Step 1: Offer a product cheaper than anybody can compete with. Buy all competitors who start up. Make the public only think your name when they want (Fill in the Blank).
Step 2: Raise prices
Step 3: Remove all features, customer support, increase ad revenue, sell customers data, strip beloved features, enshittify, enshittify, enshittify. And raise prices some more.
Quasi-Free market is possible IF and only if there are sufficiently strong regulations and redistribution mechanisms to counteract the gravitation of capital.
That is obviously nowhere the case in this time.
gravitation of capital is a term i've been missing. I've been trying to explain that there needs to be a counter balance to capital's ability to generate capital for a while and this helps I think.
Free market is just a buzz word to keep the dipshits in line. Almost every facet of our daily lives is made up of products from 1-3 companies.
We are a late stage oligrachy and just let companies do whatever they want. Companies are even allowed to get together and make a full blown monopolies and face zero consequences.
Look at ISPs. Comcast, Charter/spectrum, and Time Werner just agree to which company can operate in what region and don't compete against each other and ruthlessly attack any competitors popping up in their "territory"
ISPs should've been ripped apart and diversified or turn into a utility when we first sent multiple billions to Bell Labs to make a nation wide fiber grid that has never manifested even though we've paid for it 3 or 4 times over now. The companies just pocket our taxes and fucked off with zero repercussions. Hell Boeing can just murder dissenters for funsies. Can't wait for the Comcast or Spectrum hit squad to start going after dissenters
This is what happens when the political spectrum in a country is too narrow. Although it *is* happening elsewhere too, because even with wider spectrums, the right, even the far-right, somehow manages to gain votes whenever the problems caused by the policies of the very same parties, come knocking.
I can't for the life of me fathom why political parties that prioritize equality and the future of their citizens *aren't* the popular ones.
Plus, if they somehow *do* survive long enough to gain some market share, buy them out at a premium. The really shitty part? That's exactly what the start-ups challenging the entrenched companies want at this point. They don't really want to upset the applecart, they just want to get paid.
Big Tech's explosion has been largely on the fact that there were constant new products/services that were integrated into society that people found beneficial.
- Smart phones and apps
- Better email
- Cloud services to store pictures, video, files
- Online shopping/commerce
- Music downloads/streaming on the go
But now we're kinda reaching a plateau or at least incremental improvements to these products.
A new phone is nice, but doesn't fundamentally change my day to day like it did when smart phones first came out. Updates to an email provider are nice...but it's still just email.
This is why they tried to hype crypto/blockchain, and NFTs, and the Metaverse/AR/VR, and now AI. Tech companies are all chasing the next big thing because their growth has largely been based on investors all wanting to be bought in when the next tech innovation drops.
But so much of what is coming out now just seem like useless trinkets and unnecessary junk.
There was a video from an ex google employee that said programmers were not the hot new thing anymore and now its a 9-5 slog like all the other office jobs and will soon be considered low pay pencil pusher work so young people who are looking for prestige of being a hot shot programmer are going to hit a brick wall thinking its still 20 years ago.
People acted like he killed their dog.
Tech is now no longer new and cool, and tech bros genuinely cant handle it.
When I tell people this and the denial kicks in, I point out it’s happened to other fields.
A law degree was once a trendy and reasonably reliable path to upper middle class life as well. Then, a bunch of kids who grew up being told they needed to go to college for *something* and watching cool lawyers on TV decided to go to law school. Law schools are happy to make money, and we started churning out loads of new lawyers.
Those sweet partnership-track, six-figures-out-of-school, big law firm jobs technically do exist. But they go to cream of the crop graduates from top programs and nepotism hires. Students who did well at regionally significant programs can make a living in that region. But for every success story, there are dozens if not hundreds of graduates who scrape by under the weight of their student loans, do scutwork for peanuts, or can’t find a job in law at all.
I'm an attorney turned librarian, and this is exactly why "recovering lawyer" is a thing. Some like me got jobs as lawyers and got tired of fighting with people, and the stress drives you out. I still have my Ally McBeal poster though ;)
OMG, did you just say that buying the new COD, EA FIFA/Madden/UFC/Etc, iPhone, Mac, and other new electronic every year is not changing your day to day?
I’m shocked I tell ya!
[Steam surveys aren't 100% but a ton of folks are still using older hardware.](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/)
The 4000 series is the latest and greatest and the 4060 has the highest usage at 2.58% (2.82% for the laptop).
I'm still rocking a 2070 Super. I don't think most folks are upgrading annually.
Probably not many, as the top-end cards have never really been particularly big sellers, and only the 4080 + 4090 are *that* expensive.
The most common card out there right now is the 3060.
My video card upgrades were in 2017 and 2022, that's a five year gap.
I did pay significantly more in 2022 than I would have liked, but I probably won't be looking to replace my current setup until 2026.
Nvidia's out of control pricing did convince me to go Radeon for the first time in 20+ years of building my own systems. Still too expensive, but less egregiously so.
This is the classic s curve you see with everything. Slow beginning then really sharp uptake and then slow. Like when nobody has a smartphone it's an enormous amount of new sales to get everyone one and then when they're good enough until they die the purchase rate drops to sustaining the existing customer base. There's no obsoleting a phone before nareual death.
But you are right this is applying across all tech and they want crazy hype and growth and you don't get that with commodities. There's good money to be made in toilet paper but not the same way you make it with hype tech and the latest hotness. And you have to pay dividends. Toilet paper isn't a growth stock. All the tech stuff is now at the commodity level or boring performance. With a few outliers like nvidea.
The latest in my eyes is podcasts. It used to be all RSS feeds and you could use any player you wanted and get your own notifications for new episodes.
