lowkey_

I’ve spoken extensively about this with people from China.

If something is totally forbidden, that holds.

However, the government doesn’t want people to feel oppressed beyond the explicitly forbidden.

What happens instead is, if it’s unfavorable but not forbidden, it will be mysteriously downvoted and removed, but if it keeps bubbling up, the government says “okay clearly this is important to people” and leaves it up.

This happened with some news cases of forced marriage in some rural mountain regions, and the revelation that a popular WeChat person (like YouTuber) was involved with one of the families.

I'm in a similar boat right now as a founder -- likely to just hire 1 engineer at this stage, and have runway for 18-24 months at most.

If the hypothesis is correct and the mission is working, you go raise the next round in another 9-12 months.

I have aphantasia and similarly didn't realize it until a few years ago, at 22, when someone asked me that "Apple" test.

Since then, I've noticed a few interesting things:

1) I remember things by association. I'm great with maps, physics, economics, and topics where things are inter-related, but terrible at memorization and obviously can't visualize anything.

2) I'm relatively unburdened by trauma. A lot of my friends will have a visual memory of things that have happened to them, but for me, if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. It's sort of sad to not remember all the good times, though.

3) It's not really related to taste (I think my taste visually is better than most of my friends and they ask me for fashion advice), but I have to see something to know how it will look and make a decision. Basically near impossible to be an artist or designer.

> one of the major problems here is that small banks are often not staffed for adequate cybersecurity for global operations like these; they do just fine doing hometown community banking, but are very vulnerable to being cracked like this. Yet another reason small banks that are providing big-bank services should be regulated like big banks.

Exactly — people are responding to me with comments about how SVB failed, or how the Goldman partnership isn't going well, but like... looking at Evolve's website I know for a fact they aren't hiring solid SWEs for cybersecurity.

I understand nobody's perfect, but this is the "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" ideology at work. If you chose Goldman and they got hacked, sure, I'll say "well you couldn't have known" — but if you choose a random bank based in Memphis I've never heard of, I'll naturally be more like "wtf."

Can someone explain why in the world Evolve has my data? (I use Mercury and Wise for my company). I tried going to their website and I'm still completely clueless.

Edit: Apparently Mercury was using Evolve as their banking partner. I know this is super common w/ online neobanks, but I'm really confused as to why they always choose the most random obscure bank. Why not partner with a major bank, or Column?

Cracked, especially in saying "cracked engineers", refers to really good engineers these days. It's cracked as in like broken in a good way, like too over-powered that it's unfair.

I was skeptical of whether it was representative of 85% of the global population, or just the first-world.

I've often thought (and heard that) environmental concerns are secondary to economic, and that people in less prosperous countries don't care as much about environmental concerns as people in first-world countries who are secure in most areas of their lives. Surprisingly, this data says the opposite!

Sample size was: North America: 2000, Central & South America: 3500, Europe: 8000, Africa: 3000, APAC: 7700,

On banning unnecessary single-use plastics being 'important': Australia: 87%, South Korea: 86%, Mexico: 94%, Uganda: 93%,

This may be obvious to some, but I really had the opposite notion until seeing this data.

Side note, but I see two YC-backed startups mentioning themselves in this thread:

Yarn - Make Videos Like The Best (W24) https://yarn.so Kite - Product Videos Made Easy (S23) https://kite.video

It's sort of crazy YC is backing so many hundreds of companies that there's this level of overlap. I assume one pivoted into this?

Still, crazy to imagine all the YC companies competing with each-other these days. I've even seen YC-backed 'incumbents' being disrupted by new YC-backed startups.

> those schools you mentioned might not have contracts with the Israeli government which is one of the things students at Colombia are protesting

Do you have a source? I don't think this is true.

Christian Science Monitor has been my favorite news source for a long time despite not really being religious. It's so objective and fair even on the most contentious of topics, and really tries to understand the human experience.

They were founded by the same woman, Mary Baker Eddy, like a century ago, but today they just have one specifically-cited Christian Science article in each print.

It seems they may have the same owner still, but seems like they very much have editorial independence, judging by the things I read.

+1 to this, the article even states how there's illegal logging operations in the area that are fighting against this preservation.

At least according to this article in 2017 [1], it looks like that was because of SoHo's soaring rents (because there's tons of great shopping which brings a lot of people there). It was also common across the country at the time.

It's apparently back and better than ever though [2].

And anecdotally, everyone I know shops much more in SoHo than they did a decade ago, even if the center has shifted to Williamsburg/Greenpoint and more thrifting / vintage stores.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/nyregion/soho-empty-store... [2] https://equicapmag.com/real-estate/soho-retail-rebounds/#:~:....

> There's a reason the big NYC area malls are in Paramus and Elizabeth.

I think the reason is that malls are just out-of-fashion.

If we consider the SoHo area to be the equivalent of a mall, or the North Williamsburg/Greenpoint area to be a mall, I'd bet they dwarf the Paramus & Elizabeth malls in GMV sold and foot traffic.

As someone who currently lives in NYC, I can think of ten brands I love to shop at here and not a single one could be found in a mall in New Jersey.

