4,252 karma · joined June 2, 2011
University used to be a signal; get in, graduate, and maybe you've got something more to you than the average person. Now, it's an anti-signal: if you actually jumped through the hoops to get in, and went into debt to indoctrinate yourself, not to mention actively harm your ability to function in the real world, then sane employers are going to forgo you.
[0]https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything/issues/...
Instead, we get kvetching and hand-wringing about "what can be done", and tittering discussions on online message boards, while society decays even further.
Just declaring "we won't censor anyone any time" is fine, but you still get all corners clamoring for their "opponent side" to be silenced. If you censor any of the typical outlets (NYTimes, CNN, Fox, Breitbart, etc), their audience will (rightfully) scream censorship but their opponents will be happy.
If you randomly cut 3rd party sites under the false guise of "you may think they're our (Twitter's) competitors" (but then reinstate it after a few days), it draws heat to Musk and Twitter, but then slowly conditions everyone to grudgingly agree that censorship is bad.
Mastodon and now Substack seem like they would fit the bill as appropriate guinea pigs for this temporary experiment.
Why on earth is Python like this? It's so frustrating coming from other languages where the dependency management plan isn't just so YOLO and free-for-all.
Obviously it was sad when Ryan had to stop, but it was important he focused on himself. Either way, still grateful for all the helpful content he put out to make us better developers.
In no particular order, some interesting flashbacks to that period of web development:
Billing with Stripe: http://railscasts.com/episodes/288-billing-with-stripe
Upgrading to Rails 4: http://railscasts.com/episodes/415-upgrading-to-rails-4
Facebook Open Graph: http://railscasts.com/episodes/363-facebook-open-graph
PayPal recurring billing: http://railscasts.com/episodes/289-paypal-recurring-billing
PDF with Prawn: http://railscasts.com/episodes/153-pdfs-with-prawn-revised
Thanks for all you did Ryan! Hope you are keeping well.
So is it rising or cooling? Can the central banks ease rate increases? Or does the WSJ just hope and pray that the Fed will stop, just please make it stop?
Again, I get that the VC-backed status doesn't allow this, but that's such an interesting distinction - this would be a successful $50mill ARR business if not VC-backed, but since it is, the panic button is pressed and that thus leads to decisions and scrambling that upend a lot of what was working.
Guess we all (as usual) need to make decisions about capital sources early and how we want to grow, as well as the real trade-offs between those choices.
A big part has been life stage changes, but also I think there's been a decline in safety in many major cities, such that I just don't want to risk the crap-shoot of an Airbnb any more. Hotels are not perfect, but it's a known product compared to Airbnb listings.
Tesla was already over-priced on any basic metric. Elon is a phenomenal operator, regardless of whether you like his tweets or not. And if you follow the media coverage of any public figure on how you're "supposed" to think about them, I would recommend taking a breather and re-evaluating to whom you give root access to your mind to.
I am happy rates have risen, and I hope they stay at a sane level more in line with historical values rather than the insane period of the past 14 years. As another commenter here points out, when rates are not-zero, business defaults back to value-creation, instead of other silly game-the-system metrics that have arisen in this time frame.
Of course it will be painful, both for a generation of younger people who have never experienced "high rates", and also for the finance "professionals" who built reputations on nothing more than gaining access to easy-money and deploying them randomly to things which only rise in value because others also pumped in easy-money down the line. It may also address some of the woke-time-wasting initiatives at companies, as anything not actually adding value will be dropped.
The main thing will be to see if the Fed actually stays the course, or if the allure of the money-printer is too seductive and they decide to drop rates back down again even after (or worse, before) inflation is tamed. If so, then the currency will continue to debase until the crypto exit is inevitable.
"There's no evidence people and tweets are being suppressed"
<Shows Evidence with receipts>
"This is old news, nothing new here."
Is there a mailing list where these things are coordinated? I remember there was JournoList in the late 2000s, so is there a new one for internet commenters of a certain political persuasion? How do they get the talking points memo?
Seriously, don't swallow cock-and-bull statements like "legal should be 10% of your revenue". I remember years ago the landlord of my co-working space glibly told me that "as long as office rent is not more than 10% of your revenue you're good" in response to me pushing back to rent hike increases. Ridiculous conmen.
This really comes across as party partisans, or party stooges, just flooding the conversation trying to massage the consensus. To people who are die-hard members of this political tribe, it's apparently impossible for them to see how vastly illiberal this situation was to regular people, and how uncomfortable it makes true political independents (never mind people on the opposite political tribe, where all it does is to further inflame their belief of being targeted unfairly all the time).
Nothing wrong at all, it's good to bootstrap an initial customer base and get some user-feedback, but until the chasm is crossed to "real" customers, one could argue that this is the same case nowadays. So the dotcom time was no better nor worse than right now in terms of startup viability.
1. You need to upload photo ID and address details that have a funky AI auto-check (which often fails) to ensure what you've entered is what is on the ID docs.
2. They mail (snail mail) you a physical postcard with a printed One-Time Token to enter into your pending seller account.
3. You need to do a video call with one of their staff members to verify your identity, which also involves the pantomime of putting your passport or other ID document next to your face in the webcam so they can "check".
Yet listing re-use, with "Ships from Amazon" and the nice Prime checkmark, for something totally fraudulent, is still trivial to do.
I used to buy everything online from Amazon, and now it's much more of a judicious process which can cause family strife - I had a huge argument about not using a generic China-sold electronic in our kitchen because I was worried about the safety mark validity.
This, like the Twitter bot problem, seems solvable, but it's strange why this doesn't appear to be a focus for them.
The only difference is that recently I've resigned myself to the fact that maybe I'll never own in my current location - which even though may be emotionally sad, at least I don't have a crazy monthly payment for a shoebox apartment.