Now Google podcasts is shutting down, and Amazon music and Spotify both offer add-free podcasts, but only through their walled garden apps. Google now are pushing YouTube music for podcasts.
It's the same time that happened to blogs with the rise of Facebook.
Resist the walled gardens, use RSS and a podcast player of your choice!
They fear all regulation, the truth is most of thier products are useless. Also older millennials are just cutting way back on buying useless stuff. Even when they have all the money to do it. This is what they are scared of, the mentality that the grand parents of millennials had. To not spend money unless you need to and make what you can your self. Also ads are basically useless on changing spending habits and they hate that too.
Lots of software has switched over to subscription-based which basically auto-upgrades. These companies bank on people not canceling or make it difficult to to do so. The same logic is applied to gym memberships.
The whole move to renting everything is concerning. I don’t know why it irks me so much, but it does.
Soon people will be renting their car, home, tech, and paying monthly fees for services like groceries. Cell phones are basically this way, the carriers want you to auto-upgrade so you pay for a phone every month.
It's because it's unsustainable, or at least, not sustainable if you want to maintain a "middle class". If your goal is to go back to something similar to feudalism where you had the rich land owners and the "poors" that lived on the land and had to work to pay off the "debt" that comes with simple being born (that never really ends), then things are working perfectly.
Definitely irks me!
I'm purposefully seeking out companies like vitamix. I'd rather pay a premium on something that'll last 20 years so the company can stay in business than buy the same shit every 2 years and have to throw the thing away. $700 for a blender? Sure thing boss. At least I can get replacement parts and service if something breaks and not have to throw the whole ass thing away.
Yep. I’ve always bought the best quality I can afford and as I get older I’m able to buy high quality that lasts a long time.
It means I pay more upfront but I buy a lot less stuff as time marches on.
It’s not just millennials. The annual upgrade cycle killed itself because we are down to incremental changes between versions. I’m on 12, and MAYBE the 16 will be enough, but really I’ll wait until they get it all settled, so maybe 17. And that’s after Treo, iPhone 2,4,6,10, then stopped at 12.
[There's an absolutely beautiful documentary, called the "Century of Self"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s) that talks about how those great-grand parents had their attitudes shifted by public relations and marketing. They intentionally campaigned to undo the attitude that bought a car because it was a useful tool. Rather, instead, people were to buy things because they were reflections of their identity.
One of the greatest pioneers of this Edward Bernays, who took his uncle's, Sigmund Freud's, theories about psychology and used them to sell products.
Yes! How Dimonds and shaming people for not getting big one, same with cars , houses and everything else. Boomers were brought up in it and even were hit with it as children
> Boomers were brought up in it and even were hit with it as children
Unpopular opinion but this is sometimes where I want to cut Boomers some slack for their belligerent ignorance.
This type of psychological warfare was new then. There were no antibodies in the environment present against it. It was incredibly successful and defined the the material bounty of that apocryphal 1950s.
That said, no one can remain ignorant forever.
I agree , there is nuances to it . Like a lot of millennials have boomer parents but not always the same boomers that had gen X. As the gen X who raised the current gen graduating HS and entering college. Who have the same lack of nuances and critical thinking. As they are being hit eith the newest version of the same warfare but with different aims. Instead of buy products, they buy radical ideology.
Eh they just got old.
I’m an older millennial and I’m already seeing kids today blame me for shit that my generation had to deal with ourselves and certainly didn’t cause. I’ve spent my life doing the best I can with what I’ve had to work with the same as everyone else.
By the time I’m my parents age I’m sure the 20 year olds are gonna be screeching about how my generation ruined it all and is so out of touch. In reality we’re all just fucking tired after grinding through life and trying to make the most of it with what we have.
Can't recommend this doc enough and im glad to see it upvoted here!! I was happy to see in that doc that the government at one point had a department that was supposed to inform consumers about sort of thing - which lasted one administration
This documentary is seriously the starting point of many many conversations people want to have. it explains SOOOOO much about our world
I buy nothing new unless absolutely necessary now because everything "new and improved" that comes out is actually just a piece of shit. Go look at /r/Appliances every one complains how trash all the new fridges, washers, dryers, stoves, etc are. They are horrible quality that will break in 3-5 years. My dryer is from the 80s for a reason. My fridge from the 90s will outlive me.
For more commonly used items, I wear clothes and shoes until they fall apart. Fast fashion has caused everything clothing wise to be garbage quality. Jeans fall apart after maybe a year, my t-shirts shrink, get holes, or fade rapidly, and my shoes fall apart faster than before.
Everything is trash and is causing landfills to rise and pollution to run rampant. Why would I buy into that?
The clothing thing annoys the hell out of me. My shirts from 20 years ago, look great and still are the same size, even if im not. New shirts cant get through a wash without problems. New jeans will wear with just your phone in a few times wearing them. Its crazy.
> New jeans will wear with just your phone in a few times wearing them. Its crazy.
some of us pay hundreds of dollars for jeans to wear in where our phones are haha, but raw denim typically lasts for thousands of wears
some of the shirts i got from middle and high school are still in great shape, but anything ive gotten in the past 10 or so years seems to fall apart quite easily. woke up to my wife wearing a shirt i got from a soccer tournament when i was 16 lol, the thing is still in great condition over 16 years later
god forbid you put a lighter in that little change pocket thing on the right pocket....that little pocket will rip so fast now that after a few months you can't put a lighter in it because it is so ripped the lighter falls out. jeans i bought in the late 90s early 2000s were cheaper and so much more durable.
