For me, carbohydrate consumption and appetite are massively correlated.
When I reduce carbs below 30g/day, my appetite is naturally suppressed (or avoids over-stimulation). Food feels much less addictive. It's easier not to snack in the face of stress. Keto probably added 10+ years on to my life expectancy.
When ads are relevant and contextual enough, they become as good as or better than content. The problem isn't advertising. The problem is bad, mediocre, even malicious ads and ad formats.
The proliferation of terrible ads and ad formats fueled the rise of adblock. Adblock is how users fight back.
Adblock companies could collectively start to influence what ads are allowed through, but most attempts at this have been corrupted in the usual and predictable ways.
I wonder if perversely all the bad press could actually help Google by lessening antitrust scrutiny. If they're perceived to be setting themselves up for failure, do they become less of a target?
Your reference to orthorexia is extreme. There's nothing in the parent comment that would take my mind there. It's true that relatively few people realize how polluted drinking water has become - lead and other metals, PFAS, plastic particles - take your pick. I have a hard time understanding why any knowledgable person who can afford to do so wouldn't filter all or almost all of the water that they drink and cook with at home. OP also didn't mention distillation as a filtration method. A reverse osmosis filter with a remineralization stage is vastly more popular and a no brainer to install in any kitchen. If you do drink distilled water then you can supplement with an extra pinch or two per day of salt and minerals in your food and you will be fine.
Orthorexia and OCD tendencies are real and destructive but I'd be equally wary of normalizing the oftentimes highly toxic exposure of modern life to the point where anybody who express tangible concerns and takes meaningful countermeasures is pointed to as a potential basket case.
Now that they are venture funded, Bitwarden will try to restrict competition as much as they can. It's a familiar playbook. I wouldn't be surprised if Bitwarden has applied pressure behind the scenes on Vaultwarden to move in this direction, since the AGPLv3 license will make competition less likely (and VW shortsightedly even says as much). They're learning from Chrome/Chromium and others.
My grandfather survived Pearl Harbor and became a B-25 pilot in one of those cohorts with an 80%+ casualty rate. As a kid, I enjoyed reading and hearing about his experiences. It made me proud of his service. But I'm not sure it lessened the stresses and anxieties I felt during my own adolescence. Years later when a close family member had a near death/should have died experience, that meaningfully altered my perspective on life - because I experienced it first hand.
Carol Bartz was the one who decided to divest search to Microsoft. Even preceding Carol, there was an attitude among the executives at Yahoo that search was not "strategic" and as a result they jumped from one shiny new object to the next, never realizing the treasure chest was underneath them the whole time.
Big companies are all about politics, all the time, in my experience. Smart business/product decisions require many quarters, sometimes years, of discipline and commitment to pay off. Whereas a shorter term focus results in less headache, possible promotion, and guaranteed bonuses. If/when the company craters, you can just bail. The sign of a great executive is somebody who empowers their organization to think ahead of the next earnings report, and backs it up (and doesn't get fired themselves in the process). They're an endangered species.
One of my family members is an anesthesiologist who runs oral and written board exams for physicians seeking to become or remain board certified. Over the holidays I sat him down with ChatGPT and ran through a dozen of the hardest board questions, including the opportunity to ask clarifying follow ups. He said there were a couple responses that would have probably indicated something fishy was up due to ChatGPT’s repetitive use of certain language but that overall it easily passed.
I'm curious how all these advancements in AI will impact KYC and identity authentication. It's already easy to scrape OSINT to pull the answers needed for most people's knowledge based authentication sequences. Will we hit the point where fake passports, IDs, and biometrics (including voice prints here) can be replicated undetectably? If so, what will become the standard for identity authentication?
Dozens of new privacy laws have been passed in the last few years. In some cases, there are now severe financial penalties associated with non-compliance. This has started to empower internal teams within companies (who want to do the right thing) to actually do the right thing, and follow both the letter and spirit of these laws. I'm part of a project to build a global "delete me" button so I have insight into a range of different responses. Most companies still tend to be maliciously compliant or they simply ignore the request, but I'd be comfortable sending them my data. There are definitely bad actors out there for whom you're probably better off not sending them any request at all. Progress is slow but it's headed in the right direction.
