11,664 karma · joined November 1, 2016
That makes efforts far more durable.
Than it’s a matter of showing up in court to defend attacks against the law(s) that protect it.
In this way, we can have durable change, but it’s a high cost road. By design I am sure.
The Remittance tax has an enormous amount of exemption businesses (because no institution that is subject to the Bank Secrecy Act is subject to it, neither is cryptocurrency, which I find interesting) its functionally a tax on individuals that send money to their home countries, as once you work through all the exemptions its the only transfer function left.
While its deplorable, I thought something much more draconian was afoot
For instance, I know Coinbase may be down -22% from the IPO price, but that doesn't mean YCombinator lost money nor made very little. If they, for instance, sold off during the first few days of the IPO they would have made out quite well.
There's also the whole question of how much money did YCombinator put in vs what they got out.
Without knowing this, about all the chart tells me is YCombinator is not a predicated on building exceedingly durable businesses, but it doesn't mean they lost money on any of these investments either.
What currency controls have been implemented? A cursory search turns up no results, though there is some speculation that capital controls could be coming, they never the less haven't materialized, at least in such a way that no credible news outlet has plainly stated it.
The debasing of the USD is again, a fear, and Trump is absolutely stoking the fire around it, but it hasn't actually happened, as far as I can tell.
If you have evidence of the contrary to either of these I'm quite curious to see it. I wouldn't put it past this administration in the slightest, but there is a difference between implementing them and talking about them and for correctness sake I want to understand.
The upcoming decision by the Supreme Court on case Trump v. Cook is about this very issue[2]
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/29/economy/federal-reserve-indep...
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/why-the-federal-reserves...
[2]: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/will-the-federal-reserve-remai...
One thing I want to separate here is number of packages is not a quality metric. For instance, a core vue project on the surface may have many different sub dependencies, however those are dependencies are sub packages of the main packages
I realize projects can go overboard with dependencies but its not in and of itself an issue. Like anything, its all about trade offs and setting good practices.
Its not like Java as an ecosystem has been immune either. The `Log4Shell` vulnerability was a huge mess.
My point isn't to bash the Java ecosystem, but nothing is immune to these issues and frequency is a fallacy reason to spread FUD around an ecosystem because it lacks context.
I feel npm gets held to an unreasonable standard. The fact is tons of beginners across the world publish packages to it. Some projects publish lots of packages to it that only make sense for those projects but are public anyway then you have the bulwark pa lager that most orgs use.
It is unfair to me that it’s always held as the “problematic registry”. When you have a single registry for the most popular language and arguably most used language in the world you’re gonna see massive volume of all kinds of packages, it doesn’t mean 90% of npm is useless
FWIW I find most pypi packages worthless and fairly low quality but no ones seems to want to bring that up all the time
Cloudflare, Fly.io litestream offerings and Turso are pretty reasonably priced, given the global coverage.
AWS with Aurora is more expensive for sure and isn’t edge located if I recall correctly, so you don’t get near instant propagation of changes on the edge
The bigger thing for me is how much control you have. So far with these edge database providers you don’t have a ton of say in how things are structured. To use them optimally, I have found it works best if you are doing database-per-tenant (or customer) scenarios or using it as a read / write cache that gets exfiltrated asynchronously.
And that is where I believe the real cost factors come into play is the flexibility
Bunny has a similarity concept: https://bunny.net/edge-scripting/
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: C#, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Playwright, Node.js, Express, Vite, Webpack, Astro, Hono, rspack, React, React Native, Vue, NativeScript, Next.js, Module Federation, Micro Frontends, AWS, GCP, Docker, GitHub Actions integrations, LLM Integrations: OpenAI, Gemini, Custom MCP servers, Agentic workflows, Generative AI, AI Tools: Claude, Cursor, Copilot
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-vanderbeek
Email: scott@theawesomescott.com
Over a decade of experience in Senior and Staff engineering roles building scalable systems and user interfaces. I have extensive background working cross functionally in an organization to create and steward technical roadmaps, meet business objectives and keeping teams from hitting technical roadblocks. I help build teams up sustainably and have extensive experience in technical leadership and mentoring peers.
