I know what you’re saying sounds perfectly rational to you and I do applaud you for holding the moral position separating someone’s private life from their contribution to the company. But, think about the number of people who were let go for far less controversial actions. At some point an officer of the company doing things in their personal life becomes a distraction to the company’s goals. My question is, would you act differently if this person were not a co-founder?
Skills do matter. It’s just a different type of skill. Merit doesn’t matter - but even that’s a bit arguable - if the merit is decided based on what someone is creating value for their shareholders and value is entirely defined by stock price, it seems to be working well too.
What you’re describing here results in extreme consolidation. The one or two e-commerce giants that figure it out will rule. No startup can ever sell anything online easily. Why would a customer trust a new or upcoming brand or buy anything online?
I use Claude “on the web” or Google Jules. Essentially everything happens in a sandbox - so yolo isn’t a huge risk. You can even box its network access. You review the PR at the end or steer it if it’s veering off course.
We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped after a couple of years.
To get to the level of scale that oracle can handle we had to build sharding and cluster replication from scratch. It still didn’t get to even 1/10th of a single oracle node. Obviously we made a lot of poor architecture decisions as well - in hindsight, of course.
Metal is technically more elastic than an elastic band.
With a Young’s modulus of 69 GPa for aluminum versus just 2 GPa for ABS, metal has the "memory" to snap back from significant pressure. Plastic, true to its name, is far more likely to hit its limit and stay permanently deformed. (That’s why metal bars are used to provide “flexibility” to buildings. Concrete provides the strength)
Texas, technically, generates more TWh than California. I think a data center boom followed by a bust would help a lot more than what California can do. Unlike in cars, CAs market size or regulations can’t help/hinder other fuel sources as much.
Perovskites, compounds with unique electronic properties previously confined to specialist applications, could enable neuromorphic computers that process and store data simultaneously, as human brains do. Halide perovskites can form memristors, circuit components whose electrical resistance switches between high and low states, allowing them to function as both artificial neurons and synapses in brain-like computing systems. Researchers expect to assemble prototype neuromorphic networks using perovskite-based memristors and capacitors within the next year, though commercial success remains uncertain
Distribution agreement is generally different from a sale. Distributors act as agents of the manufacturer. It’s not yet counted as a sale. Most warranties are limited to first owner and do not transfer. How do you think this squares with that? Does it mean I don’t get warranty on the dishwasher I got from Costco? It’s also the same principle of a distributor acting as an agent that enables the manufacturer to have a contract with you.
Funny you would pick this analogy. I feel like we’re back in the mainframe era. A lot of software can’t operate without an internet connection. Even if in practice they execute some of the code on your device, a lot of the data and the heavyweight processing is already happening on the server. Even basic services designed from the ground up to be distributed and local first - like email (“downloading”) - are used in this fashion - like gmail. Maps apps added offline support years after they launched and still cripple the search. Even git has GitHub sitting in the middle and most people don’t or can’t use git any other way. SaaS, Electron, …etc. have brought us back to the mainframe era.