gduffy

10lb of muscle (easily gained by a "newbie" who is eating well) will add about 1,500 calories per day to your baseline metabolic rate

Per month?

https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...

It’s still helpful: even 50-70 Calories per day is 18k-25k Calories per year. At 3500 Calories per pound of fat that’s 5-7 pounds offset each year, but it’s not a panacea for someone with 100 pounds of body fat.

You can’t out-lift your fork!

Wow, “can’t work”. That might be the strongest signs of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever seen.

Trivial logic disproves your statement and in 10-20 years it will be proven empirically through disruption from the market (including mini-Apple splinter groups that do exactly what you say is impossible).

SJ’s (awesome, to be admired) reality distortion field was strong and its effects clearly still linger, as evidenced by your leaps here.

Apple is decidedly less innovative than it was in decades past (make sure you don’t misread that as “not innovative”) and others will take the mantle in due time. It’ll just be faster, better for the economy, and better for individual citizens if Apple isn’t allowed to exert undue influence against competitors via monopoly/oligopoly tactics along the way.

Side note: funny enough, your sort of reverence for the status quo is a huge factor in keeping large companies unaware of looming disruption. But nearly every exec that could act on it has a personal time horizon that preserves their legacy and makes it the next guy's problem. This phenomenon, while frustrating to experience on the inside, is one of the most heartening aspects of the situation for would-be competition to take hold.

If you saw, for example, how deals that lock up fabrication resources (and the surrounding global politics) work to prevent competition, you’d see one small example out of many that illustrate how smaller competitors can’t keep up.

As for the rest of your comment, I am actually a HUGE FAN of vertical integration. But your connection is a non sequitur because a $100B company can do everything the way Apple does if and only if there isn’t a $1T company next door locking up every single one of the best chip engineers, industrial designers, worldwide supply of miniature CNC machines, & etc with golden handcuffs, trade deals, capital and etc that only a monopoly could afford.

Our theoretical $100B company would still have some of the greats. But right now, some ridiculous percentage of engineers and infrastructure are controlled by like 5 tech companies. It isn’t healthy for individual citizens, and it misses huge opportunity costs if you compare it to a truly competitive economy with enforced rules against monopolies or oligopolies.

It’s one of the truly rare situations where proper, concise and well-planned government intervention (in other words, laws!) could and should help.

I am actually spending a good chunk of time on the process of extracting myself from the ecosystem, I’m about 50% there. Two problems make your solution a non-solution:

1. Apple is “best of the worst” i.e. the other platforms suck more on a usability basis.

2. It doesn’t matter if only a select few understand the long term impact of trading freedom/competition for shininess – our money is a drop in the bucket compared to regular users who care about usability and have already changed the channel when you talk about anything beyond that.

And so, large companies will roll along with exclusive access to things like TSMC 5nm thanks to capital resources and returns 1000x of any upstart like System76/PinePhone/FairPhone/etc.

Free markets work great, except that monopoly-like things form naturally and suck all of the air out of the room; therefore anti-monopoly laws are one of the very few regulations on capitalism I think we should all support (who wouldn’t benefit? 100 people total?).

There’s probably a way to oust them that isn’t legislation, but it will require coming at them from an angle that doesn’t rely on having access to the world’s largest pile of capital and etc. I.e. entrepreneurs getting real creative and taking huge risks on opportunity cost (it’s easier to build an app and get rich, easier still to pull $500k/year in total comp as a mid level SW engineer at big tech co).

But based on my experience and judgment of the situation, I’d like to see concise and progressive (vs regressive) antitrust/antimonopoly legislation, I think it would be both great for the economy and great for individual citizens.

I have the same problem, and also often people show up twice but only one bubble works (invariably the second one I try).

I tried to get stuff like that fixed, impossible when there’s 35 people who “share responsibility” and can point fingers instead of doing something. Imagine a code base and organization so complex that even fixing a bug takes political capital and months. Much less re-architecting to kill a whole class of bugs...

Steve Jobs woulda (metaphorically) broken their fingers off and fed ‘em to ‘em. Once the pointing can’t happen, useful stuff can happen!

