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loeber

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A plea for Silicon Valley to enter politics

loeber.substack.com
10 points·by loeber·6 mesi fa·11 comments

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loeber
·8 giorni fa·discuss
I have zero dollar exposure to $PLTR.

And no, you're moving the goalposts again. My comment is strictly about Nazis, not "nazi or fascist". If you can't even keep this straight, then my time is wasted on you.
loeber
·9 giorni fa·discuss
You're moving the goalposts. The original poster wrote that Palantir is on par with the Nazis. (Typos notwithstanding.) That's what I'm responding to.

And yes, it is offensive and trivializing to the millions that were murdered to suggest that that their murderers were on the same moral footing as a modern government software consultancy. (The views that you read into some of their executives are, in fact, not equivalent to actions such as exterminating millions of people.)
loeber
·9 giorni fa·discuss
You're out of your mind -- and politically radicalized -- if you think that Palantir is on part with the Nazis. And this kind of facile comparison is offensively trivializing those who died in the holocaust.
loeber
·9 giorni fa·discuss
Replying:

1. It's not about technological development as an absolute metric, but as a relative metric. The current AI race is a winner-take-most game. Google must compete and shoot to become a $10T+ company or effectively go under. Those are the choices. I think the OP is naive about the middle ground.

2. I object to the OP's 2000s-era popular moral handwringing over America's military. America's military is a force for good in the world. You might think it's not perfect -- sure -- but you should seriously imagine a world without it: I think you'll like that one a lot less. Consider that the OP in this blog post might be wrong about his ethical position.
loeber
·9 giorni fa·discuss
[flagged]
loeber
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Downvoted. Stripe Atlas is a massively successful service that handles 100K+ incorporations annually. It's a key piece of Stripe's ecosystem support. You writing that you're "not sure who it's for" suggests to me that maybe you're out of your depth here as a general matter.
loeber
·2 mesi fa·discuss
This is totally false, sorry. Delaware entities are the standard. Delaware corporate law is better understood than any other by a long shot. Dealing with a random non-Delaware LLC is usually a hint that your counterparty is a rube.
loeber
·3 mesi fa·discuss
I wrote an article a few months ago about how I expect open-source development to shift toward people no longer contributing code, but just contributing money, for the maintainers to purchase tokens to have AI ship a given feature request.

It wasn't popular but I think it will hold: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-t...
loeber
·3 mesi fa·discuss
Unified charging cable: what if the standard had been set much earlier? For example, in 2008? We'd all be on Micro-USB, far inferior to USB-C. Right now USB-C feels great, but do you really think this is the end-all, be-all? I think the cost of this mandatory standardization will become apparent a few years from now.
loeber
·3 mesi fa·discuss
> if you were not selling all that visitor information to anyone

Do you understand how rare it is for a company to actually sell its user data?
loeber
·3 mesi fa·discuss
Say that to the people who can't afford them!
loeber
·3 mesi fa·discuss
I worry that this ends up, like other EU consumer-protection regulation, as an own goal.

- The cheapest phones available in the EU (and purchasable online) all have glued-in batteries, not swappable ones. Forcing consumers to use phones with swappable batteries may just mean that the bottom of the market disappears, and consumers will be left paying more for their phones. And would they rather pay less or have swappable batteries?

- This will cause some cascade of engineering changes, which will make phones thicker or less waterproof. Again, it's not clear to me that the tradeoff is being fairly reflected here.
loeber
·3 mesi fa·discuss
Same!
loeber
·3 mesi fa·discuss
It's because we went from the Desktop environment, where rules were well-documented and standardized, to the Web/Mobile environment, where rules had to be reinvented and, for the most part, were not.

We've lost design idioms, which is a huge tax on users everywhere. I've been mad about this for years: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-desig...
loeber
·4 mesi fa·discuss
If your deathbed is at the hands of an adversary that beat you because you didn't have any weapons, do you think your views might change?
loeber
·4 mesi fa·discuss
I previously tried buying Apple for Business and it was an endless runaround with terrible signup nterfaces and having to call dumb flunkies. The whole process sucked and was disrespectful to their business customers, who do not have the time to deal with such nonsense.
loeber
·4 mesi fa·discuss
Can you provide credible examples of each of these?
loeber
·4 mesi fa·discuss
This stuff strikes me as misguided. Britain's Ofcom is sending censorship/deanonymization requests around the world, Germany prosecutes thousands of its citizens every year for "offensive" things said online... and you think Europe is a bastion of free speech or privacy? You might find that you have greater rights on US soil.
loeber
·4 mesi fa·discuss
Interestingly, this suggests that the Lean Startup methodology is basically a suboptimal strategy that produces acceptable outcomes only in the most fruitful circumstances. You can start a Lean Startup that makes a little bit of money, but if you'd really bet big and put your back into it, you would've done 1000x better.
loeber
·4 mesi fa·discuss
[flagged]