The best advice I heard for non zero-to-one folks was to watch for Series B rounds where multiple top tier venture firms participated, for example Sequoia + Lightspeed or Benchmark + Accel. This was back around 2012 so the economics could have shifted, less so the firms although there's been some movement. Series B @ $150-$250m valuation seems to be the place where PMF is (usually, not always) de-risked but the company still has room to grow 10-20x (in a good tech market).
I'm just curious: would you pay Google $5/month for a paid search plan that had no ads and didn't store or monetize any of your search query data? Assume you trust them to abide by the terms and not exploit any loopholes.
The trend I'm seeing companies settle into is one where Monday and Friday are work from home days, with Friday being more like a half day or optional day. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are default in-office days. I'm curious how this will impact commercial real estate prices, because while there's less overall utilization, the peak load remains more or less the same.
Google acquired YouTube and Facebook acquired Instagram. Both for what seemed like insane valuations at the time. Both were brilliant defensive acquisitions in hindsight. Both fueled tech valuations by illustrating the opportunity for rapid disruption.
Tech seems somewhat unique because you can start a new company and within a relatively short period of time (<10 years) you can threaten the eventual existence of Fortune 500 incumbents. The entire venture capital/startup ecosystem exists to identify these upstarts and help them obtain unstoppable momentum as quickly as possible. If the incumbents want to survive, they usually have to pay up, and the longer they wait, the more expensive it will be. This is why Adobe pays $20 billion for Figma. Greed is good, but fear is better - for the startup looking to be acquired. There are a handful of other Figmas out there (and more will be started) and that is part of why tech has so much value.
Adobe employs more dark patterns in their rebill/subscription products than any other established company I've dealt with. I go out of my way to avoid them now. It doesn't surprise me that they had to pay such a premium for Figma.
Children have value in the hyperefficient society you describe, but it's emotional rather than monetary. It's hard to compare abstract, future emotional upside to dollars spent on diapers and sleepless hours lost to infant childcare in the here and now. Society does a poor job helping young people understand how to balance investment into children, friends, family, and community against investment into professional work which often results in more immediate and measurable results.
Millennial here. In the last 18 months I've substantially increased the % of net worth I'm comfortable allocating to a home, reflected in both purchase price and remodeling costs:
- it's not clear that pandemic-era is over, whether that be new Covid strains or other mutant viruses (not to mention global thermonuclear war)
- work from home requires much more space to do well + i'm home more often to enjoy the rest of the house
- most of my close friends work from home which means they can come and visit much more often
- due to Covid, parents are afraid of nursing homes + kids taking longer to leave the nest = intergenerational living is back on the radar
- life is short, a little bit of post-Covid YOLO
I'm not sure how widespread the sentiment is but if enough people feel this way it could make an impact.
I did find it odd that the dealership couldn't accept my state-issued ID for ID validation. Maybe there's some regulatory capture at work there. Even if state-issued ID docs were accepted, that would solve for KYC but not for credit scoring.
CRAs maintain consumer credit scores which support consumer borrowing and lending - a large part of the US financial system. Experian could have (and perhaps should have) been disbanded after their data breach, but if you disband the category, who or what replaces it to track consumer creditworthiness?
Beyond credit scores, there's been a proliferation of "Know Your Customer" (KYC) requirements to reduce fraud and money laundering. The most common form of KYC is called "Knowledge Based Authentication" (KBA). This is when they ask you a series of multiple choice questions about previous addresses, schools, and employers. You usually have to get 4 out of 5 right to "pass". I paid cash for a new car from a Jeep dealership - before they'd complete the transaction, I had to pass KBA from Experian. I believe it was a state law that imposed the requirement.
I don't think it's practical to argue for the extinction of CRAs as a category. I do think it's practical to give consumers more control over their data - what is stored and where it goes. I've been tinkering on solutions for this, as have quite a few others in the data privacy community as well.