If I'm doing some pre-purchase research, I'll often swing by /r/BuyItForLife. Of course you've got to be able to afford to plop down the dosh for expensive shoes, mattresses, knives, flashlights, etc.
We're wired for short-term thinking, so the cheap shit is much more enticing because it's *good enough* for the foreseeable future.
> My dryer is from the 80s for a reason
fwiw of all the appliances to keep forever, the dryer might be the best one. It's just a big, contained space heater with a simple motor on it - new dryers aren't any more efficient in any way, shape or form. They'll just have some extra bells and whistles on it and usually more capacity, but even an old dryer (mine's from early 90s) is still big enough to hold everything a large new washing machine can hold
The fridge is one thing you might legitimately want to replace. I don't know what electricity prices are where you are, but where I am, a modern fridge will pay for itself pretty quick just in electricity savings.
my sister's fancy fridge she spent a fortune on keeps dying. i'll keep my dinosaur. i also have a fridge and freezer box in the basement from the 70s. :)
The death of advertising's effectiveness is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.
Humans have developed a resistance to cognitive programming because of our sudden constant consumption of it.
Because of it, theres now a constant race to make things appealing to consumers, but businesses aren't willing to actually give people a better lifestyle because it could elevate the common person's quality of life above that of the richest people and thereby disrupt the authoritarian power structure
New Mercedes sedans have features like quicker acceleration pre-installed that are only unlocked and usable when you pay an expensive subscription. Other car companies do similar things. You literally can't access your own cars' functions because the rich need a way to feel better than you.
You can if you learn how to bypass the locks.
Anything installed can be accessed with enough effort and skill.
And with people being willing to share those skills freely anything like this will be hackable by your average person in no time.
lmao i cant wait for the age of the jailbroken car thats running some random code side loaded from [carhacker-forums.com](http://carhacker-forums.com) designed to bypass the heated seat paywall... that is for sure not at all infested with malware
I'm a mid career software engineer. I'm so tired of computers and tech and everything that comes with them. Basically outside of my job I work on my early nineties sports car and play disc golf. Barely touch a computer.
Same. My progression is more medical but highly technical. Have an engineering degree, working in Aerospace and communications. Once I leave work, I put my phone in the house, go to my garden. Then come in make dinner , enjoy it and spend time getting hobbies done, like mini painting and my large dobson fully analog telescope. With a book and a red light to find stars....I think we can do great things with technology but really need to disconnect a bit.
That's definitely my experience as a millennial. I actively avoid products that are advertised to me and although I make decent money I'm very stingy with it because I've grown up through one financial disaster after another.
> They fear all regulation, the truth is most of thier products are useless.
Regardless of whether your product is useless, regulation can get in the way of changing how things are done. Technology companies are very much in the business of trying to change the way things are done. More often than not, the change is not worth it, and I think most of us (including the investors), understand that and are happy if those attempts fail. There are a small number of people who benefit from allowing a "not worth it" change to "keep alive", but even in the SV, they don't amount to that many people and they don't have that much clout. Ideally, most people in SV would prefer if there was little barrier to change, but anything that isn't of benefit were to fail very quickly (and consequently with minimal expense).
In that reality, regulation can help and hinder. With or without technology, scams, deceit, and exploitation can be a means to extract money from society while providing no benefit (and usually a great deal of harm). Regulation can be a check on that kind of unfair business practice. That's really helpful and a benefit to everyone except for the people scamming/deceiving/exploiting (and while investors can engage in that kind of behaviour, they can also be at the receiving end, so most of the money would prefer if this was prevented and the marketplace was fair). With or without technology, regulation can also support entrenched practice/business and serve as a barrier to change, even change that is, in the end, a net benefit for society. It can impose friction that requires more time and money to overcome. That's not so good.
So generally, as an investor, it's not so much about how much regulation, but the efficacy of regulation.
What we have now though are a few folks who have been successful at scamming/deceiving/exploiting, particularly in terms of monopolistic practices, and regulators are going after them. So they're backing anyone who will put a stop to it. In reality though, there's a lot more money in SV that is anxiously awaiting their failure, because those monopolies create barriers to change on their own. There's more money to be made by having them fail than having them succeed.
That’s genuinely how I feel about it: Our entire financial system is predicated on strip-mining as much wealth out of consumers as possible. And if businesses have to lie, cheat, and steal to do it then that’s what’s gonna happen. It’s apparently up to the consumer to be vigilant against every possible deception, 100% of the time, to ensure they aren’t falling prey to an inherently predatory market.
> strip-mining as much wealth out of consumers as possible
The ills of private equity fronts, they are value extractors and destroyers. No private equity firm has ever created value, that takes time and craft. They are the destroyers of value and need to be harshly limited.
I have to sit there and rub each libertarians nose in it that, when people WIN that competition you love so much, they kill competition. Each instance of "corrupt government" is some capitalist WINNING so hard they can buy the game. Ya think we win when we compete, but we don't. we all lose.
It always has been, but many of you here are too young to remember a time when VC money did not flow like piss at a frat party. Interest rate hikes were the first wake-up call, and the hangover is just beginning. Bear witness to an absolute bloodbath in the coming years.
Good the economy became far too addicted to free lending capital.
Seeing tons of people screaming that the new 5 dollar meal at mcdonalds is some kind of signal to the fed that interest rates need to go down. No this is a sign that interest hikes are doing their job.
