nugget

The Navy has conducted some extremely consequential wiretaps. A fantastic book about the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...

Have you considered pursuing them in small claims court?

I’d say brain drain is the root problem. It’s hard to build a competitive ecosystem when the most ambitious and skilled people move away. From Europe, they move to the US. From within the US, they move to one of a few cities, most notably San Francisco.

In my experience as a founder, excitement to work in a particular area is way more important than experience/skills. Ideally you have both. But lack of enthusiasm for a product, especially a niche product, kills a culture.

I’m pretty sure the opioid epidemic is the leading cause of death in the US. Enormous numbers of Americans are dying from fentanyl and other poisons, but the media doesn’t like to cover it and the Government doesn’t like to talk about it.

Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.

As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.

They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.

Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an opening to eventually rival them).

The Unity CEO and management team seem actively hostile to game developers. They view them more as adversaries than allies. Their first principle may be something like "How can we extract more revenue from our developers?" rather than "How can we make developers more successful on our platform [such that we all enjoy more success]?". I think that cultural value is the root of a lot of these tactical problems and missteps.

Most of the talent from IronSource has left or checked out, and they started to slip in competitiveness and lose clients as a result. This pricing model seems designed to slow those losses, but if it increases developer adoption of Godot or another rival platform (other than Unreal), it seems like Unity is playing with fire here.

For point #1, it's the exit price that matters. Whether the exit takes the form of an acquisition or an IPO, is incidental. I've done both multiple times. Acquisitions tend to be faster, cleaner, and easier exits. IPOs are tough, and once public, you're often locked up.

The E(V) at larger companies is awesome by comparison.

It's not just comp that's variable, but experience too. Fast-growing startups offer career opportunities that you'd rarely see at FANG. Even if your goal is to simply minimize risk and maximize upside, the optimal path is probably something like bouncing back and forth between FANG for the cash comp and fast-growing startups for the career acceleration.

Not to mention the type of people who thrive at early stage startups typically can't stand FANG environments, and vice versa.

As a young teenager learning to code in the mid/late 90s I distinctly remember two influential movies: Office Space and Hackers. It wasn’t until the dot com boom that I realized you could have a lot of fun and stay out of prison.

If SES is the worst, who is the best? By implication, simply the most expensive providers?

I'm a casual daily/weekly user of reddit but rarely post and have never been a moderator. I only access the website via my desktop or mobile browser. I don't care about API prices per se.

However: this whole episode has left me with the impression that Reddit is a company hostile to its own users - that they don't care about putting users and user experience first. That makes me consciously want to cut down my usage and explore alternatives, because I trust the brand less than I did before.

Toolbar, Chrome, other software partnerships and many enterprise search deals besides Firefox and Safari.

Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution. Sundar became a rising star and ultimately CEO of Google because he directly managed more paid distribution and user acquisition for Google search than anyone else. Not a coincidence. Google promotes the narrative that they organically grew to dominate the search market when in fact they spent many billions of dollars on user acquisition (while also, for most of that time, having the best product).

There are privacy "promises" and then there are privacy laws like CCPA in California which companies are supposed to comply with. CCPA requires data brokers and large tech companies to maintain at least two channels by which users (including users who have no account / nothing to do with the company) can submit basic privacy requests like right to know and right to delete.

I searched for a couple hours last week and couldn't find a single way to submit a CCPA request to Google.

If anyone has the links, I'd love to be proven wrong here, but the sense I came away with is that Google is somewhat hostile towards real, accessible user privacy.

Demographics are destiny. America can probably attract and assimilate enough immigrants to be OK. That has always been and continues to be America’s superpower. As global birth rates continue to plummet, most of the rest of the world seems headed for a hard landing.

I'm surprised the malware origins weren't scrutinized more in the press when the deal was announced. Ultimately it seems like the Unity CEO was trying to buy his way to profitability, without realizing that the two companies were a total culture clash.

Once you’re hooked on Google or Bing search ads for revenue, they can control everything you are allowed to do within a product via compliance requirements. It’s a clever and effective form of regulatory capture.

The search index is relatively easy, the ad marketplace is hard. DDG is likely hooked on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Bing revenue which is a tough habit to kick.

“They say sufferings are misfortunes, but if I was asked whether I would stay as I was before I was taken prisoner, Or go through it all again, I would say, "For God's sake, let me be a prisoner again”. For me, when our lives are knocked off course, we imagine everything in them is lost. But it is only the start of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal. A great deal still to come.”

- Tolstoy in War and Peace

Watch the exchange between Sen Lankford and Sec Yellen yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcvl104tyRY

Yellen says unsecured depositors at TBTF banks will always be bailed out, but those at smaller banks are on their own. It's one of the most incredible moments I've witnessed. I'm not sure if there's some hidden agenda being pursued, or if Yellen is just so far removed from the real world that she doesn't understand the consequences of her statement.

I'm not sure why any company or individual would hold >$250k at a non-TBTF bank after this. It borders on financial malpractice.

The short answer would be because the SVB brand is essentially owned by the bank's unsecured depositors at this point. You have to balance their recovery against the moral hazards of too earnestly sweeping failure under the rug.

They didn't act fast enough to save any of the SVB brand value which is now probably negative. I look forward to the SVB employee Halloween costumes reminiscent of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

I heard from a well-placed source that over 50% of SVB's balance sheet has already been liquidated by the FDIC. This matches up with what Bill Ackman tweeted. We'll find out early next week.

Based on internal data I have from similar companies my guess would be the first 50 employees average about $15-20m each and the next 100 average about $5-10m each just from their initial 4 year grants, with a lot of variation based on team and seniority. Stripe options have probably grown about 100x in value since the Series B so if you were an engineer who joined around that time, received $100k in RSUs, and left upon fully vesting then you'd be looking at around $10m in value today.

I don't view the move to opt-in as a meaningful one because it's trivial to content-lock certain features to the point where the vast majority of users will opt-in even if they don't understand what is going on. At that point, the company collecting the data is in an even stronger position.

The solution is to allow the user to easily and in real-time access and control (port, delete) all of their data or data about them that a company holds.

If you're interested in advancing more effective privacy legislation (or just curious in general about what's going on out there), drop me an email and I can loop you into some interesting (and real-world-productive, not academic or theoretical) discussions with folks at the forefront of the effort.

As a rule, if law enforcement has a warrant then it's going to be difficult to prevent them from gaining access. You can self-host and encrypt but that's difficult for mainstream users to do, and even for experts, it limits the tools you have access to. You can also be prosecuted for refusal to decrypt a device since SCOTUS hasn't yet ruled on the scope of the 5th amendment's protections with respect to encrypted personal devices.

I think the best solution is to set content to auto-delete (unless flagged) after some period of time. You can't turn over what you don't have.

This is not as true as it used to be, at least in certain states.

Under CCPA/CPRA in California, you can request that personal information is removed. There are half a dozen other laws around the US that allow for similar requests in different forms.

Enforcement is still hit or miss. Lobbyists are starting to fight back against the most effective laws, for example:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion...

I'm involved in the fight to strengthen and expand these laws, and overall I'm hopeful for the future.

For me, carbohydrate consumption and appetite are massively correlated.

When I reduce carbs below 30g/day, my appetite is naturally suppressed (or avoids over-stimulation). Food feels much less addictive. It's easier not to snack in the face of stress. Keto probably added 10+ years on to my life expectancy.

YMMV.