I've been exposed to the world of law enforcement a few times in my career. They're mostly good people, with a few bad apples. They're granted extraordinary authority by society and should be subjected to scrutiny from outside agencies and third parties. Defunding the police seems more likely to hurt than help the most at-risk communities. If anything, they should get more funding, and it should be used to raise hiring standards and increase in-service training time particularly around mental health awareness, civil rights (first and fourth amendment law), appropriate use of force, and de-escalation tactics. They're subjected to a lot of job related PTSD but receive almost no mental health counseling or support.
I'd also separate privacy and security (especially privacy) from the debate over funding or defunding the police. The solution to abuses like the Accurint breach is to dramatically reverse the proliferation of sensitive personal data held in the digital ecosystem. If it's not there, it can't be found and exploited.
I'm just old enough to remember the dot com bubble. Very few companies back then had much revenue, let alone any profit. Public tech companies in 2022 have enormous revenue and profit streams. Alphabet/Google is trading around 20 times earnings and Meta/Facebook is around 10 times earnings. The S&P 500 overall is in the high teens. I'm not sure I'd call that disconnected from reality.
Within the startup ecosystem there are embryonic products that if nurtured can develop into existential threats to most of the current Fortune 500 companies. Incumbents eventually have to pay up to survive, eg. Adobe acquiring Figma. This dynamic supports startup valuations broadly. Startups represent the future and the future is usually priced at a premium.
Preemption would be an enormous mistake. Federal legislation moves at a glacial pace. In a field like privacy, you may only get to pass one substantial bill every 10 or 15 years. Technology moves too quickly for lawmakers at the Federal level to keep up. States can move much faster. Justice Brandeis popularized the phrase that "[the] states are the laboratories of democracy" and digital privacy law is a text book case of an emerging field that will benefit enormously from iterative experimentation at the state level.
BitWarden is based almost entirely on open source so it's possible to branch the project. Given some of the language on their website and their more recent attitude towards OS licenses, my prediction is that they will use the new funding to build as many closed source modules as possible to increase user switching costs, similar to what Google is trying to do with Chrome on top of Chromium. But that is a slow process that takes years, and a lot can happen between now and then.
That makes sense. I wouldn't call that ad fraud. That's the ML system optimizing for what you've said you want. If you bid for cpc you're going to get a lot of cheap clicks, but they're going to be nearly worthless. That would be the case on any large ad network, especially since mediation is so mature.
If you are spending thousands per day you should be backing out real time ROI/LTV which eliminates nearly all potential fraud.
The performance ad market moved from pay per impression to pay per click and then finally to pay per conversion years ago. Pay per conversion is the foundation of Facebook's lookalike audiences and Google's long-tail search campaign tools. When I see problematic campaigns these days it's usually because the media buyer hasn't set up their funnels/KPIs correctly.
AppLovin is a suite of developer tools plus an ad network. By your definition of adware, Facebook is an adware company. Google too.
Given the level of anti-trust scrutiny aimed at Facebook, there's little to no chance they would receive approval to acquire Unity. Facebook probably would have invested the most money into future development, but they've also traditionally been the most hostile to third-party developers. Any value that Facebook can capture for itself, it will. I've been a Unity fan for years partly because they did seem intent on remaining independent.
I think the combination of Unity and AppLovin is smart. Unity has a tools business that needs more long-term investment and stability to compete against Unreal. Read the latest Unity threads here on HN, which devolved into Unreal and Godot love fests as soon as people smelled blood in the water. AppLovin is a revenue and profit machine but needs somewhere to invest its excess cash flow. Unity has the vision and AppLovin knows how to execute.
Many children of the UHNW families I know are raised by a rotating cast of nannies and emotionally neglected by their parents. It's heartbreaking to watch the psychological damage being done. Given a choice for my embryonic self I'd choose an upper middle class couple with high degrees of empathy, one mostly stay at home parent and an obsessive focus on curiosity, knowledge, and self-education.