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ginger2016

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I bought into Bari Weiss' theory and the narrative she is making a lot of money from the substack and alternate journalism. I started consuming a lot of substack content; after a few months, I realized most of the substack content I got recommended were people ranting about social change happening in America. It is interesting to read for a few weeks. After a while, you will get tired of that narrative.

Today I saw a substack article on HN's top list from Jonathan Haidt, another guy in the same political spectrum complaining about social media and societal change.

My impression of substack is that, it is the platform of the disgruntled. Substack is a niche player, and never will be mainstream.

I didn't go to YC. My impression of YC is from news articles and hacker news. I believe that YC is good only if it helps you raise money.

Their advice is not worth it because advice is free on YouTube. Let's take PG; he often gives a lot of general and specific advice; he is a great writer and a fascinating mind. I enjoy reading his articles; they are outstanding, but they aren't any different from the many YouTubers giving advice. Unless you get personal time with YC staff, their services are not unique.

Do you need to be Peter Mckinnon’s apprentice to learn photography? No, likewise you don’t need YC.

Startup probably worked on Carmack’s request because they were afraid he will post a negative review or give negative review about the startup to his friends. A startup can’t afford to piss off a person like John Carmack, they might go out of business, because it might impact their ability to get new customers and raise capital.

Meta on other hand could care less about John Carmack’s opinion as it has no impact to their business. In short John Carmack’s opinion was ignored it had no impact for a large company.

The mistake John Carmack is making is that he thinks his views are special, they are not.

I am not a lifer, but I know many people who are lifers. I switched job too many times, my stress is more than my lifer friends. Being a lifer is not too bad, if you want peace and stability.

This opinion is offensive. India is a functioning democracy. Your claim is that the people who vote are lower caste and upper caste won’t vote hence democracy is invalid. Are you suggesting democracy is only valid if upper caste people vote?

There is another possibility, he doesn’t actually own those properties. He invested in an LLC that owns those properties. Many passive real estate investors claim they own the property.

I have a few friends who are into passive real estate investing, they claim they own an apartment complex. What they did is they gave money to a group of guys who pooled money got a loan and then bought an apartment complex under an LLC. My friends owns 0.001 percent of the LLC with no operational control of the apartment complex. My understanding they are called real-estate syndicates. It is a scam if you ask me. I don’t think most investors will get good returns on their investment.

Also big advertisers can stop spending because the people who make decisions on ad money spend ideologically disagree with Musk moderation policy. The decision makers are not robots, they have biases too.

Groups can force advertisers to leave the platform. YouTube doesn’t monetize content that is not palatable to advertisers. Similarly whole of Twitter can become unpalatable if problematic speech is not moderated.

E.g. Musk said in the past he will draw the line at legal speech. Assume that Ye (Kanye) posts his early morning rant next week, and it is critical of several groups of people based on religion or race. That speech is legal, but highly problematic, is Musk owning Twitter going to make a difference in the way Ye’s problematic speech is handled in the future, I think not.

Elon Musk wants to set the bird free. But is the bird going to be free? Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs, the pressure on Elon Musk to widen the definition of hate speech will be significant. The pressure from advertisers will force him to cave.

There will be pressure from platform owners like Apple and Google as well. If the moderation is weak Apple could decide to remove the Twitter app like they did to Parler.

Elon buying Twitter isn’t going to set the bird free, for sure it made the cage a little bigger.

I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise.

Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.

I said Figma is not worth 20 billion as a standalone company. It might be worth 20 billion to Adobe. Adobe can do to Figma what Facebook did to Instagram, Facebook took a relatively small startup Instagram and made it into a global juggernaut worth hundreds of billions in value.

Similar story with ByteDance and Musically, how many of you have used Musically before Bytedance bought it and re-branded it as TikTok.

The thing about Adobe is that their products are used by common people and professionals. I edit 10 of my personal photos a year, still I have an Adobe subscription which includes Photoshop and Lightroom.

Had Figma been part of the Adobe Suite I would have at-least downloaded it and tried it. As great as Figma is, reach of their product is limited, Adobe is giving Figma‘s technology the reach they would have never gotten as a standalone company.

I have an adobe subscription, I never heard of Figma. I am sure their product is great, but it is a niche product. Figma is not worth 20B as a standalone company. Adobe will integrate Figma’s technology into Adobe’s suite of products and will make it available to the masses. I say it is a good thing that Adobe is acquiring Figma.

Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption.

dang, Paul Graham is British; has it factored into your decision of keeping the comments deferential to the Queen.

My condolences to British people who held the Queen at high esteem. But frankly world is a bigger place than Britain and America. Not everyone from the British former colonies will appreciate the Queen. if they express the feelings about the monarchy in a respectful way; do you see an issue?