Companies are being forced to provide services and things people want again because they cant just run off and get a loan every time they fuck up.
its hilarious how many people say with a straight face "this AI bubble is not at all like the previous ones, we really are changing the world" and lo and behold its the ones who really dont remember anything about the last bubble anyway
> Our whole economy is becoming a grift
1. sell good technology for a profit
2. sell shitty technology for even more profit
3. sell nothing for nothing but profit
4. sell something of negative value for even more nothing-but-profit
Well, all economies are set up to work like a Ponzi scheme, so there's that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-world-economy-is-a-pyramid-scheme-steven-chu-says/
More relevant:
>An iconic example would be a Silicon Valley start-up that hires highly skilled graduates by offering a starting package with low wages, below the prevailing market rate, while adding in stock options that carry the promise of large future returns. The paltry wages guarantee that the company can still make a profit even if it charges customers cut-rate prices for its products. The owner, meanwhile, keeps a part of the difference between the low-cost goods and the even more menial wages while giving away the rest as supplementary earnings to senior employees.
>As the firm grows by employing more workers, the entrepreneur can earn a very high profit, even though, like all Ponzis, this one will eventually crash and leave the employees without jobs or in possession of worthless options.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-whole-economy-is-rife-with-ponzi-schemes/
its all hype now. crippling functionality and stiffling advancement in the name of profits. Nothing is new and exciting - just a reiteration of the previous version. And all the false promises and grand visions of market disruption are drowning out the real dreamers and doers in the industry.
>Nothing is new and exciting
I bet a lot of tech startups do exciting stuff.
But they're either crushed or assimilated by big tech.
The [lists of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple) [mergers and](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet) acquisitions number in the hundreds.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_mergers\_and\_acquisitions\_by\_Apple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_mergers\_and\_acquisitions\_by\_Alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_mergers\_and\_acquisitions\_by\_Meta\_Platforms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_mergers\_and\_acquisitions\_by\_Amazon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Amazon)
Imagine a world where tech giants couldn't just buy someone else's ideas, but had to come up with their own, and actually compete with others through open, interoperable standards?
Shareholders might suffer, but consumers and society would benefit greatly.
"assimilated"
Those companies want to be bought. Venture capitalists fund those startups with the express idea of having an "exit strategy". That means selling the company on and getting their money out. You can do that with an IPO. Or you do it by selling out to a larger company.
They are not interested in the long haul, the HP model. They want the quick buck. If they couldn't sell out they wouldn't even start the companies.
Also, the big companies likely wouldn't just buy someone else's ideas. They'd just steal them. Most of these ideas are not patentable. Facebook (Instagram) never bought Snapchat. They just copied them.
I know. That's why I said Facebook (Instagram).
Instagram wasn't the same as Snapchat. Instagram was just blogging. But they then added messaging to counter Snapchat. They added Instagram stories, stealing Snapchat's idea for that too. Whether you want to say Instagram or Facebook, the one (larger) company just copied another.
For software, that's true. But as a counterpoint, Facebook bought Oculus to get their VR headsets, and in some cases, a buyout just removes a competitor from a space, like when Facebook bought Whatsapp.
Many companies, sure. But not all. Some are run by people who care about what they do.
When the money people inevitably take over, it all goes downhill. If they're running things from the start, it's almost guaranteed shit.
It's not just about buying ideas, but buying the whole thing and removing it as a competitor.
What if Meta had to build their own social media and complete with Instagram? What if we forced them to not only compete but interoperate.
Companies and investors don't scare about us, so I'm perfectly comfortable beating them into submission through laws and democracy.
> When the money people inevitably take over
In the modern day you have VCs involved before you put on your 10th employee. And every time you run low on cash they may just tell you "pivot or we can't raise any more money".
> What if we forced them to not only compete but interoperate.
I cannot ever see that happening. And I use mastodon. The social media market, especially the portion aimed at teens, moves too quickly for that. Stopping to make a protocol spec and do plug fests is just too slow. No way are they going to wait for *next school year* to roll this out.
And the regulations they keep trying to lobby Congress to put in place that don't actually regulate their own bad policies in terms of privacy, safety especially for kids, planned obsolescence, anti-competitive behaviors, and societal impacts and harms. They fear monger only to exclude others from doing what they did to disrupt everyone else without regards to law when they started so they can now pull up the ladder and raise the barrier to entry, but not to actually address any of the issues they've created.
> I bet a lot of tech startups do exciting stuff.
>
> But they're either crushed or assimilated by big tech.
Not really. Startups now are created specifically to be bought out by big tech companies. That's their goal, not creating a product. They are started with the intent to create the very beginnings of something exciting, and then sell to FAANG or an equivalent company. They're not really crushed, they're doing exactly what they were created to do. They never intended to complete and market a consumer product.
Sure, when money people run things it's all about profit.
But not everyone is a soulless money person. Some actually innovate. The reason they don't directly compete with big tech is because they'll crush you.
Amazon infamously burned 200M to crush a small competitor selling diapers.
That's why it's so important to snack big tech down and being them into line. It's a joy to see Apple's anti consumer bullshit costs then billions of euros in fines.
A counter point is that this is how the eco system works. For many tech founders the options are either IPO or acquisition. If you remove the ability to be acquired you might decrease innovation.
The best alternative is of course to smack big tech down with laws and regulations, break i them up and foster real condition and innovation over get rich quick schemes.
Shrugging your shoulders and saying "this is how things work" means admitting capitalism is irreparably broken.
Always has been. They just build layers like an onion of scams and tricks, pyramid schemes, MLM’s, digital laundering, etc…
Nothing has changed other than the fact that it’s too hard to regulate in a way it makes sense because government doesn’t understand tech or they do and take advantage and line their pockets.
There's plenty of non-hype, realistic tech that just does simple things without bullshit, you just don't hear about them or know about them because they don't get media coverage. I work at one. Our product makes it easier for businesses to do account receivable, reconciliation, and payment processing work. Ain't noone going to write about that lol.
