pbiggar

Meta truly is the worst company. In almost everything Meta does, it truly makes the most user-hostile decisions, awful decision, every single time.

Cambridge Analytica The Rohingya Genocide Suppressing Palestinian content during a genocide Damage to teenage (and adult) mental health

Anyway, I mention this because some friends are building a social media alternative to Instagram: https://upscrolled.com, aiming to be pro-user, pro-ethics, and designed for people, not just to make money.

If it's worth $18B, and Chrome is worth $34B, then the new company is worth $52B. Google gets 34/52 = 65% of the merged company.

This is all I found https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1b71unn/im_an_idf_sold...

To be clear, you're saying YC hosted a soldier for an AMA? Where? Like as a speaker, or in Bookface, or what?

Occasionally, when it comes to their attention, often after the reach has been lost.

Can you share more about this?

Yes, they know: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024

Dang admitted they're getting brigaded months ago. They've chosen to do nothing about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024

Not just that, but Microsoft's reputation is in the process of taking a nose dive over its human rights record

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...

I haven't had time to dig into the report, but this is utterly unsurprising given previous reports, and due to employee and former employee whistleblowers. See also:

- From 7amleh: Erased and Suppressed: Palestinian Testimonies of Meta's Censorship: https://7amleh.org/post/erased-and-suppressed-palestinian-te...

- AJ+ documentary "Inside Israel's Influence on Meta": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12btf2Oq820

Have you looked at the history before that? It seems you're missing 77 years of frequent massacres by Israel, a brutal occupation/apartheid of the West Bank, and a 17-year blockade of Gaza.

Yes, this is part of Project Esther by the Heritage Foundation. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritag...

US universities do a lot of research on Palestine and Israel's occupation and apartheid there. In addition, universities are naturally liberal and are targets of the right wing anti-education movement.

Remember that these claims of antisemitism are all false. What they actually mean is "they had a student encampment calling out Israel's genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine, that the US supports with weapons, troops, UN vetos, and bad faith negotiation"

> UNESCO’s decision to admit the “State of Palestine” as a Member State is highly problematic, contrary to U.S. policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.

America First continues to be Israel First.

Yes, the NYPD is genuinely full of cops who support Israel. They have partnerships with Israel, they are trained by Israeli, the NYPD even has an office in Tel Aviv. Check out the training they get: https://jewishcurrents.org/training-nypd-keffiyeh-watermelon...

Can we talk about the fact that such a tool exists? A private company is able to take a photo and identify you. Scary shit!

The requests - which fyi I was not involved in - are really smart. It allows Sequoia to take concrete steps to clear its name, via a transparent investigation into the racism in their firm, and to build solutions to it.

I suspect Sequoia is too evil to go for this, but let's see.

Shaun Maguire has done more to tank Sequoia's reputation than a decade of founder unfriendly policies and advice. It used to be that you took their money and regretted it - now founders increasingly don't want their money at all (unless they're far right or Israeli).

This is no surprise. I raised the flag last year on Whatsapp being used as part of the genocide in Gaza [1] following the +972 article [2] on Lavender.

This was an opportunity for Meta to signal that it wasn't in support of its technologies being used this way, to do top-to-bottom public audit of how this came to be and to prevent it from ever happening again.

Instead, Meta had an incredibly scummy response [3]. They said that "WhatsApp has no backdoors". A "backdoor" and a vulnerability are different, and Meta at the time knew [4] that it had a vulnerability which could have been used in that exact situation (since all Gazan telecoms are surveilled by Israel).

Given Meta's senior leadership is pro-Israel, with their CISO being former Israeli intelligence, and with them massively putting their thumb on the scales to shut down pro-Palestinian activism [5][6][7][8] (including shutting down dissent of it internally [9]).

Now, Meta is aligning with the US military [10], and with the Trump administration [11] which is trying to support a war against Iran that Israel started.

Literally any country which is not US/West aligned should be actively moving their citizenry off Meta.

[1] https://blog.paulbiggar.com/meta-and-lavender/ [2] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ [3] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240418-israel-using-meta... [4] https://theintercept.com/2024/05/22/whatsapp-security-vulner... [5] https://7amleh.org/storage/meta/Erased%20and%20Suppressed%20... [6] https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti... [7] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo [8] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/report-a... [9] https://7amleh.org/storage/Advocacy%20Reports/Delete%20the%2... [10] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-army-tech-executives/ [11] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo

Yes, this is correct. So for being unclear!

