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It's fun to be reminded of controversy that happened outside of modern memory.

Let's say a law like this did get passed. How could it even be worded?

For example, if it merely says "you have to give the cops your password when a judge tells you to" then using a password manager should technically protect you, because you don't know the password and have no way of retrieving it.

They could add "or the password for your password manager" but then the judge would have to say "give up all of your passwords", not just the one(s) relevant to the investigation.

Either way, the law would also have to say "and don't change your password(s) until the investigation is over" or "and give the cops a copy of your password whenever it changes".

Even then, you'd only be getting the people with 1) nothing to really hide or 2) so stupid they would have gotten caught some other way anyway because all a criminal would have to do is set their data to permanently lock, or self destruct, when the cops enter the fake password the criminal turned over.

The only way this could work is if the cops could just straight up compel you to assist in your own investigation. They can already do that by tricking you, so I don't think this would add much.

Maybe it's much more of a social decision than a business decision.

Early stage investors are gambling even more than late stage investors. The best they can hope for is to find 50 reasonable deals and let the math work itself out.

So the better part of their decision could easily be based much more on what their peer early stage investors think of them. Founders with pedigree are easy to justify and obviously more socially valuable than founders without pedigree (like buying IBM). So being the angel who keeps getting those founders means other investors will look up to you.

And, if things go wrong, nobody can blame an investor for getting into bed with pedigreed founders. It's an obvious decision, so it won't invite ridicule. Since it's obvious, there will be more competition, and that's something the angel doesn't have to rely on luck to win.

Yeah, that was a TIL moment for me when I found out the body can make glucose without carbohydrate. There were others, like how mitochondria burn fat more efficiently than glucose.

I think with business acumen you can hire all the "more" you need.

LOL, you see "a staggering amount of waste" in commercial entities and thing the way to find efficiency is to look to the government? Like government-sponsored research is going to be more efficient? That's a good one.

"Dark time" strongly implies a subjective experience. Maybe Mark meant that was an event he personally experienced as intensely dark.

That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do? Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined everything?

That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone else. Living through it could easily be "dark."

It's disingenuous to claim that because a new feature isn't making your life better means he's failing at making the whole world better.

Maybe you're one of those 10-100K experiments where some engineer pushed something out to see if it worked. Maybe a new feature boosts revenue so they can build solar-powered internet planes that bring entire cities a connection. Maybe it's just noise and isn't actually relevant.

Why would their body language have anything to do with the content you were hoping for?

Yeah, the title is a bit more grandiose than just "Sam interviews Mark." I thought it was good. It's a huge topic that has hundreds of thought leaders so it's not like you should be expecting something mind blowing.

For me, it was valuable because the whole "building the future" thing is still very much rooted in existing institutions. Outside of Silicon Valley, everybody "knows" that if you want to do something really big you need a government or corporation to do it. Everybody believes it's impossible for one person or a small team to create an impact. It's good to remind people that Facebook is changing the world, but it started in a way that lots of people could start.

concise, not precise

Benevolence is over rated. Competitive self-interest is at least verifiably productive.

Since a solid five minutes of the interview are devoted to Mark explaining how he never expected to start a company, let alone do anything as big as "connect the world", I don't think this is much of a rebuttal of anything. What makes you think Steve Jobs belongs in a "better" bucket than Mark? Even at his grandest vision he just made phones. They were good phones, sure, but he never tried to do anything bigger.

I think he means if it's important to you it's still worth trying and if you fail at least you were trying. Whereas if it's just a business, "nothing personal," then failing means you've got nothing, not even the feeling of working on something important to you.

LOL yeah, I just spoke to a dietician the other day who swore that glucose is the only thing your brain can use for fuel.

It's easy to be ignorant about a situation you never experience. Every single person they deal with is going to be in a carb-adapted state and never miss a meal, so their body will run entirely off of glucose.

I can recommend this book http://www.artandscienceoflowcarb.com/the-art-and-science-of...

From experience, you'll need to spend a lot of time learning about macros before advice on what food to eat will do you much good. For example, if someone says "eat two cups of green salad with 2 tablespoons of olive oil" you'd have to A) already know what all that means or B) spend a couple hours researching how to estimate volume and source predictable ingredients and prepare them or C) just wing it and end up with some bullshit from a store that's lettuce covered in croutons, cheese, and sugary dressing.

A good heuristic is that if you bought it, or it was bought for you, it's got too much refined carbohydrate in it and the serving size is too large. This is because to consumers value=(volume*taste)/dollar

My research indicates those 5 kilos were probably mostly water because when you go low carb your body uses up all of its glycogen, which is stored with 3-parts water, and that takes a lot of salt with it. So you have to drink more often and consume more salt. Then it can take 2-4 weeks for your body to ramp up the right chemicals to switch to fat burning.