Also, you’d be surprised how many SVPs and CEOs I’ve met in big tech that use IT support to setup and fix their devices. When I ran Dropcam, I insisted on using and operating our product only as a customer could. It’s a point of pride and a critical last-resort way to catch issues.

The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical.

Read again, I said as much & agree so much that it’s actually a fundamental part of my characterization of Apple.

I think Apple’s products are better than ever, on the whole

I had to type this quote because my iPad won’t let me copy and paste anymore on this page for some reason. (I didn’t make this up)

I don’t think we should...

Well, I’m only speaking from my years of experience as both a product executive at Google and Apple and a successful entrepreneur, which is perhaps the exact skeleton key that fits this particular lock. Your idea would not fix my Apple product issues, because they really don’t rely nearly as much on IP protection as they do trade secrets, security through obscurity, and (legal disclaimer: in my subjective opinion only) anti-competitive practices.

But it would greatly hurt some other big companies (not really Apple, Google, Amazon, ...) and small tech companies alike.

You know, I used to think as you do on that topic, but not once I truly understood the ins and outs via relevant experience. Patent trolls suck, but IP law ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.

I worked for an SVP at Apple as an “entrepreneur in residence” from 2016-2019.

Apple’s best-of-the-worst products now suck in a million subtle ways; and they’ve become so complex that they suck in different ways for each user so we can’t even band together behind a single complaint.

The root cause is the lack of a “fuck no, fix that shit” product CEO who puts customer experience above all else. Without one, it has become a very typical big company bureaucracy. The engine is still firing on all cylinders but nobody is at the wheel anymore.

It’s hard to diagnose from the outside with Apple because 1. there’s a shroud of mystery/secrecy, 2. boatloads of cash keep smart people on hand and create some very genuine technical supremacy (e.g. M1) and 3. even a broken “new product innovation” clock is right twice a day when it sprays $20b into R&D every year (AirPods, maybe AR someday, etc).

But true, earth-shattering category-defining innovation at today’s Apple is incredibly inefficient at best and structurally impossible at worst – not to mention the hardest type of innovation which consists of simplifying software, slashing the complexity of product lines, and thereby fixing whole categories of bugs with a few powerful swings of the sword. (E.g. fucking fix and unify Apple ID/iTunes/FindMy/etc ... today ... not next year).

And, in my opinion, their monopoly/oligopoly/[whatever] status, cash hoarding, and domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating and competing with them.

We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow.

It’s the case at all Big Tech companies. Time to break them up. https://paygo.media/p/25171

[ ... or if not that, can I at least get USB-C on my iPhone so I can stop carrying two cables? :’( ]

Disclaimer: I left Apple in June.

Processing on local devices is slightly better but ultimately it’s cold comfort when those devices are locked down, closed source, and opaque to anyone but hackers.

From the end customer perspective, the only protection was Apple’s customer-focused business model, which is now slowly tilting from “sell slick technology products” to “monetize the user base.”

Another solution is needed. Since I created Dropcam (Nest cam), I am working on fixing this: send us a message at https://duffy.org if you want to learn more.

Land is not scarce. I know this because I've both surveyed a large part of the world from the air myself, and from data. Please cite data.

PG&E's failure is because of poor capital investment, bad infrastructure decisions, and lack of federal antitrust intervention into a mismanaged California-ordained private energy monopoly.

You don't have to live in a log cabin, I am not talking only of pandemics but also the mental well-being of people who want to spread their elbows a bit using the copious land available on Earth, and you don't have to hunt or grow your own wheat to live in a suburban or semi-rural place and buy food and products locally (although there is nothing wrong or crazy about hunting and growing some of your own food, if you want to... we just also have this thing called "money" that you can trade for goods and services that you don't want to provide yourself).

I'm only responding now in an attempt to get you to reconsider the frankly baseless assumptions that you are asserting as facts – the truth is, and the point is: there are ways for people to live efficiently enough in urban, suburban, and rural settings, and we should stop judging that very personal preference and instead focus our time and investments on improving efficiencies across the spectrum (and fighting always to enforce legislation that engenders more competition in every marketplace).

