mikedouglas

He explains earlier in the article that he tries to apply a “consumer” lens to all tech purchases, so he can more honestly evaluate them.

The point being that he’s applying a bunch higher bar than someone with his interests and net worth would otherwise apply.

This is likely impression expansion from Reels. Same thing happened when Stories was introduced.

At this point, I'd flip whatever mental models you have for how 2010-era Microsoft and Google operate.

No, because the FDIC would collect higher fees commensurate with the increase in insured deposits. It would reduce profits for banks like SVB which have a large number of uninsured deposits and were able to take advantage of a "fed put".

It's overwrought takes like this that fail to see the real issues at play. Many of those projects were all good faith efforts and I haven't seen a shred of evidence that a16z was mass dumping tokens (most articles confuse a16z's first crypto fund, which did well, with the funds that were deployed in 2020/2021).

With all that said, a16z (and other top VC firms) are at or near the top in the list responsible for inflating the crypto bubble.

1. They weren't aligned with their LPs. The economics fundamentally changed for them as their funds 10x'd in size and they started bringing in $100M+ in management fees. They should have been asking themselves if they could responsibly invest anywhere near this amount in a crypto market with very few real users, but they decided to cash the checks instead.

2. They used social media to promote these tokens to retail and lobbied to reduce barriers for more retail investment. They were more than happy to sign off on plans for their portfolio companies to sell what were basically securities in seed companies to retail investors at orders of magnitude inflated prices. Then, they used their own Twitter accounts and podcast appearances to play up a potemkin digital revolution and raise their next fund, all while retail investors took a bath.

3. Due diligence was universally awful. They might have avoided most of the worst frauds, but plenty of investments were in unsustainable mechanisms where the collapse could have easily have been predicted.

From another Silicon Valley veteran: this was a horizontal team that lost its exec sponsor and so didn't have a clear way to make impact. This kind of thing happens all the time at companies and panicking is uncalled for.

This theoretically should be possible with MVCC, right? It's not an area I've explored and I could immediately see some issues with resource clean-up, but I could imagine it being possible with most modern DBs.

I've heard Google uses design docs pretty extensively for internal projects. Does anyone have a publicly shared example?

Related: Stripe has previously announced they were restarting their crypto team https://twitter.com/edwinwee/status/1447953485132025857

IAP is a platform-enforced monopoly that allows Apple and Google to extract a flat 30% from every digital transaction that happens in an app. It's one of the clearest examples of the deadweight loss from monopolies, as businesses that would otherwise exist but have higher marginal costs can't offer products that consumers would otherwise benefit from.

https://twitter.com/jasminericegirl/status/14026910479401001...

Full text of the bill: https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/8.11.21%20-%...

Who has a mortgage without interest payments?

I think it's more complicated than that. It's not clear that users do intrinsically own this data. Without the product and the graph attached to the product, this data won't exist.

Solve for the equilibrium. Market salaries at the top hubs will eventually go down, and salaries outside them will rise.

Brex differentiated itself by using your bank history to determine your credit limit, meaning that founders didn't need to personally guarantee their corporate cards early on in a company's life. It seems like Stripe is doing something similar.

Placements at the university aren't the property of the individual being paid, so it's illegal in the same way that embezzling funds or stealing trade secrets would be.

Augur hasn't really seen any uptick in usage: https://dappradar.com/app/673/augur

Specifically the section on "funding secured". Any reasonable person would interpret that as Musk having a term sheet in hand. This sounds more like "funding potentially interested".

They work really well thanks to the invention of the spark plug, the carburetor, the supercharger, and decades of iteration. For many years, they were objectively terrible.

Ethereum is three years old. ICE is 200+.

Funny that you mention the 19th century, because another example of a system that required an ever-increasing series of hacks to solve major flaws is the internal combustion engine. Whether the problem that Ethereum solves is anywhere near as valuable as the problems solved by ICE remains to be seen, but this just seems like the engineering process to me, especially for a young technology.

There’s a housing crisis and employees are affected. If they want more people to work at Menlo Park, they need to address it.

Simplification is a red herring (notice how corporate state taxes are still deductible). Republicans needed a pay-for for reducing corporate/passthrough taxes and eliminating the estate tax. It just so happens that high wage earners in high tax states tend to be Democrats.

Due process is a legal concept, and fundamentally, a restriction on the state (for very good reasons). I think it's fine for commenters on an internet board to use P(crime was committed|shady trading patterns) > 0.5.

How? There's a $3000 cap on THL against regular income and capital gains is only taxed at 15%. $1M in realized capital gains is a pretty extraordinary circumstance.

If your hypothesis was correct, shouldn't these lily-white small towns in Pennsylvania and West Virginia be paragons of social connectedness and happiness, instead of the epicenter of the opioid epidemic?

The problem with jumping to the conclusion that "multiculturalism is bad" is that it seeds the idea that people who don't lookalike can't peacefully co-exist. Personally, I feel a far greater sense of community here in Silicon Valley than I did in the homogenous suburb I grew up in.

Are you located in North America? I really doubt Facebook would've rolled out any Super Bowl-specific features to Europe/Asia/Africa/South America.

It's not a viable way to look at investing in ad companies. Advertising has historically been zero-sum (about 2% of the economy), and there's huge returns to scale (more data, bigger advertisers, etc). Unless your inventory is unique (which it isn't), you need reach (which is why TV is/was such a great platform). Look at Twitter, which is having a extremely difficult time w/ ads because of that lack of scale.

In ads, you want to be GOOG/FB, not TWTR.

The load issues were prior to (and sparked) the switch to MLBAM.

From the link: "In the late 1990s I paid $11,000US each for several round trips."

That's about $16k when accounting for inflation, so $20k isn't too far off.

"No, don't you see? This is all about ethics in game journalism."