If you're looking for a startup, something that's supposed to start cheap and scale huge in <10 years, then you're probably only looking at problems that can be addressed by software on the internet.

That being said, you don't have to look there. You can start a huge variety of businesses just by gaining modest expertise in something new and then charging people for doing that thing. EX: get a $1K drone, learn to fly it, and charge half of what it would cost a helicopter/plane to get the same shot. It's not a startup, but it's a business, and it might lead to a startup.

Startups seem to be bimodal (no I don't have data for this) in that they're either business-focused or solution-focused. Uber is business-focused. They don't give a damn about anything other than fat stacks of cash. Tesla is solution-focused. Musk just needs the business to last long enough to achieve his goal of shifting the market away from fossil fuels.

It's a lot easier to find a business opportunity than to find a solution you're passionate about AND makes for a good business. Most people who just pursue a solution end up in non-profits or simply realize that there's no way to sustain an organization providing that solution.

If you're just looking for a chewy problem to solve, then PM me because I'm working on a good one.

Yeah, I appreciate when a point is succinctly and aesthetically encoded, but not poetry for the sake of poetry. Seems like the vast majority of it is just ambiguity masquerading as depth.

One of my favorite poems is Invictus by William Earnest Henley, so I tried reading a lot more of his poems, but they all seemed like a chore.

Seemed like an okay title to me. They summarized the article at a non-technical level. That's the same title I would have written to summarize it. Maybe I wouldn't have used the word "revolutionary", but I already ignore that word whenever I see it.

Maybe all those ignorant poor people will just use the free Facebook-only internet to coordinate long enough to build their own infrastructure. Maybe a half dozen other providers will build planes and fly them over those ignorant poor people, providing competitive options. Maybe someone will invent mind-to-mind links.

If you're honestly confused why a for-profit corporation needs to find a business model before they can provide a service then go back to the basics and start reading again.

Charities are altruistic, and even then it's more theory than practice. For example, when charities altruistically donate food to starving people, they can either send armed guards along with it, or watch the food taken by the local armed militia and sold for profit.

Dumping anything free into a market always distorts it, and that's after you figure out how to afford the cost of providing the free thing in the first place.

Didn't he put like 99% of his wealth into a charitable trust or something?

Maybe he doesn't have much of an intention. Maybe he's just sitting on top of a rocket ship and looking around and going "okay, what now?"

To be fair, Facebook was an idea that caught on, and advertising was all they could come up with to keep the lights on.

I mean, I can't think of anything else they could do for revenue.

For what it's worth, I honestly think Musk is just a geek who got lucky enough to be able to pay everyone else to build his toys. I don't think he saw SpaceX as an investment I think he saw it as crazy fun. If it hadn't worked out he would have gone on to build another valuable startup, since he already had a track record at that point. It just happened to work.

Wait, so, Google controlling your access to information on the internet via "the front page" doesn't bother you. Facebook controlling your access to information inside of a website you have to visit and log in to, does bother you.

Google has 7 products with 1 billion users, as explained in this article titled "Google has 7 products with 1 billion users." http://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-with-1-billion-u...

You realize that "organize the world's information" translates into "control the world's information", right? Just like "provide internet to everyone" translates into "control everyone's internet."

Google wants you to keep coming back so it can sell advertising. Facebook want's you to stay so it can sell advertising. Musk wants your eyes free to watch advertising while the car drives itself. Advertising wins every time.

You're underestimating how highly people value their own vanity. All Narcissus needed was a puddle.

I'm not sure how you'd propose to stop them from trying. They're offering a service. People will accept or reject that service based on the costs and benefits.

Can you think of a way to provide internet to everyone in the world that wouldn't involve a powerful entity who's intentions worry you? Maybe distributing mesh networking tech? Well, that would have to be developed, manufactured, and distributed, AND maintained. Who's going to do that? A charity? A consortium of charities?

I think the key part is "if facebook disappeared and was replaced by another tool." The important part is how many people are in the SAME tool. The value to the user of a network depends on how many other people are in that network. The same number of people, split up into different networks, wouldn't be a linear decrease in value, it would be an exponential decrease in value.

Maybe the fact that reality is clearly contradicting your intuition about value is important? 1 Billion-ish people find Facebook valuable. You disagreeing with them just makes you wrong, or maybe lacking in empathy. I didn't understand the value in ridesharing. I still think it shouldn't be nearly as popular as it is. But that's me not understanding reality; it isn't reality being wrong.