moltensodium's comments

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.