mindfulplay

These industries are spurned by growth-hacking companies that receive a lot of VC funding to do just that: prove out "user value" which is code for "get as many users as possible".

Twitter, Reddit, FB, Instagram all thrive on mediocrity amplified by the loudest voices. And then these investors and founders brag about user engagement, customer acquisition, retention and such meaningless numbers. None of it maps to user value. Because this drives advertisements to their sites.

Unless there companies actively reduce this nonsense, things will never change.

This seems like the largest misconception of what FB is about. Your feed doesn't matter. We can all pretend to mass #deletefb, but you have already given enough data that they can carry it through all these "properties" without much loss.

They have pretty much every app, website, device manufacturer in their pocket.

It's sick what VC funded diarrhea can accomplish. The fake liberal crap that these companies put out is at odds with their business model that eat away at the societal fabric in a meaningless manner.

Two major advantages: transparency and optional lossless. JPEG blocky artifacts are very hard to remove for high resolution images unless you hand tune them.

I have no idea what this company does but her account of it is genuine, honest and makes me appreciate the true difficulty of being a female leader.

It's a bit unfortunate there isn't a government support for women in power to take with huge risks while bearing children. It's unclear as an outsider what a free market could do to help here and that's sad.

Obviously the people who work in your company should then quit and create their own stable businesses.

I like this honest explanation. Thank you.

A dumb but serious question: what powers does a board of directors have? In terms of day to day operations, engineering, product, marketing and so on?

You are missing "cryptomining lidar focus" .. might add more legitimacy.

I don't think deleting a Facebook account really matters in this day and age.

The FB Ads SDK has infiltrated every nook and corner of your life. From websites to your phone to TV's to iot. I am scared by the prospects of that level of intrusion than anything else. They don't need your account.

Visiting my account off FB activity was just there tip of the iceberg. They can connect everything about you without your involvement...

A mere FB account doesn't do much. Sure in the short term we can have lengthy blog posts about "deleteFB" and so on but really it's mostly for sentiment not really concrete.

That sort of puts things in perspective. I didn't realize all of that amazing stuff happened in the course of a few minutes...

Incredible. For all the silly things Elon Musk does on Twitter, he rightfully takes the credit for building these important machines and building the right team with Gwynne Shotwell.

Quote: "Being a VC is fing hard".

But what he won't tell you is much much harder to be a founder/engineer who actually does stuff.

It's not clear how different this is from say hedge fund? I would imagine it's the same set of people who just found a nice, easy alternative?

I see your point. I think there is an angle there. However, still feels like a rich person's game here: not sure if the average or below average conditions will improve (childhood mortality, adult mortality) in developing countries because of this.

That's really where the "average" advantage seems to be: if life becomes better for everyone then they live longer.

The most dangerous type of technology: putting silicon valley mindset to a critical, deadly torpedo is not just risky but callous.

Falling to these (hotz/musk) people's perceived intellect as somehow determining the success of self-driving cars is a bit disingenuous.

One thing that's not clear to me is the advantage of living longer. Why do some people feel the need to live longer?

When I hear of blood transfusion and such, it also feels like a lot of these technologies are being developed by snakeoil salespeople to other nongullible but strictly egocentric humans.

As usual a beautiful, beautiful language. As expected, they start with something simple and build layers upon layers all connected via simple concepts.

Add init to a property, make its class a data class, and boom you have immutable beautiful class. Kudos to these designers.

(This is similar to AutoValue in Java / data class in Kotlin, but it feels a lot more elegant and connected and simple than what these other languages offer)

This is really fascinating. Continuing along the comparison with airplane stocks:

On one hand you have companies that keep flying chairs in the sky filled with people, feeding them every few hours migrating them across continents.

On the other hand, I have a company that can replace my crappy apt bedroom with a fake office background.

Fascinating that VC funded madness has gotten to this point - prioritizing CTRs, engagement, growth rates and so on.

If Lamborghini wanted to boost their sales, there couldn't be a better product placement than this.