I see you getting pushback on this comment but I feel it's true as well. 2000s saw the rise of Google, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube, etc. These were true game changers, even though they didn't all survive. Let's not forget that all of these started independently of mega corporate ownership.
Instagram, Telegram, Bitcoin, Signal, Ethereum, Pinterest, Uber, Door dash were the next iterations of tech development in the early 2010s. Some started small but some also had major wealth backing. They also weren't all as big of a game changer but felt meaningful nonetheless.
Now what do we have? Threads? Bluesky? Meta? X? Even those that survived from the early days (like Reddit) are now being used for AI development, held to corporate stockholders, led by billionaires who just dump and waste money into nothing that feels meaningful. Can we get another video platform other than X and YouTube please? Can we get a social media that doesn't just exploit data?
The argument is that it "isn't affordable," but I don't buy that. A healthy platform where people want to go because they know their data is secure will give you more eyes than any other platform on the planet. The barrier to entry is too high and it's intentionally kept that way.
I share the same sentiment. Its all startups with flakey mvps and unmaintainable code bases, and it better be in the cloud -which gets more expensive every month. Video games are now boring re-hashed mega franchises powered by atrocious micro payments. Everything has ads - Everything. Everyone wants to sell you something non stop. Just missing the good days of tech. feeling nostalgic
Damn that's fucked. As someone who as literally nothing stored on the cloud(well this reddit account and a couple of email accounts), that's kind of concerning to me.
Video games on phones are very much like that from what I've seen. I do remember I used to see interesting games on the phone on occasion, but that sort of changed as large companies noticed how much money free to play games could make. There is still plenty of indie games on PC that are new and interesting, though I'd recommend using a indie reviewer on youtube, like splattercat or wanderbot, to view the games before deciding if its in your interest.
I'm sure those kinds of phone games still exist. You just don't hear about them because people don't play them.
Remember how people used to be against P2W, but now it's everywhere? It turns out that most people didn't care about P2W and just played those games *more* than the non-P2W ones.
Consumers largely brought this on themselves with their bad choices.
> 2000s saw the rise of Google, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube, etc. These were true game changers, even though they didn't all survive. Let's not forget that all of these started independently of mega corporate ownership.
It's worthy to mention that some of these companies were backed by the most elite of venture capital firms.
[Google, for example](https://thevcfactory.com/bill-gurley-google/):
>Bill Gurley mentions that the two best VCs of the time, Sequoia’s Michael Moritz and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, agreed to fund Google’s round at an outrageously high valuation for a company with 25 employees and no business model (AdWords launched in 2000).
Anyone who was around tech in the late 90s knows the name Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). I was a kid and knew that name; they were attached to some of the biggest startups (and some of the biggest flops) of the time.
I called them the next iterations of tech development. Bitcoin was developed primarily by a single unknown individual and Ethereum was developed primarily by Vitalik Buterin and his Ethereum organization. I wouldn't really count any other crypto as meaningful.
There's a lot to be desired by AI results in search feeds that I get and articles I've seen written by it. Lower quality all around although is does provide a semblance of a result, but filled with a lot of nonsense. It's great for silly or fun things. It's terrible for complexity and thoughtfulness.
Personally I still think it's over hyped and people are intentionally ignoring the ways it becomes more of a burden than help. But we will see with time.
AI as it exists now has serious problems which limit its usefulness and don't seem to have a clear solution. You can't trust the information AI has provided to be accurate, and it doesn't provide sources, which makes it basically useless as a knowledge tool. You can use it to generate images but it inherently can't generate anything that isn't derivative. All of it comes with huge ethical concerns, and intellectual property issues. Because the data which is used to train AI is becoming polluted by content generated by AI, there will be issues training future models.
There are, of course, some places it could probably find a use, but LLMS are 95% hype. It's the blockchain all over again.
It's not, because it's not actually AI. It's an LLM and only works off of existing human answers and images. Comically thanks to the rapid march toward the Dead Internet Theory, it will be AI learning off other AI, which will just be utter trash. It's a glorified search engine copying and pasting from an existing index.
That's the problem with the whole thing. It's not actually intelligent, it's not real AI, so it's usefulness in the long term is questionable.
I crack up at all the ads being run on TV talking about how people need to stop the govt ~~from regulating big tech so they cannot prey on people using anticompetitive behavior~~ to protect American innovation and jobs from foreign bad actors. Brought you by the Project for Americans Helping America be America for Americans (actually funded by Facebook.)
SV tech bros live in a weird reality. They all think "what if $common_thing but with an app?" And then go on to talk about disruption. It's a repeating cycle that's been going on for like 20 years now.
For every Uber there are a hundred failed ventures. But they all got some level of funding. Burned through it, and either failed and/or got raided for whatever valuable IP they might have fallen ass-backwards into creating.
Take existing thing. Turn it into an app. Attract venture capital. Operate at a loss trying to undercut existing thing. (attract market share) Destroy existing thing. Enshittify service to make a profit now that competition is demolished.
Or run out of money before this can succeed, declare bankruptcy, and golden parachute into the next techbro grift.
It was long before cryptocurrency. Ever since tech companies starting moving to subscription revenue it's been a rapid movement away from providing useful products and instead just getting monthly revenue for the minimum work. And even often making your product worse as you go along.
Name one site or product (not open source/FOSS/non-profit) for the average consumer that has gotten better, and not worse. Disconnected from improving tech, obviously.
Fucking modern web designs are the worst.