If you are advocating for capitalism with externalities priced in using fair (by democratic vote) and absolute/equal valuation methods, that is what I am arguing for as well.

SF doesn’t have that by a long shot. That’s the actual point.

Also, I didn’t say I had a problem with cities, far from it – I have liked living in the city in the past, and I can understand why someone would want to live in a good city. But [citation needed] on cities being fundamentally and meaningfully cheaper under the externality-adjusted capitalism model.

Urbanization can increase total living costs compared to lower-density living, for example through disease spread, crime, power density and transmission requirements, high-speed waste processing requirements vs composting opportunities, food production locality, and etc.

Whether the efficiency scales balance out in favor of a particular density or not is a mystery to me. I am just not as sure as you seem to be.

Let’s find some data that shows a TCO per capita for a well-planned/well-run suburb vs a similar city. Or, do what I’m doing and get out there and mold your local environment into what you need while letting others do the same – there’s enough space and energy for all of us here and probably >10x if we fill the Earth and Mars.

P.S. While I don’t know for sure, I suspect that the answer to efficiency vs density is: it is either a wash or a small enough difference that it doesn’t matter compared to living the life you want as sustainably as possible.

No the incentives are not there, not when you can vote yourself richer by freezing property taxes and preventing building up or out.

Citation needed on cities being fundamentally more efficient. A suburban home can be powered by pure solar, rainwater/groundwater can be captured and recycled locally, an electric car can carpool, and mass transit (sure, let's build more of that too) can easily reach out to the suburbs. You can even telecommute, and that sipping straw of electrons makes the public transit users look like energy-guzzling planet-killers in comparison (Ooh! We all love some tasty moral superiority!)

Even if that weren't the case, there is such a concept as efficient enough. At some level, sanity factors in, and trying to raise a family while dodging needles and poop in San Francisco is enough to make some people say "enough is enough."

I'm all for spending smarter and more compassionately. San Francisco spends $240 million per year on homeless programs, or $30k/yr per individual. And it doesn't even make a dent; the local living costs are so high that $30k evaporates in the blink of an eye.

We need policies/infrastructure that encourage building up AND out to relieve this pressure and better care for the less fortunate people ... while still allowing for sustainable urban and suburban lifestyles.

I'm not counting paving farmland, friend. Also, go look up aeroponics and 3D farming.

We don't need PG&E. The sun gives us free energy, and batteries + thermal energy storage can cover the cloudiest of days.

Well-designed suburbs don't need to be subsidized. And they can also be healthier and happier for you and your family (quiet, safe, better air quality, elbow-room, &etc). Just decentralize large cities by building smaller mixed-use "downtowns" surrounded by layers of variable density housing. Single family homes with yards are a part of that.

I'm moving and will be putting this into practice, instead of sitting back and seeing what happens. My cost of living will go down even though I am self-providing all of my family's utilities.

I might even use the savings to build more than just my own needs... creating opportunities for those with less capital to make the same choice to enjoy a better life at an affordable cost.

P.S. I have done the carbon calculations, and burying it in concrete is a good part of a total solution. "Deluding." Hah. A head not in the sand can more easily look in the mirror!

The first part of the response is to the parent comment, not the article.

That said, intelligent legislation to encourage all types of housing and development (with externalities like carbon priced in as taxes, not government prescribed solutions to mitigate them) would go a long way to bringing back affordability.

The solution in the interim is to vote with your dollars and feet, if you can. And really think about it if your answer is "I can't". Most of the time, that's not really true.

I'm leaving next month. Bye California and your awful policies that literally burn us to death at worst, and make us poorer and stingier zero-sum competitors at best. And for those of you who say "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" ... check in with me in 10 years and let's compare stories! <3

No offense, but your thinking here is actually a bigger part of the problem.

There is nothing fundamentally unsustainable about suburbs, single family homes, low density, or cars. 50% of the USA is totally uninhabited, and it is possible today to build a totally off-grid and sustainable single family home / suburb in the majority of it.

