely forgotten without the proper assessment after the fall of USSR. It was also a very interesting twist that Iris Alexandria, "that Russian catgirl chemist", had an advisor who was a physicist-cum-biochemist studied this theory and as a result were so familiar with the theory that they were able to tell if replications follow the theoretical prediction.”

So it might be an old hypothesis brought back?

Agreed, tools like gathertown can make a big difference in improving this problem for remote teams, but it requires buy in from the top and the right culture (everyone has to hang out in there during working hours).

The fact they think this shows they have no idea what they’re talking about.

This problem was solved when apple introduced ignore unknown callers.

They could improve on it slightly by allowing iOS apps access to breakthrough if they can prove its from an app somehow (like Uber or doordash), but really even that is an optimization not really needed.

For the phantom “what about my kid who’s phone is destroyed and is calling me from a strangers phone with seconds to live” you’d get the voicemail and multiple calls anyway.

That said, in recent years I’ve noticed a precipitous drop of these kinds of spam calls, so it may no longer be that big of an issue.

Yeah it's unavoidable, if you rely on growth (especially if you have a free or freemium service) you need to do this crap (though the author describes the most hostile form of it).

The business models of the web trap everyone within these incentives in order to be competitive - everyone hates it, but moloch demands it [0].

To escape it you have to escape the business model, to do that you have to escape the incentives, and to do that you have to boil the ocean and hope it works out [1].

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[1]: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...

Maybe? I did find this from 1997: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Microsoft-Pulls-Pran...

I thought I’d read that came after Netscape started it though? I could be wrong.

Some more info here: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/

> “Then, Marc Andreessen began talking up Netscape not just as a browser, but as a new, cross-platform operating system. He went as far as saying that in the future, Netscape would reduce Microsoft to a set of “poorly debugged device drivers.”

> Gates did a quick about face in May of 1995. He sent out a memo to all Microsoft employees titled “The Internet Tidal Wave.” In it, Gates outlined a new future for his company, one connected extricably to the Internet. His paranoia for competition was also clear. Netscape, Gates demanded, was a company that Microsoft would need to “match and beat.””

I swear I read the Netscape guys went to Microsoft hq in Redmond and posted signs all over the campus mocking Microsoft for being stupid and missing the web.

Rumor was Gates saw one and thought they were right so pivoted to destroy them.

Don’t poke the bear I guess?

I can’t remember where I read this or how true it’s likely to be, but it came to mind.

55k on average is ignoring the entry cost of a model 3 (especially with incentives) - also average is just a bad metric for affordability.

An extreme example: https://electrek.co/2023/07/24/brand-new-tesla-model-3-less-...

That's also an outlier, but less than 30k isn't which makes this post somewhat misleading (at best).

The Model Y was also the top selling vehicle globally across all categories for Q1 2023: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/26/23738581/tesla-model-y-ev... and in 2022 was the best selling car in the US: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-y-2022-best-selling-to...

Ford's cars are probably too expensive because they ignored the EV market for a decade and it takes time to scale up production and reduce costs.

> "The big problem for EVs from a price standpoint is that the whole industry has decided that the only way to cater to American tastes is to make their EV fleet out of trucks and SUVs, eliminating the economical sedans that might be affordable."

I'd guess this is because Ford can't profitably make an affordable sedan (they can't do so without losing a lot of money) so they need to make a more expensive vehicle with better margins, Tesla did this too of course - they just had a decade head start while the legacy manufacturers did nothing.

Urbit's current chat implementation solves a lot of these issues and there's a clear path to things like search getting way better since all your chat data is stored on your local urbit.

No worries - trying to engage in thoughtful conversation despite the internet incentivizing craziness is my goal!

Fair point about existing players, I just tend to discount old large companies being able to execute for the same reasons startups tend to eat their lunch. Why haven’t they done it already? Why haven’t they started even now?

Why did it require Tesla to build EVs? Why did existing car companies ignore Tesla for 20 years until they were way behind?

Probably the innovators dilemma - it’s rare existing providers are much of a threat.