My background for the last 4 years in particular has been on scaling a business, with a general focus on the user experience and technical stability. Taking a product or suite of products from 400 to 40,000 active users without losing control of performance and keeping the user experience approachable is where I shine best. This means addressing performance impacting hot spots, adoption of new tools or improving existing ones, proper A/B testing, gathering user experience data to identify pain points and most importantly empowering teams to move fast sustainably through best practice.
I'm sure not in every case, but even as far back as 2018 the trend line of wealth and iPhone ownership was high. Even today most app store developers admit that iPhone users tend to have more disposable income by a good margin.
Really, when I do a cursory google search of wealthy public figures that include them holding their devices, what I can find is they're clearly holding iPhones most of the time.
Ironically, the tech industry at large went after Lina Khan even though she was instrumental in moving forward with taking on tech industry monopolies[0] even though they themselves have complained about the App Store for years[1] because monopoly enforcement also included shutting down anticompetitive mergers like the Figma buyout.
Selective enforcement is how we got here in the first place.
This is why the tech industry writ large did a 180 on Trump and helped to get him elected. Apparently monopolies are good if it means payouts for investors. Despite the fact they'd stand to make more in a highly competitive marketplace, not less, as has been shown throughout history
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/real-reason-silicon-valley-h...
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/y-combinator-says-apples-a...
However, I have noticed that its very rare. In every other case I've looked into, from Omni apps to streaming apps like Netflix, I'm paying the same either way, and often with a more convienent way of managing the subscription.
Thereby, I think it goes undetected by most, because price comparing the app store to the non app store price will yield the same price most of the time. Though importantly, I have noticed, it is not always the same options. For example, regarding Netflix, I am paying the same price for my sub via Apple but new and returning customers can no longer pay for it this way, they must go to the website now. I also can't add additional members (effectively discounted second subs) either.
This has to do with the fact Apple did captiulate to allowing companies link to their own subscription pages and actually allow customers to be directed in that way with clearer and transparent language. However, I have noticed most apps with the exception of large streaming platforms have done away completely with in app subscriptions, and the prices are still the same whether its the web or via in app purchases on Apple's platform.
However, Google Play is no better in this regard. Even though they allow 3rd party payment processing as an alternative to using Google's payment processing, it has not lead to apps being cheaper on their platform, in the majority of cases. Which makes me wonder if the value is still there for a 1st party payment processor, or something else.
Thats always missing from these sorts of articles and comments, is why is this better
Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was a big push for this exact thing and it failed due to business concerns, not technical ones.
It's simply assuming what the way forward is without positing why other ways will not work to justify the position.
My secondary critque of the article, is using this as a basis of comparison:
>any product that can't be used by an agent will be as dead as a product without mobile support is today
First, I think its important 'mobile support' is defined. Is it as simple as a mobile friendly website or an app? Are we talking equivalent functionalities as well with the desktop counterpart?
Second, it ignores a ton of successful projects and products. Blender, Maya, Unreal engine. There's also a huge swath of games that only launch on PC or consoles.
If equivalent 1:1 functionality is to be considered, Adobe suite is still primarily a desktop tool, as is Figma.
I know there are a huge host of apps I'm missing too.
While more consumer apps migrated to web + mobile, you can often find functional differences between accessing on desktop vs mobile, where desktop is more complete. Its still not uncommon to have a mobile / tablet version of an app that is missing features that the desktop or website version is not.
You missed the point entirely, and if you were to take a few minutes to look this up you’d know that
Blood. If things don’t reverse course this trajectory historically leads to bloodshed.
In many respects it already has. How many people have died just this year already because businesses didn’t do what they were suppose to? Because cutting costs with no consequences is seen as the norm?
Of course nobody wants to account for those externalities and when that blood comes back on them they become scared and use government force instead. You’re seeing the trial run with ICE as we write our comments on this forum
Heaven forbid we forget about the investors, and don't forget about the executive compensation!