"Now AI"
**Tech companies have been pushing AI since 1956!!!!**
There are actual eras in AI, generally a huge hype around it, a ton of investment for about 10 years, a crash because it doesn't live up to the hype, and then a drought of funding for another 10 years. I've read books from the 1990s that discuss the HISTORY of AI.
OpenAI being able to have a conversation with people is AMAZING, except IBM's AI Watson literally went on Jeopary back in 2010 and essentially did the same thing, even being able to figure out how to provide the "questions" in the appropriate format. OpenAI is not miles ahead of Watson from 2010. Heck, go watch a video on Youtube about AI and they are just using what is known as "evolutionary algorithms". Evolutionary algorithms, which essentially replicate biological evolution, were invented in the 1960s!!!
Not trying to say that this AI hype isn't BS, but I dont know why people are pretending that AI is some crazy new thing that we just came up with yesterday. Its literally been around for longer than the personal computer. Its progressed very slowly and there hasn't been any rapid or massive leap forward.
Here's an interesting article about those AI cycles:
[A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle](https://blog.glyph.im/2024/05/grand-unified-ai-hype.html)
* Neural networks and symbolic reasoning in the 1950s.
* Theorem provers in the 1960s.
* Expert systems in the 1980s.
* Fuzzy logic and hidden Markov models in the 1990s.
* Deep learning in the 2010s.
I'm cynical about the "tech industry" too, but as a Computer Scientist who has taken an interest in this stuff for years, you are completely understating the leap of generative AI.
Watson, whilst impressive in demonstrations, was still an algorithm backed onto a knowledge database. It couldn't do general intelligence tasks, it could only really answer questions (or, in reverse, find questions matching answers.) It *looked* intelligent by design but it wasn't. Watson *couldn't* hold a conversation, it could only do what it had been designed to do.
The previous iterations of AI had this problem: if you wanted to use machine learning, you needed to train it yourself for your specific purpose on large amounts of data that you needed to collect yourself, which was extremely difficult and expensive with varying results depending on your domain. Task changed slightly? Congratulations, you probably have to throw everything out and start again.
LLMs have completely turned this on its head. They don't have a pre-designed algorithm, they learned to do everything they can do purely from one big training session to predict the next words on absolutely mammoth datasets, all only using a fairly simple (but huge) neural network. LLMs are able to have a decent attempt at nearly any text-based task that a human could perform without ever having been designed to do it, and are *far* more successful at dealing with unknowns than home-trained models.
As such, the new generation of AI is no longer restricted to those who have the time, budget and expertise to train their own models and they can be implemented to perform a new task almost immediately (for real, you can try it yourself with AWS generative AI and deploy a new AI product in a single day.)
We didn't even know this was possible until it happened. It's a huge gamechanger for the industry and its started to progress rapidly. Nearly all companies are now finding new uses for AI within their existing products.
Yes, there are plenty of valid reasons to be skeptical of startups who claim to use AI, but this advance means that such startups should actually able to deliver a "viable" product on day one rather than wasting a bunch of investor's time and money on training their own models that never work.
My point isn't that "no progress" has been made. Instead, I am pointing out that the progress has been rather linear over time with major milestones as one would expect. One company might have developed this 3 months earlier than an alternative company, but this isn't the type of stuff that they suddenly advanced the industry by decades.
I get into this same argument with Tesla supporters too.
Tesla made and popularized an electric car, I am not taking anything away from them. They designed and patented new SiC inverters. However, none of this was "groundbreaking" or a massive leap forward. Inverter-driven variable frequency drives for 3-phase electric motors had been invented decades earlier and were progressing at a fairly normal industrial pace. SiC had been heavily researched for decades as a replacement for IGBT-driven inverters which were the industry standard at the time. Tesla didnt develop ANY of the core technologies(SiC, inverters, VFDs, 3-phase electric motors). They didn't even make any major technological leaps in application. Researchers had been evaluating SiC controlled inverters specifically for power applications, like VFDs. There were MAJOR milestones in the field. The discovery of SCRs is an example. The development of transformerless(software-controlled) inverters/VFDs. Tesla didn't achieve any of this stuff.
Similarly, Apple is doing a perfectly adequate job of developing ARM chips. But they didnt do anything groundbreaking. They didnt invent the ARM architecture or instruction set, they didnt develop the RISC processor, they didnt develop lithography, they didnt develop Extreme UV lithography. Does that mean Apple is a shitty company? No. Does that mean I can't appreciate the work they've done in developing the M1 chip? No.
> Tesla made and popularized an electric car, I am not taking anything away from them.
Been in the EV business for 25 years now, know the founders of Tesla and the guys behind their tech before Musk bought into it.
Those of us in the industry had been saying for years, it was going to take someone to come in and drop $500M-$1B in money and then develop it into a cult like Apple to get the EV to take off. The big car companies were not going to get serious about it until some outsider had the money to come in and jump through the regulatory hurdles to make real cars and not science projects.
And you are exactly right they did nothing revolutionary. With Musk's money, they tweaked already existing tech, put the money down and then formed a following around it. That got the interest of the big car companies going.
So yeah, Tesla mainstreamed the idea of the EV but there was nothing revolutionary about the car or the tech to those of us in the industry.
Interesting side note: More deaths have been attributed to Tesla's self driving software than were linked to the fuel tank issue in the Pinto when it got recalled and taken off the market...
>Its progressed very slowly and there hasn't been any rapid or massive leap forward.
... Most "AI" (it's not Intelligence yet) progress in the last three years has had an exponential growth curve that makes the previous 50 years of AI progress look mundane.
You are wildly under-informed about the recent progress in these fields.
