drumdance

And government in general. Populist demagogues capitalize on the misperception that one man can just make all the "easy" fixes. DOGE was a good example of that.

From my perspective, there is such a thing as "too much democracy." I don't know how to quantify the exact right amount for a given situation.

In the case of companies, a benevolent dictatorship is fine because employees, customers and investors can all exit and find other companies. It's at the nation state level where you need more structural veto points. (Arguably true for towns/counties/states too, but you still have the right to exit so...)

For give my naiveté, but who pays for the training of these models?

The spam results dominating Google, runaway popups... ugh

Wow, this brings back memories. Way back in the 2000 I worked on a concept to charge “postage“ to big senders and remit payments to receivers (hosts, not end users). I also looked at hashcash. I ultimately abandoned the project because I realized I would be spending all my time convincing big senders why they should pay and I knew I would hate that job.

Previously I was the spam cop for a big sender and saw up close all the ways our clients would try to weasel around it.

Do you have a web site? I'd like to check it out.

I'm building an identity verification platform for age verification. I set it up as a nonprofit because I think this is a public good that should be provided by governments. It's mostly a proof of concept right now. My long term goal is to get state DMVs using it (or something like it).

https://cardlessid.org

I could use this for a project I'm working on, but the Download link is 404 on GitHub

That link only works for verified YC founders, not just members of the network.

In theory yes, in practice it requires lots of different government services to get on the same page. How do you verify a state ID? Usually the DMV. Have they released an API endpoint for that? Almost certainly no. What if instead you're using a passport? Then the federal government needs to do it. What if your passport is from a country with weak government that doesn't have a lot of capacity?

And of course governments attract hackers because they tend to not be up to date on security best practices.

A single abstraction layer on blockchains allows more developers and security experts to contribute and innovate.

There are also SNRIs, which don't have the sexual side effects. I've done mostly SSRIs but in the last few years I've been on an SNRI called Pristiq and it's the best by far.

He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.

I've always had questions about this. Did he not look at the senior leadership and get a sense if that's true?

I agree with this on a subjective level, but it also makes me think of blacksmiths at country fairs. I'm sure they deeply enjoy the work, but industrialized CNC and other technology replaced them long ago. It's a craftsman's hobby now.

I've thought for a while that I could get a good sense of someone's potential if I could just read their email. I noodled on the idea of an oauth (Gmail) based AI to evaluate email but the privacy issues make it a nonstarter.

Thanks for your input. Once we launch the the product itself we will make no mention of crypto for exactly this reason.

Lofty.ai used crypto as the back end for their fractionalized property platform, but there is no mention of crypto. I used it to sell a portion of my rental property. Here's a video I made about the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgPLXFwhZbY&t=2s

This is something I should use but am not at all knowledgeable about. One thing to consider as a feature is creating an llms.txt file that explains all the details so its consumable by an LLM

A decentralized identity platform for age gating content - https://cardlessid.org

My very first programming job was with Quattro Pro spreadsheet. It was a great introduction for someone who was self-taught and pre-internet.

IMO the value of AI coding is less about what we're seeing now and more about what will happen once anyone can program their phone, watch or smart speaker just by feeding it a prompt.

How so? Stable coins issued under the GENIUS Act are fully reserved, unlike regular banks.

Surprised to see so many people who dislike the article. The important background hum to this piece is that she's dating men in a place where the male-female ratio is in her favor. It's also a pressure cooker environment where the men often judge themselves against some of the richest people in human history.

So on one hand she gets to be more picky; on the other, there is a larger share of men likely to have status anxiety.

At first I thought this mean that the absolute count of pull requests was trending down and this could be a new BLS data point.

I don't have a strong opinion on this piece but I very much would like to see DID catch on.

Not the WorldCoin version, but one that states and other state-backed providers can use to verify that someone is who they say they are.

Easy: parroting YouTube comments

I think that, broadly speaking, hard work and talent strongly predict success. But the circumstances can dramatically affect the magnitude. I have no doubt that Zuck would've been successful in 1880, but not one of the richest people who ever lived. The leverage that comes from being an introverted hacker type was not as great then.

Trump has had a bizarre fixation on trade deficits since the eighties. Back then he blamed Japan. Now it's China. It's his one and only ideological commitment.

Obama didn't endorse ZIRP. He wanted to do more stimulus but Congress wouldn't let him.

In that environment ZIRP was the only solution. Ben Bernanke (a Bush appointee, re-appointed by Obama) devoted his academic career to how the Fed could have prevented the Great Recession. He was right.

Budget deficits are not the same as trade deficits. Trump barely even mentions the debt and clearly does not care about it one bit.

Sadly, this go-round it's Gen X more than Boomers. We voted for Trump disproportionately compared to other age cohorts. I'm embarrassed on behalf of my idiot friends from high school.

For a while I thought about starting a nonprofit or foundation or whatever whose goal was get universities to adopt the coop model for all majors, not just engineering. The idea was to take a year and learn how the world actually works. We're talking literally basic business skills like how to run a meeting, how to do an effective presentation, etiquette for email and slack etc. Also give exposure to different types of work (office vs frontline vs outdoors etc) and industry types. 1/3 business, 1/3 nonprofit, 1/3 government.

I'm 56. Please teach me your ways. I took a break from dev work from 2017 to 2023 and want to get back into it. I learned more recent stuff like React and have built a couple of open source projects and a mobile app using React Native, but I can't even get an interview.