jdross

Instagram Reels? Your measure of “innovation” is just not how large companies succeed. They are specialized at optimization, and take seeds of things and water them. Instagram had 0 revenue and like 13 employees when acquired. WhatsApp had 50 employees, no encryption, etc

Socialist Russia was an environmental disaster. https://www.gchumanrights.org/preparedness/the-environmental...

we regularly depose those with political power. In elections.

And the wealthy die or stop participating within around 30 yrs of becoming wealthy normally. And compete themselves across idiology. Soros, Koch, Musk and Moskowitz all have very different packages of political beliefs they advocate vs each other

The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.

The whole post is premised on a fixed pie economy.

"The financial model underneath requires the elimination of human cost centers at civilizational scale."

No, it is not. It requires humans to collectively want more things if they are offered and available at a lower cost. Which then requires more humans to fill in the blanks to provide those things. We've been doing this since the industrial revolution.

"certainly" is doing a lot of work here. I'm not "certain".

In fact the people I have spoken to who have worked on Palantir platform were deeply suspicious of their users treating data with respect, and so built security and immutable auditability as foundational tech.

Flame of the West? Seems like a pretty apropos name for an American defense company

They have over 300 falcon 9 launches in a row now, just in case you’re not caught up on the latest

I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there

It was 1T post merger with xAI being 250B of it, SpaceX being 750B

I'm pretty sure this is the school that was on the corner of a military base, and the school building hit was previously part of the military base.

“I’m going to either steal your work in a way you don’t consent to, or not consume it” isn’t really great. The alternative is paywalls

The steelman is that this issue is politically loaded, and there is not yet proven public evidence for the most explosive version of the claim. That makes it an easy target for partisan amplification, especially because it maps perfectly onto an existing fear people were already primed for. It is emotionally potent by design.

The opposite of this has been my experience.

HN comments bias far more negative towards technology, tech companies, and current politics than the people I know in real life. People who mostly don’t work as professional software engineers, at least not anymore. And the (employed) engineers I know are all having a lot of fun too.

We usually just call this collective extraction “taxes”

“While the pouches are considered a tobacco product, they don’t contain any tobacco, and are instead made from the plant fiber cellulose”

It’s just Zyn, which doesn’t seem that dramatically different than coffee. But maybe that’s because I don’t drink coffee or use nicotine

As you know, this is a subjective take. (I enjoy my experience there more now, for example, with less social politics in my feed.)

And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then.

https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...

Would nuclear energy research be a good analogy then? Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons. So we got the weapons but not the humanity saving parts (infinite clean energy)

I’m married to a Brit and she is constantly in awe of how much better our healthcare is here in the US. And she paid for private insurance there too.

Quality of facilities, low wait times, quality of staff interactions, organization, etc.

She even freaks out about how we have free parking at our doctors and hospitals here!

We’re on corporate insurance.

I think the consensus is the biggest danger of a nuclear weapon being used is that it will result in way more nuclear weapons being used.

The specific damage of a single nuclear weapon is far outweighed by thousands of them hitting population centers in an escalation of force

Is there a single private sector more removed from market incentives than healthcare?

I'm not saying we shouldn't have an IRS, and I think IRS agents are probably one of the best ROI gov't employees possible, but 8,500 IT engineers and managers (who I have heard literally didn't even know how to code) makes no sense at all

Do you know how many people 8,500 employees in IT alone is? Google, all of it, has 60,000 engineers

IRS direct file is just not that complex, I promise you, and are you sure it was even built in house vs contracted?

8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane.

They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work

Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization

I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet

The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…)

Skilled labor still has some legs.

The set of people who believe the automobile (or the Internet) are net negatives taken as a whole for society is extremely small, for good reason

Well you could not sue the video-editing software for someone making child pornography with it. You would, quite sanely, go after the pedophiles themselves.

Including Cybertruck, it's just 2.75% of sales

Q4 sales: Model 3 & Model Y: 406,585 deliveries All Other Models (S/X/Cybertruck): 11,642 deliveries