My ex's family lived in NJ and we'd always commute in for a fun day in the city. There's way better food, better shopping, better energy. I'm not surprised people come to the city.

In what way does this not ruin the surprise? It seems like you'll know exactly what you're getting, just not who it's coming from. The surprise is which gift, not which friend is getting the gift.

I'd have expected it to be more like... gauging the types of things they'd like, but keeping it super broad, to help hint you in the right direction.

> I'm not sure thats right

Doesn't your point support the quote? Taxi driving was dangerous because of cash and being a robbery target, and Uber changed that.

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

This could be helpful in the short-term, but I'm skeptical long-term as it'll become just as gamed.

Board members can remove other board members with a majority vote.

Sam, Greg, and Ilya were presumed guaranteed to be the same team, which meant they couldn't be removed (3/6 votes).

Ilya switched sides to align with all 3 of the non-founding board members, giving them 4/6 votes, which they used to remove Sam and Greg.

Now that they've been removed, there's 4 remaining board members: the non-founding 3 and Ilya. They'll need 3/4 votes to reorganize the board.

Maybe not Japanese, but the French love Japanese culture.

I've started using a tool similar to "GPTs" recently, and the quality is definitely higher.

I believe this has to do with generalization — you're encouraged to make your GPTs as specific as possible: only give them access to what they need, and iterate on how they can do it better, both through giving feedback and improving your prompt. This is how you can refine them to be great at a certain task.

The more generalized they are, the worse they'll be at the specific task — this will likely be true until we create AGI, and this is how all these businesses with refined purpose-built models exist and create value.

> Then you didn't have an easy problem to begin with, you had a hard one ("summing too many numbers fast enough") [1].

That’s exactly what the initial comment said:

> The "solve X as quickly as possible" is now the problem. Not just solve X. I And that sounds like a hard (therefore interesting) problem!

There were two separate points: 1) Finding a simple solution to a problem can be hard 2) Solving an ‘easy’ problem quickly enough can be hard

This is a good analogy to make, but I'd add that in this analogy, the majority of land has oil underneath it, and the majority of that oil can be reached without capital for exploration.

Fintech, bio, etc. are exceptions, but generally if you have a large TAM, you can still choose to take VC funding or not (you bootstrap at the risk of someone else taking funding to grow more quickly and capture the market).

It's proportionally like the equivalent death toll of NYC on 9/11 or slightly higher.

In NYC, 1 in 4000 people died on 9/11. In Chicago, 1 in 2000 birds died the other day. (Not to say it's equivalent at all, just that it's certainly a newsworthy event to the birds).

Just wanted to say: "help seniors have a better, safer experience on the internet" sounds like a great core mission! I imagine there's not too many startups focused on seniors, but my mother (late 60s) struggles a lot with technology already.

Speech is not the same as blocking traffic. You have every right to your speech, but you don't have a right to force me to stay and listen to it.

How have they expressed that? How has it changed their minds?

I'd be genuinely amazed at the personality of a person who goes "Wow! They must be disrupting my day for a very important reason. Let me look up and better research their cause," versus "Oh f**, I'm going to be late to my appointment. What's going on? Oh, these idiots are blocking the street."

If you're going to interrupt my life based on some future, uncertain scientific reasoning, especially the lives of everyday working-class people who can't afford to spend their day blocking streets instead of working, it would turn me off to your cause, and that's the only sentiment I've heard from my friends.

Maybe we're wrong for that, but I'm curious how others would respond.

It's more of a loaded term than meant literally.

"The YC of Pittsburgh" for instance wouldn't attract the best talent worldwide, but SF and SV is known globally as the center of tech. If someone replicated YC in the global center of tech, they'd have a big advantage over YC.

> Apple said the agreement with Amazon was designed to limit the number of counterfeits sold online. Previously, the company was spending a lot of money and effort to send hundreds of thousands of 'take-down' notices to stop the sale of counterfeited devices, it said.

At least from my experience with Amazon, I can absolutely believe there's a lot of counterfeits of almost anything, and that Amazon selling the product themselves in partnership with the manufacturer is a great way to avoid counterfeits.

Who are these third-party sellers of new iPhones? Where and how are they getting them for cheaper, if they aren't counterfeit? Do we really need government to support and protect their business?

I heard from a large AI founder recently on this topic. Data is an okay moat, but in this craze we'll see the power of data shrink. Companies are getting enough VC funding ($10m-$100m+) to buy any data they need. A better model could also make up for a lack of better data.

Instead, the best moat is to know that your product isn't a thin replicable wrapper for ChatGPT but instead has a large surface area, with lots of well-built features. Continue building those features at a fast pace, and you can win.

I actually think it makes a world of difference to opine about the game world. It's so much more immersive.

Have you ever gone to a living history museum? (Old Sturbridge Village is one example, my favorite I've been to). All these people in character, able to talk about the period, it makes for an amazing experience.

In traditional video games, if we try to or even accidentally push any deeper, we see the cracks in the universe. "Oh, I spoke to this person again, and they said the same thing to me." AI can help fix those cracks, and fill them in wherever the player ventures.

This certainly doesn't change Fortnite, but I think it could change immersive RPGs and MMOs.