thesausageking

It's not a "massive blow" at all. Consumers will only vaguely remember this in a month. Netflix got a lot of new signups and got to test out their streaming infrastructure to figure out what needs work.

The fight itself was lame which worked in their favor. No one really cared about not being able to see every second of the "action". It's not like it was an NBA game that came down to the last second.

The challenger to these will solve for a different problem. Not every transaction needs complex fraud detection or being able for the customer do to chargebacks.

For a 3% discount, would customers agree to use something that worked just like cash, where the transfer was instant and couldn't be undone? Then you don't have to worry about fraud, chargebacks, etc.

Here's a video w/ Marshall Allen from last year. Amazing what 99 can look like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw-zE7zGEkM

Have they talked about how local laws and elections will work? The backers are putting up a ton of capital and boot strapping it with $1B+ in community benefits and housing subsidies.

When it starts being populated, is it going to be run like a company town[0] where they control the stores and restaurants? How much control will they have over local elections?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Key problem is that the average consumer is with their health insurance provider for about 3 years. This means that when you have drugs that provide significant health and cost benefits in the long term, the patient's current insurer pays the cost but another company receives most of the benefits.

It would help tremendously if the US changed the rules and made it so most people got insurance directly and not through their employer.

I can't think of any important things Mozilla has created since pushing Brendan Eich out 9 years ago. That's almost a decade and billions in revenue they've burned through.

There's now almost no programmers on the board or in senior leadership positions. The interim CEO they picked is an MBA who ran a business line at AirBnB.

It seems like another case of MBAs taking over.

I don't understand why the author dismisses carbon steel and cast iron pans. They're my favorite. They last forever and cook great. Go into any restaurant and you'll see mostly cheap, carbon steel pans.

Password manager + MFA is a lot more secure. Password managers aren't impervious to attacks.

Abstract:

"Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4–6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however previous cortical tracking studies were unable to demonstrate the presence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically invariant phonetic encoding emerging over the first year of life, providing neurophysiological evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By contrast, we found no credible evidence for age-related increases in cortical tracking of the acoustic spectrogram."

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43490-x

That's a good analysis, but I don't find it convincing. He's trying really hard to disprove Haidt's post by poking holes in many of the studies. If you look at 386 studies in the social sciences, of course you'll find issues with the analysis or design of many of them.

The larger trends ("most of the effect is driven by teen who use no social media", etc.) aren't supported by the data he presents (look at the table of "social media time" -> Depression for example).

Are the researchers who look into this problem predisposed to finding a connection? Probably. But I do think the open, community based analysis Haidt led was done well and if you look at what they found digging through 386 studies, it's compelling.

No you can't. Read the linked studies. "correlation doesn't equal causation" isn't a magic spell that disproves all research.

For more, here's an open, collaborative review of 386 studies: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...

The data is well established that social media use by teens leads to worse mental health outcomes. I'm a parent and as my kids near the age in which social media becomes a thing, I started digging into. I had assumed it would be vague and filled with underpowered studies, but it's not. Social media is bad for kids and the data is very clear on it.

This post has a list of the some of the better studies and gives a good synthesis of the results:

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-repor...

FTX took funds from customers and used them to run a hedge fund. When the fund did poorly, the customers' funds were gone, leaving a $8B hole. And they lied to customers about it.

Binance is very different. While it hasn't complied with various securities laws, it's never lied to customers and has kept customers' assets safe. They've also done steps to build confidence and be transparent like verifying proof of reserves:

https://www.binance.com/en/proof-of-reserves

While this report isn't perfect, it does show that wallets they control have as much in assets as they're supposed to, so we know they're not doing what FTX did.

The release from the Attorney General has more details and is much better written:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/united-states-seized-and-...

What's most interesting is almost all of the $54m is from how much crypto has appreciated since it was purchased in 2014:

> Castelluzzo then used some of the Bitcoin he had earned from narcotics sales to purchase 30,000 Ether in Ethereum’s Initial Coin Offering in July 2014. Castelluzzo also received an amount of an additional cryptocurrency – 30,000 Ethereum Classic – in 2016. Castelluzzo used the additional cryptocurrency to purchase various other cryptocurrencies. The complaint seeks the forfeiture of all of the cryptocurrency Castelluzzo obtained as a result of his narcotics sales.

In the ICO, ETH sold for ~$0.25, so they bought $7,500 worth. ETH now trades at ~$1,800, so what they bought is now worth $54m.

He makes money creating content on how to make money by creating content.

