reb

Low barriers-to-access for tooling absolutely democratize the creation of things with said tools.

But. It doesn’t meaningfully shift the underlying economic mechanics we live under, where people with access to capital can easily outcompete those without that access. It also erodes the relationship between the laboring class and the capital-deploying class (less interdependence), which has to have knock-on effects in terms of social cohesion and mobility.

I’m very much in favor of the tech being developed right now, but it’s hard to believe it’ll do anything but amplify the trends already present in our economy and culture.

So we can just calling time-of-death on the United States' social tech dominance now, right?

Domestic tech companies shamelessly sold access to American users for manipulation by "foreign adversaries" for years, made billions, suffered no lasting consequences. Then Chinese Vine walks in, smokes everybody else in ~24 months, the mad South African buys and destroys Twitter, and Mark toddles off the cliff of irrelevance with a social network in each pocket and an Oculus strapped to his face.

I guess it was fun while it lasted.

It’s rough out there. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and try to remember the people around you are just, like you, people.

We’ll figure it out in time.

The idea that our two choices are “abandon capitalism” or “allow children to be devoured by it” is… unhinged.

You’re talking to another person who started working well before turning 18.

I lived and worked in a few places as a teenager, including one where many of my teenage coworkers ended up dropping out of high school to work as close to full-time as they could at the urging of their parents (or grandparents). They worked hard, but I’m sure you can imagine the impact this had on their already shaky prospects. I left and am doing okay, but that wasn’t the norm.

Child labor is a fundamentally different beast across the classes and regions of America, and it’s either naive or disingenuous to pretend kids picking up a little spending money and some life skills is the primary form it takes.

Making children and adults compete in the labor market so business owners can protect their profit margins doesn’t seem off to you?

I wouldn’t want to subsidize some company’s low wages by lending them my kid at a discount rate, but that’s just me.

Again, I haven’t seen (or can’t recall) seeing anyone credibly make the case that the concern was unreasonable. I have seen some saying that promoting the concern within Founder’s Fund triggered the bank run, but that seems like a distinct position to me.

Plenty of startups fit that bill and will nonetheless be impacted by SVB’s failure, while the most pointless businesses surf by on their founders’ access to inherited wealth and political power. Any revenge on them will be short-lived and will have serious, lasting consequences for middle class workers throughout the industry. For anyone reading this who doesn’t already know: startups aren’t all snotty trust fund kids making $300k+ selling AI deodorant on the blockchain.

As I said on another post this weekend, I’ll remember the comments I’m reading here for the rest of my life.

Is that how people are talking about it? At this point the thread of most conversations here seems to follow this pattern: lots of deposits > overallocated to interest-rate-sensitive long-term bonds > short-term withdrawal pressure forces SVB to sell assets at a loss and then attempt to sell itself > Thiel urges pawns to pull based on that knowledge (and possibly more) > word gets out, wider bank run > FDIC takeover. A potential issue become a concrete issue through panic.

The rationale presented alongside the urging to pull out doesn’t have to be fabricated, just hypothetical. That the risk become real as a consequence of being suggested is potentially interesting, but ya know.

I'm going to remember the comments I'm reading here for the rest of my life.

Does the money make them crazy or does the system reward the crazy?

Markets can produce some unexpected winners...

I'm pretty confident there's good evidence supporting a connection between "early childhood adversity" and the development of schizophrenia, but I'm inclined to agree: once the system has gone off the rails, it's probably too late for environmental intervention to rein things back in. And that's assuming there's any reliable way to initiate and maintain those environmental changes.

Realigning the internal systems involved in schizophrenia seems at least as important as improving external systems that might provoke it.

Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.

I'll bite: what do you think?

That’s kind of my point: the work is mainly vulnerable one-on-one conversations, listening to people who are struggling, and then advocating for them in an environment that isn’t terribly concerned with worker happiness (corporate America).

There aren’t simple answers or one-size-fits-all solutions. Picking a representation metric for one demographic and pushing it up won’t fix things, even for that population. Many people are, at minimum, skeptical of DEI, and are inundated with clickbait news reinforcing their skepticism.

The people doing the real work understand all this and still show up every day trying to making things better for people.

> Hmm. I am currently participating in a group that uses a more, lets say aggressive, interpretation ( white supremacy is pervasive and all that ). It gets old fast.

Go read my reply again, I namedrop the kind of people who fixate on this stuff. DEI is way, way more than "white supremacy is bad"; if that's all you're getting, they're letting you down.

> Maybe, but then good actors have some responsibility to denounce bad actors.

And they do, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately to the CEO who hired a grifter "DEI" consultant for a year-long engagement that only delivers experiences like yours.

This just isn’t true. At the core of DEI is the understanding that negative cultural biases make life worse for everyone. These cultural biases (which differ individually based on a million factors) are an unavoidable part of the human experience and impact all of us in different ways, so DEI initiatives encourage being mindful of them in order to limit their harm.

Critics, execs trying to CYA, and incompetent practitioners of DEI work focus obsessively on simplistic guidelines around race, gender, and sexuality, but legitimate DEI work aims to support everyone in the areas where prevailing attitudes are letting them down.

You’re never going to hear about all the DEI professionals capably doing that work because it’s uncontroversial and often very private, but it’s happening all the same and it materially improves employees’ lives every day.

"Free speech maximalist"

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The person you're replying wrote no one wants to study the effects of nootropics in healthy adults.

Sick people with insurance, particularly chronically ill ones, or those with illnesses that threaten their lives, are where I'd imagine the majority of money is made. You could probably argue treating the ill is more psychologically impactful work too. That's going to skew where researcher's focus their attention, especially if their work is funded by private industry.

Mmm, but a signal is a signal, even if it's a duplicitous one.

Reading the replies to your comment is so grim. I think, more than anything, I'm floored by the level of arrogance that permeates seemingly every conversation on HN lately. I'm spending less time here than I have in years because watching the culture of curiosity die just makes me sad.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to share this.

Apple’s been earning my money for a long time, but I will say: some of my favorite things about their products have seemed less reliable in recent years. I used to love how painless Handoff was, and how easy it was to switch AirPods from one device to the next. Both are finicky and slow now, and I hear the same from other people I know (unprompted anecdata).

How do you figure? “Unchecked” means uncontrolled, not uncontrollable (an important distinction). In a functional social system, different powers constrain one another, which is a kind of loop I guess, but a stabilizing one.

Why is that more important?

> Oh apart from destroying Twitter as a platform for live events, protests, OSINT etc.

Ding ding ding.

I'm pretty cynical, but let's be real: power doesn't have to work this way, and I don't think we do ourselves any favors acting like it does. A functional society finds ways to hold unchecked power accountable for pettiness, and that's a norm that doesn't go away unless all of us let it.

Does this really seem like something that will cost him with the audience he's been courting in recent years? At this point I feel pretty confident they enjoy watching idols squash their "enemies" as much as they enjoy watching them role-play victimhood.

Strongly agree. Firms exist to separate users from their money, time, attention, etc. It follows that digital product organizations at nearly all levels are incentivized to thread dark patterns into their experiences, and healthy skepticism/awareness is a must for anyone spending time in these virtual spaces.

The internet indisputably made my life better growing up, but I had to learn how to use it (and not the other way around) through trial and error. There's no good reason young people today should have to start that learning journey at zero.

Meta: I'm familiar with "an historic", but I've never seen "an hypothesis" before. Is "an before h-" a broader grammatical pattern than I realized?