Yes, the next version will be able to set up locally - you'll be able to install a single Darklang binary and run any darklang program without any further steps. See the explanations on https://darklang.com homepage.

The issue with the hard connection between the editor and language is that each change becomes a massive undertaking. Making a language improvement was much much much simpler than making the editor change to support it.

Stachu is really interested in bringing back the hosted programming environment in some form fyi. Just need to get the basics working first.

Who are we talking about here? Looks like a comment was edited but now it seems like you're talking about Darklang?

OK, interesting question. Long story short, companies are made of many shareholders with different needs and wants and financial expectations. We can split this into: "what are the needs of the investors of the Dark Inc" and "what are the needs of the founders of Darklang Inc".

Dark Inc investors signed up for a unicorn ($1B company) or better. They didn't get that, and they aren't interested in shares in a small business making programming languages. So they want to shut it down, they're not interested in funding it, and actually would much prefer to not have shares than to have shares in it. They are also interested in their reputations, so having a "soft exit" is better than a hard shutdown - usually that's an acquihire where they get a bit of cash back and get to say "we succeeded" but they also don't want to damage their reputation by shutting down products that are in use.

Meanwhile, the new founders of Darklang Inc are interested in building this cool language, and so want a (possibly small) business making programming tools while continuing to make a living. That company needs money to run until it gets revenue.

It is much simpler and cleaner to sell the assets than to sell the company (many acquisitions are structured this way). It's not just money in vs money out, it's what are the needs of the stakeholders. It's in the interest of both Dark Inc investors and Darklang Inc founders for Dark Inc to sell assets and shut down. Dark Inc investors are relieved of reputational liability and can close their books on the investment, and Darklang Inc gets a clean start.

In this case there's more money in than out - that money isn't just for buying assets though, it's for running the company for several years.

Hope that addresses the question!

I agree it won't fit it, but IMO it will remove one of the barriers to adoption. The problem with doing something revolutionary, is that it's only going to be revolutionary in some ways, and it has to compete with things that are mature in ways you are not. And the original version (now called Darklang-Classic) was quite immature in an awful lot of ways that made it difficult to build on.

That's being addressed with the new version of course!

Source-available was a hurdle for adoption, and maybe it would have been a problem had we hit it big, but for the last few years we've wanted to get rid of it.

Hey folks, author here. Happy to answer any questions about Darklang and Dark Inc.

Extending strings is not a linear-time operation. Behind the scenes, the JS runtime allocates new memory for it. In the naive case, you start by allocating 1 byte, then when you append to it, you need 2 bytes. So you allocate a new string of 2 bytes, and copy the data in. Each new byte is a new allocation, and a new copy of the entire string. That's how it's quadratic.

In practice, memory allocators tend to double the size of an allocation like this, which is still quadratic.

In practice, JS runtimes also tend to use data structures like Ropes for strings to handle this sort of issue. That brings it down to linear time in practice (I think?)

They've already revoked the visas of Palestinian students for free speech that Israel doesn't like. As usual, oppression of Palestine and racism against China are used to fuel an expansion of the fascist state. If you don't resist these, you're going to find it expanded to you and your family too.

I run a non-profit called Tech for Palestine that is pushing for digital and real-world freedom. The efforts to weaponize the tech industry to control our speech are very frequently aligned to Israel as part of a movement to suppress Palestinian liberation.

We support over 60 projects in areas such as media bias, algorithmic/AI bias, protest tech, and boycotting, which are pushing back against these initiatives. Donations are very much appreciated

https://techforpalestine.org/donate/

About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. They didn't enjoy the job, needless to say.

I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity and autonomy. Coding was always solving problems, and never felt like some sort of assembly line. But in a lot of companies, this is how it was constructed, with PMs setting up sprints and points, etc.

Similarly, I spoke to a doctor about how much they loved being able to work remotely at their role - with 2-3 days a week where they just responded to email and saw patients over telehealth. It felt very "ticket" focused and not at all the high status doctor role I imagined.

I suspect that both those roles will be lost to AI. If your role is taking a ticket that says "the box should be green, not red", and nothing more, that's the sort of thing that AI is very capable of.