noddy1

Zuckerberg is very happy to bend/break the rules and abuse his customers when it suits him, so screw him. These aren't instagram's images anyway - they're the images of the people who painted them, and the people who photographed them.

Great way to get a piece of a company which is unable to get adequate funding from VCs (who at this point are funding almost anything anyway)

Moving towards the model where a portion of early VC investment goes straight into the pocket of the founders and early employees, as bird has done.

If I've built a company with an implied valuation of 200 million, why can't I bank a couple of million for a rainy day?

I've heard VC's state with a straight face that this is a misalignment of incentives.. apparently if the founder is financially comfortable they aren't "hungry".. this from a venture capitalist who is guaranteed a juicy carry whatever happens to their fund I find this insulting.

I'm a Dr who has just quit my specialist job for the 2nd time to pursue a startup.

You'd think I'd do something medical - I've been in the field 10 years, I should have been able to find a problem IT can address?

To be honest the thought of doing a health IT startup just fills me with dread.

Has there been any precedent of patients saying to the hospital at the start of a visit "I agree to pay 1.5x the medicare reimbursement rate and no more, if you don't agree to this I will go to the next hospital"?

80% of companies in the S&P500 over time produce zero return. 20% of companies account for ALL of the returns. In the past these would've been driven by massive growth stocks like Amazon going 1000x over a couple of decades. Now, the main reason to IPO a tech stock seems to be because the company has reached its growth potential and you want to flick it off to derisk early investors, and often it plummets as reality sets in. Meanwhile, high growth stocks are captured in pre-IPO markets and the gains are all accrued to private investors.

I think the S&P500 is an entirely different beast to what it was 20 or even 10 years ago as a result of this.

If you were a family office your goal would be to get exposure to pre-IPO growth stage stuff as well as the public market.

The constant threat of million dollar lawsuits is a pretty stupid way to ensure good practice of medicine.

This is an excellent opportunity for social pressures so curb behaviour. MBS has 45 billion dollars in the vision fund, and if it doesn't work out well, he will look stupid. If the vision fund loses ability to invest in the best companies, this could potentially ruin their performance. Masayoshi Son and MBS need to be sent a message that their ability to invest will be limited if Saudi Arabia behaves in a shitty way.

Thanks SEC for ensuring that all the returns from high growth tech companies are accruing to foreign billionaires and corrupt oil princes rather than to american retirement accounts and pension funds!

red scare (female russian immigrant socialists in new york critique metoo and other neoliberal stuff in a sexy manner)

Yup, which was the perfect time to dump all your crypto bags.

you can get chinese vet grade USS machines for ~$500

its amazing how prevalent the 808 sound is in modern music... probably 80% of current rap music is based on sounds derived from the 808 kit. The combination of smoothness, "bassiness" and chattering hats and static snare really is infectious.

I had an acid trip with an agonizing comedown that made me really rethink my life and priorities. As a result of that day I began the path to go to medical school, despite everyone including my parents telling me it was unrealistic. I'm just finishing specialist training in anaesthesiology and my life is great and I pretty much thank LSD for the whole thing.

Anyone have any insight into why goog/fb haven't acquired reddit at this point? If they could get it for anything near the 1.8billion previous valuation surely they would just snap it up?

Really enjoyed this talk, especially the stuff about the Irish emphasis on making people feel at ease. I wish I had more of that.

He has just the amount of humility for his age/CV!

Backpacker hostels also generally have great free wifi.

Agree - 5 star hotels have the worst. Clunky, shitty, login procedures and laugh out loud ridiculous pricing models.

This is similar to the situation for tourist visas in various countries. The shittiest countries that you absolutely would never want to overstay in have the most difficult to obtain visas. I once got a visa to go to bangladesh - it was expensive, took 2 months to get, and I still had to bribe 2 different people when I got to dhaka airport to get through.

currently in china, was in bangalore last week..

China feels almost like a first world nation at this point (albeit a weird one).

India, even in the most prosperous/developed city is still essentially a crappy 3rd world place.

I don't think India will naturally follow the progress China has made, and I definitely don't think amazing manufacturing will suddenly spring up from nowhere in India.

How do you account for rogue employees or hacks at the trusted 3rd party?