Ponzi is the wrong word. Pyramid scheme is more accurate.

That number is way low. I'm guessing it's only looking at indoor lights and not outdoor displays. Holiday lights in the US used 130 TWh in 2016.

Bitcoin uses less electricity than christmas lights. Are they more "valuable"? How do you decide?

Most tree planting projects fail to capture the CO2 spent on planting them. There maybe ways to use trees to capture carbon efficiently and at scale, but it's still an unsolved problem.

The SEC is just the wrong organization to be enforcing laws in crypto. This was a scam that was done out in the open and launched 4 years ago. People conned into buying this have already lost their money and they're not getting it back. The founder will use some of the $1B+ he's made of it to defend himself in a long, drawn out court case that the SEC will eventually settle.

The SEC's purpose is supposed to be to protect investors and no one is being protected by this.

Yeh, I have a lot of problems with Worldcoin but this isn't a great post on it or the issues. You can tell she went in with the intention to write something for an audience that hates crypto and wants to be told they're right.

As a comparison, Vitalik wrote a great, even handed analysis:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

This is a technique that's been known for years and is in PyTorch. It's not widely used because people tried it and, in practice, it doesn't work as well.

OP calling it a "bug that's been overlooked for 8+ years" is click bait.

I don't think the fund level ratings matter anymore. a16z has more than 300 partners managing $35B across separate funds in tech, bio, crypto, cultural leadership, and other areas. The partner(s) you work with matter more than the shingle outside the office.

Side note: does anyone know why it costs so much to make a donation?

I'm an avid Thunderbird user and I like to support the team making it, but drives me crazy that sending them money costs 8%. So if you give them $100, they only get $92.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/

I know Mozilla is anti-crypto, but there still has to be a cheaper way to send them money.

They have multiple of them on board and can swap in a new one if there's an issue. The focus on the controller is misplaced to me. Game controllers are well made and better suited for the job than custom hardware. It's just the association with videogames that makes it seem odd.

If they used $30 logitech keyboard as well, would anyone question that?

You're saying that the SEC knowingly allowed Coinbase to become a public company, have insiders dump billions in stock on the public, and then continue to operate a completely illegal business for another 2 years without taking any action at all? Not even issuing any guidance which Coinbase requested from them dozens of times?

If so, that would be a huge scandal and the SEC should be investigated immediately.

A much simpler explanation is that crypto was largely ignored by regulators, including the very shady parts like FTX, for most of Coinbase's life. When FTX imploded, lawmakers turned on crypto and put pressure on the SEC to attack the industry. This is why there's been a whole series of actions by them in the last 6 months.

If that's true, then why did the SEC approve Coinbase's IPO and not doing anything about it until years later? Even in spite of Coinbase meeting with the SEC hundreds of times and testifying before congress. This is a complete change in their stance by the SEC.

They're slowing burning through their VC money trying to make a business out of the hobbyist market while Cruise and Waymo have fully autonomous cars deployed in SF and are scaling up.

For background, "geohot", is George Hotz, who's a known hacker / tech personality[0]

This project fits the pattern of his previous projects: he gets excited about the currently hot thing in tech, makes his own knockoff version, generates a ton of buzz in the tech press for it, and then it fizzles out because he doesn't have the resources or attention span to actually make something at that scale.

In 2016, Tesla and self-driving cars led to his comma one project ("I could build a better vision system than Tesla autopilot in 3 months"). In 2020, Ethereum got hot and so he created "cheapETH". In 2022 it was Elon's Twitter, which led him to "fixing Twitter search". And in 2023 it's NVIDIA.

I'd love to see an alternative to CUDA / NVIDIA so I hope this one breaks the pattern, but I'd be very, very careful before giving him a deposit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

Sequoia, NEA, Lux, Insight, Lightspeed, ... these are brand name funds and they were completely duped. Sequoia wrote a glowing, 15,000 word piece about Sam:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220922164619/https://www.sequo...

How do investors put in >$1B without doing any real diligence or having the company setup a board or even have a CFO.

You can't paint it with such a broad brush. Employment laws are very fact specific and differ state to state. California was pretty sure Uber drivers were contractors, they brought an action, and the courts found against them. You really can't say unless you drill into a number of hairy specifics.

Not to mention, FTX was in the Bahamas and Alemada Research was based in Hong Kong, so people working there may not even be covered by US employment law.

This claim is the IRS to making up the biggest plausible number it can and then using that to review the facts and make a case to the bankruptcy judge.