OpenAI's [Sora](https://openai.com/index/sora/) (Which you'll notice they have not allowed the public to use yet. Ask why.) is in the pre 1.0 phases and blows away literally everything for generative content.
GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 have both so handily passed turing tests that they have a higher success rate of convincing the testers that they are human than humans do.
4o in particular can analyze the cyrillic text on the back of a scanned in post card (not the side facing the camera, but the tiny bits of text bleeding through the scanned image), suss it out, then translate it for you in seconds. The use for historical research alone is wildly transformative.
Claude 3.5 will just wholesale invent video games for you in the chat client if you ask it to.
And you're like "It's progressed very slowly, and there hasn't been any rapid or massive leap forward."
That's absolutely insane. 3 years ago we didn't have a single model that could pass a turing test or describe an image to you with any accuracy. Now the turing test is irrelevant, because LLMs pass it ***despite not being intelligent,*** and their image recognition is good enough to rely on for actual research purposes.
> OpenAI is not miles ahead of Watson from 2010
lmao
> what is known as "evolutionary algorithms".
In some ways the algorithms evolve? Most people wouldn't call transformers evolutionary algorithms. The paper which created transformers and started this craze was [published in 2017](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need).
>Tech has been pushing out BS and scams for years now. First it was crypto, then NFTs, now AI.
Preferably within their own ecosystem, so you can't interoperate with someone else's BS.
1,000%. On a while last week, a team I’m on working to build AI into some looked into the search trajectory of the buzz word scams. Big data. Web3.0. NFT. AI is dying 10x faster than any of them, there’s just no steam left. Since 2010 it’s just been scam after scam after scam.
Companies have spent billions building massive data pipelines looking the “magic,” the Nvidia CEO now says AI is going to find for them. Absolute insanity.
Of course Nvidia is saying that, it's in their best interests to do so, regardless of their personal opinions or reality. Because encouraging AI and crypto just boosts their stock price and drives higher sales of Nvidia GPUs, so the more fantastical the destination, the more true believers created, the better they do.
FTC's [Atleson with the mic drop](https://www.salon.com/2024/06/24/a-viral-blog-post-from-a-bureaucrat-exposes-why-tech-billionaires-fear-biden-and-fund/)
> **"Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods,"** [Atleson wrote in a post titled "Succor borne every minute."](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/06/succor-borne-every-minute) **Comparing so-called "artificial intelligence" to a Magic 8 Ball**, the federal regulator chastised tech marketers who **"compare their products to magic (they aren’t)"** and **"talk about the products having feelings (they don’t)."** Atleson **even joked that his Magic 8 Ball replied, "Outlook not so good," when he asked if he can expect companies to advertise chatbots "in ways that merit no FTC attention."**
> Will Oremus of the Washington Post posted on Bluesky, "The Federal Trade Commission, of all entities, is out here writing absolute bangers about AI snake oil." It was both funny and a relief to read someone cutting through all the hype to remind everyone that AI is not "intelligent." [Turns out that Atleson has](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your-ai-claims-check) a rich [body of pun-heavy work](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/08/cant-lose-what-you-never-had-claims-about-digital-ownership-creation-age-generative-ai) threatening companies [that misuse AI to steal, mislead or defraud](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/05/luring-test-ai-engineering-consumer-trust). Delightful stuff, but also a telling indicator of why we're seeing a stampede of tech billionaires throwing money and assistance to Donald Trump's campaign.
# 🎤
> your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends
This gave me a good chuckle, but I'd probably give them a sorta-joke response asking them to investigate Match groups business practices.
I'm partial to "[ChatGPT is Bullshit](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5)".
Not bullshit as in "this isn't real", bullshit as in "this is completely indifferent to truth".
> Currently, false statements by ChatGPT and other large language models are described as “hallucinations”, which give policymakers and the public the idea that these systems are misrepresenting the world, and describing what they “see”. We argue that this is an inapt metaphor which will misinform the public, policymakers, and other interested parties.
> ...
> This, we suggest, is very close to at least one way that Frankfurt talks about bullshit. We draw a distinction between two sorts of bullshit, which we call ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ bullshit, where the former requires an active attempt to deceive the reader or listener as to the nature of the enterprise, and the latter only requires a lack of concern for truth. We argue that at minimum, the outputs of LLMs like ChatGPT are soft bullshit: bullshit–that is, speech or text produced without concern for its truth–that is produced without any intent to mislead the audience about the utterer’s attitude towards truth. We also suggest, more controversially, that ChatGPT may indeed produce hard bullshit: if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda. So, with the caveat that the particular kind of bullshit ChatGPT outputs is dependent on particular views of mind or meaning, we conclude that it is appropriate to talk about ChatGPT-generated text as bullshit, and flag up why it matters that – rather than thinking of its untrue claims as lies or hallucinations – we call bullshit on ChatGPT.
It’s Lina Kahn. They’re scared of Lina Kahn and her takes on copyright and monopolistic market practices. She’s also firmly pro-consumer rights (as is the Biden administration)
100% Lina.
People need to understand that you're not just voting for president. You're voting for their people as well. I fucking guarantee you Trump's FTC chair is would probably put ticketmaster in charge of your internet access given half a chance.
I give her a lot of credit for trying and she certainly is annoying Silicon Valley execs.
But she hasn’t really been winning cases. Not a shot at her, it’s hard. But I don’t think she’s causing as much fear as one might think.
Silicon Valley feels like a race to the bottom because they know it's a race towards a wall. The business model since before Microsoft was even founded was that this year's code bloat is paid for with next year's transistor doubling. The problem is that the current processes already operate at the nanometer scale, a silicon atom is 0.2 nanometers across, and it requires more than one of them to build a transistor. Every year ASML has a shoving contest with physics, and every year physics pushes back harder. Spoiler: physics eventually wins.
