noneckbeard

I believe he’s saying the opposite - that people like to think of blockchain as trust in technology, but in reality you are still trusting in people.

Any evaluation of the security of the system has to take the whole socio-technical system into account. Too many blockchain enthusiasts focus on the technology and ignore the rest.

As a founder I've raised through crowdfunding multiple times. The experience is great on both the startup and the investor side, and I love that crowdfunding lets more startups get off the ground, especially ones that don't have access to SV money.

But this should really be thought of as "gambling" instead of "investing." There's very little ability to do due diligence and the companies are usually so early that it's impossible to know if it's going to work or not. However, if you have money you're willing to lose it's a lot more rewarding than spending it at the blackjack table.

Not saying Windows is dead, just that things seemed to work out alright for PayPal.

Agreed. I think it was also a power struggle over which engineering team would be in control moving forward. Musk’s X.com was built on windows and he wanted everyone to switch over on the merge.

In the Wrong Platform section he mentions how the new PayPal CEO wanted to switch the company to Windows and “Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.” That CEO they gave the boot? Elon Musk.

It was probably still a good decision and maybe we wouldn’t have spaceX or Tesla without that change, but still hilarious!

I think the argument was more that the bus system was already a pretty terrible experience, and making it more terrible would discourage even more people from taking the bus and create a downward spiral of quality.

The obvious correction is to make the bus experience less terrible, but I’m guessing that’s hard w/o increasing taxes or fares, both or which come w serious political and real world costs.

Could be that they’re trying to turn fare collection into a revenue generator, but not sure. I recommend his book, it’s a pretty interesting read!

In Gavin Newsom’s book Citizenville he talked about how, after becoming SF mayor, he discovered that fare collection cost as much as the revenue generated from fares. He started the process of making the bus free but was told by so many advisors that the busses would become “dumpsters on wheels,” from a combination of homeless people using them for shelter and people not respecting services that are free, that the plan was scrapped.

To be fair Twitter already has a lot of prohibitions in place for ads, many of them very subjective (e.g. Hateful Content and Inappropriate Content) so the free speech boat sailed a long time ago.

https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/introducti...

Can’t it be both? Those aren’t mutually exclusive, and in fact are hardly even related in terms of implementation.

And taking out supply to drive up cost of fossil fuel will absolutely have an impact. At least a few people will opt for the fuel economy version of their new car in the next few days after seeing the new sticker price of a gallon of gas.

Investors divesting from fossil fuels sounds a lot like sanctions in that they “don’t work until they work.”[1] It would take an overwhelming number of investors to make divestment really hurt, which is unlikely. And I definitely agree that focusing on supporting climate change impact is better than starving the polluters. But it seems intellectually dishonest to say that divestors are “wasting their time.” And there’s no reason you can’t do both.

1. https://qz.com/1072581/sanctions-dont-work-until-they-do-the...

Those are all fair points, and I agree with you on each of them! But they have to do with buying new things in general, not the new iPhone specifically.

Does everyone here also drive a base model Honda Civic because “car hardware is done”? This is a luxury product and people upgrade because it’s fun and feels great to have the fastest phone and fanciest camera. It’s not that big a deal, and it’s definitely not a ripoff.

This title is very misleading. Shopify has surpassed eBay in market cap, but is in a very different business. Same wrt amazon. Conflating market cap with market ownership is just confusing.

However, I really hope Shopify can figure out a way to make it easy to find quality sellers and replace Amazon’s dumpster fire of a third party marketplace. Trying to buy electronics or household products on amazon is a complete crapshoot these days.

Seems like those shots were from just one camera.

Some of this feels very cherry-picked. They’re comparing lidar vs camera on snapshots, when a model will always be continuously built as the scene changes.

There’s also one instance where it gives lidar the advantage because it’s mounted on top of the car and can see over signs. What?!

This is a very zero-sum take on the project, where it’s very possible that creating more diversity in the neighborhoods these families are moving to raises the level of education and outcomes for everyone involved. Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.

This seems demonstrably untrue. Basic html development is vastly cheaper than “modern JavaScript” which would give any company w an HTML-only strategy a huge advantage. Why aren’t HTML-only companies dominating in every market?

I didn’t say there was no effect. The change in outcome from IQ is statistically significant, just modest.

Why on earth would countries want to limit improvements? We don’t see countries engaging in vaccine non-proliferation agreements, even though those are unevenly distributed. Non-proliferation is for destructive technologies.

However, as stated in a sibling comment, I think the advantages gained from IQ gene editing are quite exaggerated.

There was a good meta analysis of the impact IQ has on outcomes estimating that, while statistically significant, IQ was not much better of a predictor of success than parent’s socioeconomic status or education, and high IQ people still have a wide variance in outcomes. So while you may get a bump, achieving Gattica-style world domination through gene editing seems a little far fetched.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2007-strenze.pdf

While burning waste/biomass adds air pollution it does not introduce new carbon into the system, making it far better than burning coal.