" Our cars are so amazing, even a five year old would drive by himself on a highway to buy it."

There used to be a time when products and innovation made in America were deemed high-quality and highly desired for. I am talking non-software.

Here we are talking about people who make a living out of cheap potentially slave labor and to top it off, selling courses to others to be a marketing/ecommerce snakeoil salesperson.

Truly disgusting to think about what we are turning into as a society.

Is there a future in which manufacturing would ever return to the US? Legit question....

Ah got it. I hope there is some level of scrutiny on what gets posted. But agreed on not offthread comments.

Am glad I have to scroll this far to find a crypto company. In this day and age, given how much money has already been swindled by Bitcoin crapto folks why should anyone want to risk/work in this dangerous snake oil peddling area?

Missing the excellent "The War stories" from Ars Technica. e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/03/war-stories-how-princ...

Their PAX West/East reviews and thoughts are also excellent.

I am a little out of date on this topic but what effect does Spectre/Meltdown and other mitigations have on newer processors? Is it fundamentally just a software fix going forward? Seems like we are willing to sacrifice in the order of 10% performance at least in the previous generations....

I see what you are saying. But to me it's uninspiring. It cannot be replicated. It's a simple tool that's overblown. There isn't a technology behind it. I just saw a piece of news saying it took their engineering and design team many months if not a year to rollout a simple design change. That's not inspiring at all. If anything this would be something I would strive hard to avoid.

Neither the technology nor the product seem to jump out of the paper... Just like toilet paper. Which is not bad but doesn't require more attention.

The other problem is around this set of ideas that grab users attention for quick bites that are essentially empty calories. I feel that these are gamified, product hacked versions that are hard to replicate but ultimately not inspiring.

If we had the sketch to how toilet paper was first developed would we hold it this level of reverence?

What is the fascination with such trivial technologies grabbing a mindshare?

Agreed! Asking people how they feel and jotting that down on a piece of paper isn't science. Similar to social and nutrition "sciences" that gear more toward PR angle and "number of news outlets talking about my paper" than legit science.

They should all be relegated back to the arts and crafts.

I find this incredibly fascinating. I wasn't aware of how complex these things were.

A few videos that blows my mind on what really happens inside your cells - https://youtu.be/bee6PWUgPo8

https://youtu.be/Ofd_lgEymto

Why are startups born this way? Why optimize for growth and CTR etc. Is there a world in which security and privacy focus (maybe sprinkle in, dare I say, social good) could be funded from the start?

These companies presumably all pivot on going public and making a crapton of money: couldn't they anticipate the need to respect the users longer term as opposed to selling them like commodity to investors and advertisers?

The worst types are the ones that advertise how good and amazing they are, and when the "tide goes out they are found swimming naked" as Buffett might say.

My point is the insane supply chain costs that permeate the insurance, hospital and medical manufacturing industry. I used the saline solution as an example based on an LA Times investigation that found out saline solution is charged 1000$+.

Again a very hard problem as it involves innovating across the board in boring ways.

Ideas are incredibly cheap. Execution is hard as someone else pointed out. Beyond that, a random AI crapsoup of techonerdmangled words would give a pretty good "billion dollar idea":

AI ML crypto spaceship

Nano modular ML-based DNA aggregator

Crypto but actually is useful

And some of the most important ideas require the most boring execution:

- safe, clean toilets for the next billion

- all-display walls, e-paper that can act as lights too

- instead of self driving cars how about simple government intervention to provide sensors on roads for augmented-driving cars?

- continuous study of flu via most populated areas to predict flu vaccine 6 months from now (Bedford lab but super charged and automated)

- and finally, 5$ hospital saline solution

These seem stupid and naive but I believe they are some of the most important "ideas" and again without any execution plans.

Why are nutrition and social studies considered science?

They chart out a few numbers for very few people; have no understanding or analysis of the underling biological or biochemical processes. The later of which is hard, grungy and boring science - but that's really the important high order bit.

This is hack territory. It's the easiest science with very low bar, but at some point we have stop this madness.