Equifax was a trusted 3rd party with no skin in the game.

Facebook was too (at least it was trusted by the west, the chinese never trusted it).

I agree; I'm cynical on about 99.99% of touted blockchain use cases.

However, for the 0.01% of use cases where you can't trust the government (money printing) or where the stakes are too high to rely on the security of a trusted 3rd party, blockchain is great.

Crime and plotting is much harder to do prospectively than retrospectively. Having prospective records timestamped from a number of independent providers is really hard to fake.

"Points 1 and two aren't solved in any way, as the buyer has to trust the producer to not lie when making the entry. In other words, the trust problem here occurs before entry into the database."

The blockchain will show in time that X producer sells X amount of extra virgin, virgin, and regular olive oil. This will make it difficult for a small single origin producer claiming that ALL of their output is extra virgin. It would also make it difficult for a small producer to rebrand large volumes of some other olive oil as their own.

As for the temp-sensing stickers - add GPS, encryption and transmitting functions and you can add some cool features to temp sensing stickers.

Finally- there isn't THAT much data involved here for the $$ involved, you could do it on the ethereum blockchain or even the litecoin chain. There are quite a number of ultrasecure blockchains at this point.

Global supply chains involve a number of superpowers who are at proxy wars with each other and a vast number of countries of which the majority have deep corruption issues. Who do you designate as the trusted 3rd party?

An olive farm makes some extra virgin olive oil in Italy. It is recorded at some date. They also make some virgin and some regular olive oil. It gets put in bottles and shipped somewhere. The shipping info is linked to the original production entry on the blockchain. An IOT device in the shipping load adds an entry to the blockchain saying that that it hasnt gone above or below some range of temperatures. It finally reaches a wholesale destination. At this point, it could go to a number of companies. In this case, any buyer could verify: 1) That an entry was made that this was extra virgin 2) that the olive farm is also making appropriate quantities of virgin and non-virgin olive oil - eg. not just labeling all of it extra virgin 3) where and when the shipping company picked up the olive oil from that farm 4) that this olive oil was transported in appropriate conditions

These are all timestamped, impossible to alter, and would require an elaborate planned fraud between a number of parties to fake.

How would you do this without blockchain? with a trusted 3rd party. Who can you trust when you are involving the russian govt, chinese govt, and US govt, and EU, and corrupt italian public servants? none of those groups trust any of the other parties completely.

If this could be applied to making palm oil substitute, that might be the only thing that can stop deforestation of indonesia/borneo/PNG

Creating new synth sounds does not excite me much...

Some things I'd like AI audio researchers to work on:

- High quality isolation of vocals and other instruments in recordings

- Convert audio recordings into multitrack midi/vst recordings - so a recording of a jazz quartet could be converted into the notes and appropriate patches/sample banks

- Convert between styles of music

- Convincing "vocal synthesis" - think text to speech but with singing allowing emulation of famous singers

This 4 billion dollars and all the money wasting on power and ASIC chips is a direct tax on the bitcoin ecosystem. This is the incentive you and your currency/consensus model have to beat bitcoin. In addition to the engineering problem, the number of people worldwide who prioritize environmental preservation mean that a currency that can preserve or even improve the environment are going to be preferred. What if we changed proof of work to be proof of not-cutting-down rainforests? 100 secure micro-satellites circle the globe taking pictures of areas prone to deforestation and distribute currency based on the areas not being logged?

He just did a podcast with Tyler Cowen yesterday - its a good listen: https://soundcloud.com/conversationswithtyler/matt-levine-ty...

I'm a medical doctor and frequently use sci-hub to review papers relevant to care of my patients. Prior to sci-hub, I would often have a clinical question, look it up, find a paywalled article, attempt to access it via the hospital's access, find it usually wasn't, give up, and then have spent 10 minutes of precious time doing this, feel like an idiot for wasting time, and just make a decision without the best information.

Now I get the DOI/pubmed #, go directly to scihub (or at least one of the scihub domains that isn't blocked by the hospital for being "unethical") and have the paper in 20 seconds.

Just as spotify for music has almost everything, "spotify for journals" needs to have 80-90%+ coverage or it is an annoying waste of time.