twblalock

PR exists because honesty and frankness are punished in our society and people will jump at any opportunity to prosecute or sue. The result is PR fluff, endless disclaimers, and announcements with as little detail of the internal workings of a decision as possible which need to pass through review by legal and finance teams.

But we all know that, right? We don't need to pretend like we don't, or act like we are offended by it, as if it's the first press release we've ever seen.

The company with the best track record of maintaining backwards compatibility in the entire tech industry owns Github. I'm not worried about that.

The press release also contains actual information that is relevant -- in this case, that free teams is not being sunset.

The reflexive complaints about press releases don't have that value.

It's incredibly tiresome that the first post on HN whenever a company does a press release is going to be from someone who will never be happy no matter what was said.

"What does take responsibility mean?" "This is just PR fluff". "They are just saving face." Criticism of good things because the poster didn't like the motivation. Stuff like that.

Did you really think the company was going to bare their soul to you like you were their psychiatrist or their priest? Do you think you are even entitled to that?

Commenting about whether or not this is a good decision is valuable. Complaining about the content of PR fluff is not.

A few years ago the NYT editorial board argued that inflation was going to be transitory because "it's not the 1970s." It was a smug, dismissive, and ultimately incorrect argument. Appealing to the past doesn't mean much because we don't live there.

This argument about automation is no different. We don't know what is going to happen because of AI. We don't even know where AI is going to go as a product/feature/whatever. It could totally make obsolete an entire class of lower-earning white collar workers whose main contribution is writing things. On the other hand, it could fizzle out and we could be comparing Bing Chat to Clippy a few years from now and laughing at all the investors who wasted their money on the next big thing after crypto.

Pointing to times in the past when people feared automation, and showing how those fears did not pan out, is not a good argument. Everything in history is contingent, everything could have gone a different way if a few people made different decisions at a few key times, and fear of automation may have motivated some of those people to make the decisions that prevented automation from destroying all the jobs.

To put it another way: If you play Russian Roulette with a six-shot revolver and you survive five rounds, should you be more or less likely to believe that you will survive the sixth round? People who look to the past and say "bad thing that was predicted did not happen then so it won't happen now" are guilty of thinking that if they survived five rounds then they will definitely survive the next one.

You don’t need to learn or use any of the new features. Most devs seem to still pretend they are writing for Java 8 anyway.

A library is able to lend out physical books because it bought the books. The publisher got paid when the book was purchased. Plus only one person can borrow a given physical library book at a time.

That's going to get easier too. Stanford can already get this far for $600, so soon after the major GPT-based chat AIs were released. Imagine how much better it will get with just a little bit more time.

There are lots of places to get compute, including Chinese cloud providers...

The genie really is out of the bottle now.

This is a lot like pharmaceuticals. The initial investment in a new medication is enormous. The price of each pill is trivial, to the extent that every drugstore chain is able to supply a generic in-house brand.

Governments are really bad at limiting the spread of digital content.

This is why it's not possible to slow down or "stop" AI: once the problems are solved the solutions turn out to be trivial to replicate. All it takes is compute.

And yet AWS is pretty reliable overall, and certainly better than most in-house systems even at large companies.

I know multiple people who have worked on AWS. There is definitely some manual stuff going on, but there is also considerable infrastructure and automation in other areas.

The web is a much wilder and less controlled place than it was a decade ago. All kinds of stuff the government doesn't like is being published all the time.

If this had happened in 2008 I don't think the government would have reacted as quickly or as well. We would have seen a wave of bank failures.

One of the lessons learned from 2008, especially after the collapse of Lehman, is that acting too late or sending mixed messages can make the problem worse.

The SVB run started on a Thursday, and the government announced a plan to stabilize the banking system the next Sunday before the markets were about to open. It was a pretty fast reaction all things considered.

What we didn't learn well enough from 2008 was the extent to which small bank failures can create systemic risk for the entire system. It's not like SVB was the only bank with long-term investments that lost market value after rates rose. When people realized that, they freaked out.

The other thing people realized too late was that we have had a two-layer system of deposit insurance since 2008: the too-big-to-fail banks effectively have infinite insurance (because they can't fail) and smaller banks didn't. That creates an incentive for depositors to run on the small banks and move all their money to the ones that cannot fail. It seems like nobody understood that until a few weeks ago, including the regulators.

Another problem, which is older than 2008 but needs to be fixed, is that our current system of deposit insurance doesn't make sense for the way businesses use banks. If it did, we wouldn't be in a situation where only 60% of deposits are insured nationwide. That blunts the effectiveness of deposit insurance for preventing bank runs. The solution may not be more insurance, but perhaps caps on account balances or limits to the percent of uninsured deposits at a given bank.

Yes but as an individual depositor, if you moved money this would not impact your decision. You got the safety you wanted.

> If even the Swiss can't keep it together financially we're in real trouble.