You can even capture carbon in concrete. Don't prescribe solutions just because you prefer them, set incentives and goals to favor the right outcomes and let people decide and optimize how to do it.

Your urban utopia is my hellscape, and my suburban utopia is yours. The good news is, this is America, and we can both live here. Good fences make good neighbors.

P.S. most of the $2 trillion real estate market in the Bay Area where I have lived for 12 years exists precisely because our politicians DON'T promote further development, sustainable or otherwise. Most of what's here is decaying, old, unsustainable, whether it is high or low density, and nobody can afford to improve it because all the tradespeople got priced out and left years ago.

Anytime!

Erasmus also said “What is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?”

“With all due respect”, which part are you playing right now?

My comments were not meant as logical proofs. But, I am content to say that Dropcam, as designed at launch, could likely be proven “net good” based on several popular moral axiomatic systems. That’s the best I’ve got, chum! The alternative is to convert oneself to a motionless blob, attempting to exert the least possible influence on reality unless intense logical calculation and polling of prevailing subjective moral bases has occurred first.

I choose instead to just try to do the right thing, and build cool/good stuff too. And always try to make things better, as long as you have breath. I highly recommend it over the blob strategy.

Have to admit though, I had forgotten how much fun it is to comment on the Internet!

This is exactly right, and way better than my reply.

Your polish can improve as you scale and get more resources. That doesn't mean there isn't a min-bar of basic security practices and ethics, but if min-bar is perfection on all counts, get ready for a long and fruitless existence...!

I'll try when I get a moment. I think it might actually be better and easier to open-source SW and HW modules that do the right things.

That's not a very generous interpretation of what I wrote, and honestly hints at an immature understanding of good engineering and security.

Dropcam v1 was one of the most secure internet products in existence at its inception, by design, full stop.

Making things more secure is a never-ending charge, and we never stopped. Google/Nest continue to try to improve things as well, but they've been slower and more inefficient at doing so than we were in our heyday. That's why these stories never seem to stop coming. The attackers are outpacing the defenders.

Being capable of changing one's mind is a great thing. Thanks for the honest conversation – that's what's great about HN these days!

We competed head-on every single day with companies that lied like it was a national pastime, and we beat them handily. I think it is because good people tend to make the best products. There's an efficiency increase from passion, and all it takes is one good leader to unlock a team of hundreds or thousands of good people. I believe it is enough to take to the bank against shady practices.

That said, I do support better antitrust laws, we need to update them for the 21st century tech oligopolies + IP-stealing/currency-manipulating nation-states.

But all it takes is one good motivated person like you or me to Make The World A Better Place (™ HBO Silicon Valley). So let's get to it...!

Thanks, I appreciate that!

I feel you about the lights. Ultimately, I have grown to think that users should have ultimate control over the software running on their devices. If I want a light you can't disable, it should be by designing the hardware that way ... and you're still free to use a sharpie/tape/drill to modify your own hardware.

It's a fine line balancing making things difficult for creeps vs fully empowering a homeowner/caretaker to protect their castle/family how they see fit. But freedom for users to find their balance and law to punish truly bad uses are the only stable solutions... otherwise, creeps can always just use crappy products with no protections instead and you, the regular person, get stuck with crappy restricted products.

Some poignant examples of this are the many art installations that contain Dropcams. Suddenly a bunch of them have ugly blue dots that weren't intended by the artists. Does the artist now have to visit their installations with a sharpie? It's a stupid and limiting rule change that further pushes what was once a generally useful tool into a one-trick home security pony.

I think I understand where you are coming from, and I've thought similarly before.

But billion-dollar companies have been made almost purely on "NAT punching". I've written the code, and it's more complex than it seems.

And RE: your lightbulb example, I love it, because it I will now use it to illustrate how even seemingly simple devices require ongoing software maintenance. Is it using a wireless protocol compatible with other devices? Does it use encryption/authentication (e.g. to keep the neighborhood hacker kid from controlling my lights)? Does the setup process require interoperation with a changing set of personal devices (phones, etc)? All of these things could require software updates, see e.g. heartbleed. And if you have a software update system, it now needs maintenance as well...

