moltensodium

I have never met a startup founder that wanted to address a problem or improve the world. Instead they all want to make sure that the Series A investors are happy. Nothing else really matters besides doing whatever the investors think will make number go up.

One time I almost got involved with a person who truly wanted to improve the world, but didn't get the job.

Outside of that one person I almost met 15 years ago, literally every founder in tech I've interacted with is just trying to run the ponzi scheme and get to that exit event, consequences be damned, employees be damned, profit be damned.

Maybe there are some good people in tech, but I still haven't met them after a whole career in this industry. Just a lot of people who make number go up like they're told to.

*edit I think this comment will be very poorly received and downvoted to -100000 karma, but honestly typing it out has made me realize I just fucking hate this industry with every fiber of my being. Every new platform and channel and tool gets completely subverted by ever more intrusive and personalized advertising, and the total data surveillance ecosystem of the big tech giants ensures that they will be able to kill or consume any truly good business idea before it gets off the ground. I think I'm done. Fuck tech. Fuck computers. What a waste of a career.

Maybe this is just a generational thing, but I still have never clicked on an ad. I hate ads. I don't know anyone who likes them. I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them.

I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being. It is the garbage we all just sort of accept exposure to as some sort of fee for existing online.

Who are all these people that subverted technology and turned it into advertising-tech?

Jack's last tweet in this thread:

paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle

Ignoring the technology aspects of this for a minute: he's basically arguing directly against the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling, which I find interesting. If we're going to argue that money is too corrupting in online political advertising then it really doesn't have anything to do with being online.

This example is wrong, it should print "after fork" twice as both processes would run that.

The argument that it is simply too dangerous to provide electricity when it is hot and windy is just so bizarre. What was the point of building all that infrastructure if you built it so poorly it keeps killing people?

That's a big part of the problem right? We've stratified information access such that special elite groups get to decide what the lowly commoners are allowed to know. We know what's best for them.

In theory this would be fine if we had a rigorous and well tested process for managing dangerous information, but the whole classification system has just been subverted to just hide whatever embarrasses the rich and powerful. It's an illegitimate farce.

Yeah, outside of Lee Harvey Oswald this guy was the most important prisoner in the history of the USA. The fact that he just "suicided" in prison and we're all supposed to move on and share links about suicide awareness is utter nonsense.

If the corporate media doesn't get to the bottom of this then someone else will, it's just a matter of time. Everyone is so tired of being lied to by authority figures.

I think we have officially scraped the bottom of the barrel now on ways to increase user engagement with netflix chipmunk mode. That's it. There is no innovation left to find in the realm of increasing content consumed per day. All done here.

Let's try formulating some new goals now. What else can we create outside of trying to make this one metric increase a tiny bit next year?

Not really, by 2005 or so we all knew flash was terribly problematic and making the web much worse. Some people embraced it for sure, but in my experience most people involved with the web at this time had objections to Flash (and Adobe more widely).

The adtech industry embraced flash in a big way, youtube was defaulting to the flash player until four years ago. Plus the dozens of flash ads and trackers that were (and still are) placed into many ad networks.

Now that the adtech firms switched to building the browser and the cluster of html5 technologies have matured it's easier to track people natively. That's really the only reason flash went away.

AWS is the most true tech company out there I think, I wish there were a way for me to invest in it outside of the Amazon borg cube media conglomerate trying to fight Disney.

Ok. Just want to make sure we're all on the same page, this is about nationalism and competition, not freedom or trade. Pretending like we're opening the world up for everyone to become magical free millionaires just makes us seem naive and dishonest.

The WTO/World Bank is an arm of the US State Department.

The rules serve to further US diplomatic and corporate interests, not openness or trade.

It's ok to make fun of the guy who gets in trouble for smoking weed on private planes and whose new age nepotism hire wife fires people for having bad energy. The reason people like this exist is because nobody has been ridiculing them and saying no.

If anything we need way more people making fun of elite billionaires. Sharpen up your wit and sarcasm folks, we're gonna need it in the years ahead.

Adam seems to be the scapegoat, somewhat justified of course, but the bigger problem of this company being an obvious scam with no way to make money has not been addressed.