I mean, seriously, is there no such thing as balance? I'm not saying investors should be arbitrarily shorted, but on the same token it doesn't mean workers need to always take the brunt of the change, which is how it goes down 90% of the time.
If layoffs were seen as executive leadership failures first and foremost it would be a small step toward the right direction of accountability.
>To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets.
Fallacy that the stock must continue to rise to the detriment of the workforce that supposedly would benefit. Never minding that RSUs shouldn't be seen as a primary form of compensation to begin with, there is a myriad of things companies can do to maintain the valuation of employee RSUs, like bigger grants.
Secondly, you're assuming to capture these emerging markets, a layoff is a must. In reality, it likely is not. If you have a surplus of resources, deploying them effectively would be a net win, as you re-allocate these folks to higher priority projects and workstreams. The incentive structure that C-Suites have built up since the 1980s however don't align with that, because executive compensation is entirely based around juicing the numbers on a spreadsheet, as opposed to being rewarded for building sustainable businesses.
>If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
It doesn't, compensation is more broad than RSUs, and could be adjusted in kind. This is a solved problem.
It's not equivalent in the least. They aren't expanding headcount by 20K, they're building more expensive AI tailored servers
First, I'd expect the trajectory of any new technology that purports to be the next big revolution in computing to follow a distribution pattern of that similar to the expansive use of desktop computing and productivity increases, such as the 1995-2005 period[0]. There has not been any indication of such an increase since 2022[1] or 2023[2]. Even the most generous estimation, which Anthropic itself estimated in 2025 the following
>Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-generation AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade[3]
Which not only assumes the best case scenarios, but would fail to eclipse the height of the computer adoption in productivity gains over a similar period, 1995-2005 with around 2-2.5% annual gain.
Second is cost. The actual cost of these tools is multiples more expensive than it was to adopt computing en masse, especially since 1995. So any increase in productivity they are having is not driving overall costs down relative to the gains, in large part because you aren't seeing any substantial YoY productivity growth after adopting these AI tools. Computing had a different trend, as not only did it get cheaper over time, the relative cost was outweighed by the YoY increase of productivity.
[0]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-...
[1]: First year where mass market LLM tools started to show up, particularly in the software field (in fact, GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, for instance)
[2]: First year where ChatGPT 4 showed up and really blew up the awareness of LLMs
[3]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-g...
The Federal Reserve of St. Louis is using the CPI numbers, as most government agencies do. I would contend those numbers in and of themselves lie. The ALICE index, which is based on more comprehensive data[0][1] and closer to what CPI used to represent before the major adjustments in the 1990s, tells a different story[2]
Inflation against the ALICE index is much higher than the 3% reported in by the Federal Reserve, running at a stark 5.9% YoY change. This honestly lines up much closer to the reality I see in my day to day life than the CPI numbers reported by the Federal Reserve do.
[0]: https://www.unitedforalice.org/methodology
[1]: I recommend downloading the PDF here: https://www.unitedforalice.org/Attachments/Methodology/ALICE...
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/28/melania-trump-d...
Another would be to remove burdens off companies that are better handled by the collective of society, via the government. Take universal healthcare. An often unnoticed benefit is how it would shift liabilities off the books of a huge number of companies, from the auto manufacturers to smaller businesses. A tax is a much easier and simplified expense to deal with over legacy healthcare costs that can weigh down a business. It also has a secondary knock off effect: employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs. In all likelihood, an unintended side effect of universal healthcare would be an increase in entrepreneurship from the middle class. People who would otherwise be handcuffed to their job because of health insurance.
Somehow, the lesson everyone took away from the G.I. Bill was not that the government providing robust funding of social services (IE college, home ownership) works. That part is seemingly ignored by the vast majority of the conversation around the 'good times past' that many Americans romanticize.
Too many of my fellow citizens are prioritizing their own short term gains over the long term health of the community and society in which they were empowered by to get ahead in the first place. This will inevitably crater quite spectacularly bad.