Not to mention if consumers want their hardware investment to continue paying dividends through new software features. That part should definitely be opt-in and open to competition.

But those engineers you hire to maintain your software aren't commodities. They have shifting interests, bills to pay, and boot-up time to re-remember all of the old code. Costs will be lower to keep them employed and making continuous improvements once a product reaches sufficient scale.

Competition would prove out which model is best, though, so no need to think too hard about it, we just need to improve antitrust/competition law.

Every rung you climb between client-server towards fully distributed increases software difficulty non-linearly.

It seems simple at the outset, but once you actually try to build a complex business/product like this one you realize you have to start with something simple just to get the money to fund something more complex/better.

RE: internet service loss leader model, I think it can be beat with a better product and a better model. But someone is still always going to need to pay to maintain and update software, and it seems fair to profit off of that as long as you allow for competition (& that's where I believe the law should e better protect consumers).

I know what you mean. Product engineering gets weird when you remove all constraints, and you actually end up hobbled instead of empowered by the "resources".

I think if they made projects require independent profitability (after a startup period), a lot of that weirdness would go away and customers would be happier too.

I've got a table of a zillion different methods with myriad categories of benefits and drawbacks. And a weighted scoring system. And ... I may be slightly obsessive about this topic! :)

That seems true. I'm a fan of empowering users, with safeguards in place that they can disable if they opt-out and know what they are doing.

For a product like this, though, you need to make sure everyone who is ever in eye or ear-shot (or will purchase it used) are considered/informed as well.

In my book, once information is equalized, be adults, go nuts.

No, for two reasons:

1) You get no credit with customers for security features, only blame if they get hacked. You must invest in good security engineering because you believe it is a good thing and a good long term investment, it will only cost you in the short term.

2) Unfair competition from large tech and China-based companies, in terms of pricing and incumbent advantage. (And yes, I helped create this situation by selling Dropcam to Google, and profited from it)

In order to win, you'd have to make something better in every other respect (or find some yet-unknown killer feature that average customers actually care about), sell it for the same price, beat them in price wars, and spend enough on marketing to undo the PR damage they've done to the space AND rise above the noise floor.

We'll have to let god balance that out on the scales of morality when I reach the pearly gates someday.

There's a lot of good and bad that came out of Dropcam but I think it's been mostly good. Lives saved, murderers in jail, happy moments captured that would otherwise have been lost.

Plus, we had every intention of improving this aspect, and I'm even commenting unpaid on the internet to put as much pressure as I can on Google to follow through on that!

  nest created a great ux helping expand use to unsophisticated consumers

My quip about QR codes was kind of tongue-in-cheek, but any step that can be eliminated should be and there are just better ways to do it. QR codes can also fail in interesting ways, e.g. bright sunlight or cracked screens.

Most QR code based setups were just transmitting wifi credentials in plain text. That's insecure, and it doesn't solve the pairing problem, only the wifi connection. There's actually a fair bit of 2-way data that needs to be exchanged to provide the best experience. And sure, you could start streaming encrypted setup information through animated QR codes, but there's better ways to do it.

Not to mention that we're talking about Wyze cam, which has been filled with hilarious(ly scary) security flaws since day one. Be careful with those things...

Sorry, but that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem space. We entered the "IP camera" market in 2010, when all the competitor products booted a 7-year old Linux kernel with busybox and UPnP'd a port to the public internet. Admin/admin, no string escaping, buffer overflows, inadvertently indexable by Google, rooted and/or turned into botnets.

Dropcam v1.0 eliminated all of those security problems.

The only gotcha is that we required cloud storage. However, my plan for v2.0 Dropcam was to go with open-source verified builds + kill the cloud-storage requirement (but offer it optionally with e2e crypto).

If I had required that at v1, the company wouldn't exist today, and worse stuff would have taken its place. Good product engineering requires prioritization and stepwise problem-solving, not ivory tower ethics.