At this point there is a non-zero and growing chance the company collapses completely. They have no plans or research or any other projects that are expected to make money, ever, and nobody seems interested in another round of fundraising.

They will likely try to force the IPO through anyway at some sub $5B valuation, but even then it seems like they may not generate much interest after that cuckooville S1.

You just perfectly described the problem with many universities nowadays. The way to advance your career in academia is to build a shiny new building and kick off an initiative or institute or something real you can put on your resume.

We have a lot of shiny new half empty buildings in all the colleges, and a lot of very well paid "administrators" trying to get their name on some project. Tuition and fundraising demands are skyrocketing decade after decade and there is very little to show in real benefits for students or researchers.

Can you point me towards what you read on this outside of the article? Not doubting you it's just been like 500 years since I studied nuclear chem and I'm not sure what literature you're talking about.

Thanks, not showing up in search for some reason.

What company? What was built? It's a money destruction machine, not a business. They have no plans or experiments or research moonshots that they expect to be profitable, ever.

Does WeWork not have a crunchbase profile page? I'm curious about who all managed to get out before the Softbank fiasco. Were employees allowed to sell shares on the secondary market, or are they all effectively hosed now?

"Oops"

If the conventional explosives around a warhead go off in an uncontrolled manner then they are almost certainly not going to kick off a nuclear chain reaction. Things have to happen at a very specific time.

But what you're going to get is a massive plume of weapons grade plutonium flying in all directions. Depending on where this happens and the wind this could be the end of a few million people.

Bank loans are not that different from bonds, yes you are selling debt to the bank who is buying it. Debt is an asset that is bought and sold around the world just like stocks or magic cards.

Most loans are then immediately resold by your bank to some other bank, unless you're at a tiny credit union it's unlikely the bank will keep that debt asset on their books.

This guy Galloway also does a podcast with Kara Swisher called Pivot which is mandatory listening. They get silly but still shit on every bad actor in tech so it's super entertaining.

AOL's garden (and Prodigy's before that) was always packed with ads from the first version, it was one of the reasons I hated AOL and was always just trying to get a simple TCP connection so I could just browse the web instead.

I don't think AOL shipped a normal browser until later than '93, they hated the web for obvious reasons and were actively fighting against it in those early years. They had something resembling a browser you could just type AOL keywords into, but that was only for their content. I remember I had to make a phone call to get a config change for a normal TCP connection to browse the web in some versions, that's how locked down AOL was.

Not at all. It was a magical wonderland of directories, forums, and secret links you'd pass around between friends. For the first time ever you could type in an address at the top of a window and just go there. We had never seen anything like that before, everything previously was a walled off program or service that hid everything under the hood.

Pretending advertising was built in from the beginning is just dishonest. It was a shift in the contract, we all got swept up in the early ad free web and it was amazing at first.

In these early years I learned so much, there was a pirated encyclopedia which was the first thing I downloaded, followed by learning how to shave, how to speak spanish, how to do my homework, how to tie a tie. The first time I got paid as a web developer was in 1993, still more than a year before the first ads, and like five years before ads actually started appearing in significant numbers.

None of this advertising is necessary, it was all just tacked on by corporations. This is to say nothing of tracking and profiling and targeting, which is simply evil.

It's quite amusing how in a week the valuation dropped from $47B to $10B (-79%) and now it appears it may in fact be worth nothing.

Time to put an end to the ponzi schemes. We all know We is not the only company that just moves purely on bullshit.

I spent years browsing the web before it had any advertising on it at all. I remember the first ads, they were called "banners" and everyone raged out about how awful they were.

But we had no idea just how truly awful they could become, and that in fact the entire infrastructure of the internet would bend so that tracking and advertising became omniscient and pervasive. What a nightmare.

For a few years there though it kind of looked like the web was going to remain free and open forever. Back when we were all so young.

Can I just rant for 5 minutes about how the majority of the time when I pull up social media and open a trending topic or what have you, 90% of the posts are just people trying to come up with the perfect reaction gif and zinger. I often just close the page without ever knowing what happened, but just seeing the same five images trying to be forced into the same melodramatic reaction joke over and over.

No I really don't need to see the universe mind exploding guy in response to a story about some minor medical survey again. It's been done, thanks.