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demadog

270 karma · joined October 29, 2019

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demadog··on Tesla rival BYD launches five-minute battery in $30k model
This is huge. The 20-30 minute charge is very clearly a bottleneck, despite owners saying its a good opportunity to go into Target and do some shopping.
demadog··on AI 2027
RadPod - what models do you use to power it?
demadog··on Flyflow (YC S24) Is Sunsetting
After over a year of building Flyflow alongside you, we've decided to sunset the product. The team is joining forces with a larger company to build something new (more to come!). Talking to our customers has consistently been the most inspiring part of my day; thank you for that.
demadog··on Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone
Yep - they self-censor themselves according to China's whims, just so they can have China access now only to be banned by the great firewall 1 year from now after Chines startups scrape all their image outputs for training.
demadog··on Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone
The only restrictions they have are that you can't imagine President Xi, nor can you mention anything PG-13 like bathing suits.
demadog··on Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
I predict his character arch will be similar to Adam Neumann and Travis Kalanick - first the media gushes over him and praises him as a genius. Then the media starts to question him. Then they start to fully dig in and dig up a ton of dirt.

With no mainstream outlet pushing forth the allegations his sister is claiming on social, I imagine right now they are looking under every rock on that end.

I respect his hustle but there is something about him in watching him speak live and in person that comes off as incredibly manipulative. He knows how to speak and pause in a way that gets the audience to laugh and gives soundbites. I am long OpenAI but I don’t trust Sam.

He could follow the character arch of his friend Thiel where the media come after him but he’s too resilient.

Or Zuckerberg where the media hated him for years and then moved on.

What do you think?

demadog··on Netflix loses 970k subscribers, says ads and new fees are key to recovery
You’re not the 80%+ of consumers that eat up the cheap stuff and love it.
demadog··on Why the United States spends so much but gets so little public transit
European cities were built a thousand years ago to be dense by default because that was the technology.

The US is very young and not dense, save for a few downtown clusters.

There is definitely a lot that can be done, but it really comes down to user demand. People actually prefer cars if it’s the viable option. But depends on distance, timing, distance, and goals.

We shall see how ridership shifts in Los Angeles - probably the greatest live experiment in trying to force habit change currently in progress. Anyone here have inside baseball numbers on the habit changes in LA?

demadog··on Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
I was a kid in the 90s and I still try to do as little trips as possible.
demadog··on Foster care is evolving by relying on children’s kin
No doubt an emotionally charged and complicated system, but surprised it’s taken this long to realize what most would see as obvious.

Nevertheless happy that’s it’s trending in the right direction.

Pretty shocking at the end it mentions Gray fostered 41 children and 7 grandchildren…

demadog··on Solar-powered desalination device wins MIT $100K competition
$100k? Most SV engineers could self-fund that. Why not make it $1m+?
demadog··on 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm
Amazon Turk is more of a platform for small business to hire other workers for micro-tasks. Raterlabs is used only by Google to improve their core product.
demadog··on Is there a good “blog search” out there?
Partially but no, it’s comparatively pretty bad after playing with it a lot.

It seems to be based on a much older and more literal algorithm where it buries a relevant post on page 3 just because the keyword was not perfectly in the title.

Probably intentional or they just don’t prioritize since a small % of people use it.

Better to use “site:” search for your fav blogs instead.

demadog··on 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm
When those reports come out that “The average Google employee makes $220k a year” or whatever, it’s totally misleading since it doesn’t account for all the outsourced labor at $10 an hour that is critical to tuning their algorithms.
demadog··on Is there a good “blog search” out there?
The only thing I’ve figured out that works is building a Google Custom Search Engine with your favorite list of 50-100 blogs but it’s far from perfect and doesn’t help with new discovery.
demadog··on Opinion: Another species of hominin may still be alive
Georges Lemaître - father of the Big Bang theory and Catholic priest.

Gregor Johann Mendel - father of modern genetics and Catholic friar.

demadog··on Google “hijacked millions of customers and orders” from restaurants – lawsuit
> Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.

Do you mean for restaurant results specifically or all Google Search results? Big difference if both.

demadog··on A Simple to Follow 6 Month SEO Plan
Disagree - it is kind of a thing, but truly really depends on what you’re trying to rank for.

EAT is great, but not always the differentiator in weaker SERPSs. Health, finance, loans, etc yes for sure.

Niche and nuanced or low competition areas, not really.

As the end of the day, rise 10% above the top in your industry to rank well.

demadog··on Twitter Banned in Russia
I might get downvoted for restating this, but for all its faults and headlines in recent years, America truly is built on laissez-faire principles so it’s unlikely to happen.

Proof is the extent to which Alex Jones types of figures have yet to be totally banned by the government, just deplatformed by private social networks.

That being said the conversation about Tik Tok and Chinese ownerships and servers did seem to get close to this.

demadog··on Ask HN: Should I give up and get a job?
If you were to take what you’re doing now and make it very simple but very broad, what could it be?

Example: Airtable is a database anyone can use.

Cloudflare protects any website from ddos.

Yotpo is a reviews plugin for Shopify.

If you were to make your thing very consumerized, or prosumer B2B what is it?

demadog··on Ask HN: Should I give up and get a job?
Yes this is the way - networks get really powerful in the mid career years (35-50)
demadog··on Ask HN: Should I give up and get a job?
Or just be scatterbrained and entrepreneurial and dumb like me where you have to force yourself to learn it all one piece at a time!
demadog··on Ask HN: Should I give up and get a job?
Could you do this 20 times as a custom services consultant and then identify the most important and valuable ask from your clients and then productize that as software?

Take on 4 clients in parallel with 3 month contracts and you’ll have 16 done in a year.

If you can’t sell it as a custom service it would be a hard sell as a piece of software right?

demadog··on Psychological Operations
I’m surprised the army literally calls it PsyOp rather than trying to disguise it as something more mild like “Communications Specialists”.

Is there a reason for this?

In my mind it would be to attract better talent that actually wants to do PsyOps rather than Communications, so it’s a good filter to attract smart people that want to do spy-like work.

demadog··on What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
Do you mean purely for economic reasons or a whole array of reasons and the economics are a part of it?

Securing oil fields and the Persian Gulf is more than money and oil, it’s about securing trade via maritime traffic in the gulf for liberal capitalist democracies worldwide.

And keeping oil access secure is about pure security but also keeping prices low to not disrupt economies.

At least that’s how I understand it.

demadog··on What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
In addition, how much were the Iraq and Afghanistan wars about projecting power to Iran? Look on the map and they’re being contained on both sides.

Projects the power that the military will show up.

demadog··on What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
I have this sad, but likely true, theory that the U.S. needs to always be involved in a war to stay in practice and iron out the kinks for bigger wars.

I say this as a medium-big supporter of the US military.

demadog··on Visa, Mastercard block Russian financial institutions after sanctions
That’s the equivalent of me giving $2
demadog··on The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
Ideas that will make their startup better that are realistic, highly likely they are considering:

- 50 drones not one - make sure they don’t run into each other - drones of different sizes and speeds - watch out for power lines - watch out for birds - don’t run into planes - don’t ruin the scenery for hikers by always being aloft - make sure they are charged - use as first line of defense before the humans come - make sure they can’t be hacked

demadog··on Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?
They already do this, they have 10,000 quality raters doing this manual work.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-eat/quality-rater...

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en

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