The Swiss banking industry has been overrated for a long time.

In this case it's not like a competent, sensibly run bank failed. Credit Suisse had a track record of being pretty terrible.

The big difference between now and 2001 is that we aren't seeing a lot of tech companies completely fail and go out of business like we did then.

This is a return to sanity -- businesses need to control costs and be sustainable, product ideas need to actually make sense, you have to prove you have a good idea to get investment, etc. This is good for the long-term health of the industry.

The real problem right now is not the layoffs. The layoffs are needed, because many companies cannot reasonably justify their headcount, and it's destructive to a culture to have so many new people join so fast. If you've worked at the same company since 2021 you might have more tenure than half your coworkers!

The real problem is the hiring freezes. These especially impact new grads, but also experienced people will have trouble finding jobs simply because few companies are actively hiring. If you get laid off from a FAANG you might be able to find a startup job paying ~1/4 to 1/2 of your previous total comp. Might as well just not work for a year. Businesses overhired so much they need to shed more employees before they can even backfill or grow teams that work on things that make sense.

This happened in 2001 too, but the big difference between now and then is we aren't seeing a lot of tech companies completely fail and go out of business.

Yes, most people cannot figure that out, but also it would not occur to most people to consider that when opting for a PIN over a password.

> Is it safe to rely on a 4 digit PIN? Obviously not, when there are only 10000 possible combinations. You shouldn't need Bitwarden to tell you that though.

Most people really don’t know that. It is not obvious to a normal user.

Exactly. This is why every tradesman I know wants their kids to go to college.

All banks that were not in the “too big to fail” category were at risk as panicked depositors would have flown to safety in the arms of Chase and the other big banks. They would have done that even if their own smaller banks were just fine, because of a fear that other people would do it first. Once the panic begins it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Also, many other small banks are not fine. SVB is not the only one with concerning duration risk in their assets.

What you described is what happens during a normal bank failure. That happens fairly regularly to small local banks and it's not normally even newsworthy.

That's not an adequate response to a systemic risk against the entire banking system.

It's not unusual. Only about 60% of deposits in US banks are insured.

We've effectively had 100% deposit insurance at the "too big to fail" banks since 2008 and the lending restrictions you are predicting have not happened.

The fundamental problem is that we had effective 100% insurance at the "too big to fail" banks but not at the others. People just didn't think about that until quite recently, and when they figured it out, they panicked and were going to move all their money into the too big to fail banks unless the government stepped in.

At the moment SVB stock is worthless and SVB does not legally even exist anymore. The government didn't buy the shares. Every shareholder got wiped out, unless something changes.

The systemic risk to the entire banking system was real and still is, and VCs banding together to save a single bank would not have helped.

The systemic risk became real simply because a lot of people realized that SVB was not the only bank with problematic assets. The result would have been an outflow of deposits to the "too big to fail" banks because those banks effectively have infinite deposit insurance (because everyone already knew they would not be allowed to fail).

That's not what Carter did. He inherited a bad economy from Ford and Nixon and failed to fix it. We expect our presidents to fix problems whether they caused them or not. At the end of 8+ years of a bad economy, oil embargoes, and leadership that conveyed a depressing message for the country's future prospects, the voters were rightly displeased with Carter.

The rewards are socialized, because the small players would not have existed in the first place if not for the big players. All these small companies that were impacted by SVB only existed in the first place because VCs invested in them. The same story plays out in many other industries.

The losses aren't really socialized either -- not this time, and not in 2008. In 2008 the government made money on the bailouts, effectively getting an investment return on taxpayer money. So far in the rescue of SVB no taxpayer money has been spent either.

Banking has been a quasi-government-operated industry for over 100 years, since the creation of the Fed in 1913, the creation of the FDIC in 1933, and the increased regulation since 2008.

In 2008 the Fed created a two-layer banking system: banks that were "too big to fail" whose deposits are effectively insured for infinite amounts, and all other banks whose deposits are insured for $250k. Nobody realized this until a few weeks ago, and without the government's scramble to respond everyone would have moved their deposits to the big banks, killing all the others.

People finally realized this because of duration risk on long-term investments. Who caused that duration risk to actually manifest as a real problem? The Fed! The same people who are supposed to run the banking system in a stable way have contributed to the instability of the banking system by keeping rates low for so long, overreacting to Covid, assuming inflation was "transitory", and then raising rates very quickly trying to squash the inflation they caused.

That's not capitalism. We haven't had capitalism in banking for a century.

People have an impression that banking is a private industry and the government comes in to bail it out, when really the government was involved the entire time.

Aside from the crash in 2008, where the Fed really did help, a number of the major recessions in the past century have either been caused by or made worse by the Fed, including the Great Depression by Bernanke's own admission.

Banking regulations certainly need to be changed because of what happened last week, but the way the Fed is run should definitely also be changed.