I presumed it was a reference to employees of Facebook/Google/etc? I.e. some of the most talented engineers aspire to work for companies whose purpose is to become the dominant ad distribution network.
950 karma · joined November 6, 2013
Current project: https://nachapp.com
You're right that the system is no way foolproof, I do think it's an improvement over the current situation though, and a step towards more accountability.
It's really just based on trust - like how many people now distrust Facebook over privacy issues (even though Facebook never really promised anything). If a founder were to commit to these pledges, then go and break them, they could probably expect a similar type of distrust in their future ventures.
Alternatively, the pledges can all be used individually, so you could use some of the others without a commitment to long-term support. That's a stamp of "We're not exactly sure how sustainable this idea is yet, but we have ethical standards so we'd prefer to let the company fold than to screw you over (privacy/selling data/quietly raising subscription fees etc) to try and reach profitability".
In both those cases, it would make me feel more confident as a user signing up (especially if they're an app for managing some private/personal part of my life).
Yeah, it makes an exit more difficult. Of course if you make no promises to your users, you can make more money because you're free to sell to the highest bidder, no matter what their intentions. But that's kind of the point of these pledges - as a founder it's saying "I care more about maintaining certain values for my users than making myself rich through the first acquisition offer than comes my way". I'm sure there are founders that think that way, even if they're in the minority - that's really who I'm trying to reach.
EDIT: Also, what I've got in the draft is a clause for each pledge about the correct procedure for retracting the commitment (properly informing users and giving them time to act), so if an acquirer really wanted to go back on the pledges they could - but, rightfully so, they may lose some customers who felt strongly about those values.
There's no fundamental reason a 2 year old phone should be seen as ancient. Hardware can last many times longer than that, and software can be updated. Google is just not making the effort to support its older devices.
For people like me who don't want to buy a new phone every 18 months (both a wasteful use of my money, and the earth's natural resources), Android is looking like a pretty bad choice.
Don't think I've ever owned anything with such a serious planned obscolence issue. Windows supports its OS releases for 12 years (and doesn't lock you in, so you can usually follow official upgrade procedure anyway). And anything "dumber" than a smartphone doesn't really open itself up to these gaping security flaws, so still operates fine after many years.
What is there to show that "this same story holds for any vitamin or mineral"?! Surely there are many which have no positive effect on the body, where zero would be the best dosage. What law of biology suggests that every mineral is in some way beneficial to the human body?
Lithium happens to have an effect on moods in the brain in such a way that suicide is less likely - but the mood dampening effects may well diminish people's positive emotions too (for example). For someone with no mental health issues or risk of suicide, this could well be an overall negative effect, and therefore makes no sense to force on the entire population.
As to why that is relevant to microdosing...
- High doses: major mood suppression -> practically no chance of suicide
- Micro doses: (?) -> lower chance of suicide
Simple reasoning would suggest that (?) == some degree of mood suppression. I'm not sure how you've concluded that this "could not occur" with lower doses?
Putting it in salt is hardly better than putting it in the water supply, it's still systematic mass "medication" which would become difficult to avoid.
I'd imagine there are many, more complex, factors involved in brain chemistry / mood suppression, so it would be a lot more difficult to determine where this middle lies.
If you're using high suicide rates to suggest we're not in the middle and need more lithium in everyone's water, I'd have to disagree. In the vast majority of cases, a better healthcare system which ensures those who need it are connected with mental health professionals would help nip the problem in the bud. Rather than solving it with these lithium microdoses, causing to those on the verge of suicide to not have the lucidity of emotion to commit to the act, and the rest of the population having their brain chemistry played with too.
It would be one thing if micro-doses of lithium were sold as a supplement, which individuals can opt to take. But the article goes as far as to suggest adding it to drinking water -- it seems very irresponsible in my eyes to leave it to the government to decide "how docile" the population should be above the natural level / what trade-off with suicide rate is acceptable.
There are better ways to deal with the problem of suicide than pushing society slightly closer to the "souless robot" end of the spectrum.
Personal goal-setting / task management platform which is more in-depth and feautre rich than the typical to-do list app. Unlimited hierarchies, analytics, email/SMS reminders, etc.
Would love some feedback, and happy to answer any questions.
Hulu is an example which mixes both approaches - clearly an $8/mo premium subscription isn't enough to support their business model, so it has to be supplemented with ads. Not sure why this needs explaining. TV is obviously an industry very tightly coupled with ads, making it more difficult to disrupt with a fully ad-free approach.
The project I subsequently started operates on a very simple $5/mo pausable subscription with a 30-day free trial. I'm _much_ happier with this model than anything I've ever worked on which is ad-based - it feels like a completely fair and fulfilling exchange of value.
I, too, feel like if the web was free from advertising, and instead was home to services supported by paying customers and/or donations, it would be a much better place and have far-reaching benefits. This is something I genuinely want to make a difference on, so feel free to get in touch if you want to see if we can combine our efforts in some way (contact details in profile).
Are you suggesting that the only motivation to start a business is to "make millions and keep millions"? What about:
- Making the world a better place
- Improving the lives of others
- The personal satisfaction of building things and solving difficult problems
These are all motivators to do something which creates "economic value".
Yes, good point - it's just a single contact form at the moment, probably time for an upgrade.
Re caring about making a great product, that's alright haha. I used to be a money chasing developer, but I had a bit of an epiphany, and realised that trying to help others improve their lives means a lot more to me than spending my life acquiring and hoarding possessions and wealth!
Could I ask why you'd have hoped for open source? If it's any consolation, I'm making the API completely open, and I'd have no problem with custom clients. In fact, I may even consider open-sourcing the default web-app client. But as for running it as a SaaS rather than distributing the whole thing as open source, I feel like the whole project will have a brighter future if it's set up in a sustainable way like this, and subscription fees can be invested back into the product, towards marketing, development, scaling etc.
In particular this week, I've been working on solidifying the quantification side of the app (see the first two screenshots) - i.e. making day-to-day productivity (and lack of productivity!) towards big goals something that's measurable and the user can be held accountable for as they look back over past performance.
I've added more of an explanation to the imgur captions.
The site's currently in a launched-but-heavy-iterating stage at https://nachapp.com
It isn't trying to completely replicate the storage of everything you have in the apps you listed. Instead, it's trying to focus your attention to what your real goals in life are, so you hopefully end up with quite a minimalist approach, where you're discarding a lot of info that's essentially a distraction, and really able to focus on only saving the stuff which is relevant to your goals, and keeping a hierarchical list of actionables as your method of recall for the content, instead of it being scattered randomly across a dozen apps.
If this sounds like an attractive solution to you, would be great to talk about this a bit more (you can reach me through the site's contact form), because I want to work out ways to make the app smarter for covering that exact workflow you're talking about (discovery -> actionables).
Note that the app may look pretty "simple" from the landing page, but it is also very much aimed at power-users (I personally have a couple of hundred active steps+goals).
Virtual reality has a low enough barrier to entry that the kickstarter and existing investments had already solved that problem. And as far as I'm aware, VR are some of the highest aspirations held by the Oculus team, take this recent quote from Palmer Luckey for example:
> "I’m obsessed with VR. I spend every day pushing further, and every night dreaming of where we are going. Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined we’d come so far so fast."
So I personally see the comparison with SpaceX/Tesla as a fairer comparison than Musk's first two businesses.