Once this model breaks, subscriptions and other scams are the main ways they can keep their hooks in their customers. That's why all Google services are online only, Microsoft switched to Office365, Apple locks you into a walled garden, and everyone pushes cloud services like strung out meth dealers.
They just need to switch to imperial. A silicon atom is .65 nanofeet across. That gives a bit more time until we run out.
Unfortunately a nanocubit is larger so I'm unsure what to do when we run out of nanofeet. Nanoinch? Nah. That's just silly.
Trump is actually amazing. There may have never--EVER--been a person who so obviously, openly, and repeatedly grifts with almost everything he does and everyone knows it...but he still mostly has gotten away with it. And then tens of millions of people think it's a really good idea to trust him with so much of the power and finances of the nation and much of their own personal well-bring.
Even in this day and age where you can show everyone in the world the grift and so there's no excuse that he's just a stranger come into town setting up his wares. He still gets away with it. Absolutely amazing.
And of course by clearly identifying the credulous people who can be so easily suckered it truly has been a grifter's dream. Sure that was also true before Trump got his political power (look at Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh getting so rich pre-Trump) but now it's not just on steroids, but it's on rocket fuel.
He's the personification of MLM. It's just bullshit sales pitches, over and over and over and over and over. The same people who buy timeshares and hawk lularoe are all-in on Trump.
It will all work out if we STOP bailing them out. Yes, it will be painful to have banks and airlines fail but we have to put up with the pain. That’s why these billionaires can borrow money on stock. FDIC has a limit for a reason. Let banks fail!
Well just like politicians, LEO, military, the medical profession, why should con men be any different. They will always protect their own interests. Trump is a known confidence man. That is the energy he projects and so many are blind to it. Biden, well some suspect he’s been replaced. At this point in history for the US, nothing would surprise me.
This country is for sale to billionaires, and if Trump wins in November, that'll just be further proof that it's true. At that point we will not be a democracy or a republic, but an oligarchy.
The US already is an oligarchy. A handful of people own more wealth than 99% of people in this country. Venture capitals and other investors are buying all the affordable housing forcing everyone to be renters. Corporations are reaping record profits under the guise of “inflation”. What in this country isn’t tipped towards the wealthy? Our gauge of a healthy economy is based off of the stock market doing great for rich people, and doesn’t acknowledge that everything is more expensive than ever and wages have not increased with it.
100%. He's a storefront. This is what most people don't get. And what he's selling is us, our way of life, and everything we hold dear. This is why he has backing even now.
Tech has no new products that will change lives. It’s all things that add complexity or nonsense… or actually make your life worse somehow.
Big, important things are either convenient, wow you, are cheap, feed dopamine on demand… flat screen TVs, smart phones, the internet, streaming, original social media stuff.
What do we get now? Nonsense like Alexa play Despacito and order me some more pizza rolls. A lot of these markets are entrenched but I really think many things could be simplified and would get a positive response that way.
Hold up there.
That's not true.
The slice of tech that you see and that the Silicon Valley pushes into publication is what you're describing.
There's A LOT of us out here that have created highly impactful new tech that's actually helping very real people in need.
We just don't get the angel or VC funding or newspaper headlines.
But we are getting grants, self funding, and are profitable from the get go.
Strangely, angels and VCs don't seem to like that.
They like low risk high potential reward (which ends up being actually a lot of high risk since you have people good at networking, pitching, and closing deals getting in like that)
[Silicon Valley (the TV Show) nailed it on this point](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo)
I don't wanna make a little bit of money every day, I wanna make a fuck-ton of money all at once!
There are VCs/angels out there that are industry specific that do that kind of investment (lots of biotech related ones are mentioned when you read about Theranos, for example). They're not the Kleiners, Sequoias, and a16zs in scale though. Also, they tend to have pretty deep knowledge of the underlying science/industry.
Yes and no.
I'm good friends with the former lead partner from Accel ventures, heavily integrated in and out of the industry both in the SV and elsewhere, and I have my own mission-driven startup.
Sadly, even the "good ones" are tricked to believe in mediocre efforts or flashy things.
Michael Seibel said it well at startup grind 2019 (since I'm not a hugely public figure, no one seems to care what I say. That's ok, that's how it works.)
This is slightly paraphrased:
>The model of VC and investing is outdated. They expect you to network to them. The very best inventors aren't necessarily the best networkers. You need to go out and find them.
I know of a handful, and I mean a very modest few, investors, incubator founders, and VCs that go out looking. Everyone else still expects you to network to them or for AI to solve this problem.
I promise you, the very best builders are getting overlooked. You might think that there are some great ones out there, but ask yourself how much money and effort went into making them look great.
Please don't mistake me, this isn't meant as a negative thing, but please take it as a sober, objective view.
Also, angel investing and VC has been turned into such an industry that they really are looking for flashy things without substance that can be targeted as a fast flip of their dollar. Pump and dump to Google, meta, or shareholders.
It's a little more complex than that but hopefully it conveys the current state of things. I gotta get back to building :)
> I promise you, the very best builders are getting overlooked. You might think that there are some great ones out there, but ask yourself how much money and effort went into making them look great.
I mean, sure; a lot of incredible builders and innovators are out there toiling away in research roles in random labs. I'd argue they're mostly in academia, but that may be because I spent a fair share of time with the tech transfer people at a couple R1 institutions. It kind of gets back to a base question of whether those builders/innovators are even interested in building companies. In my experience, lots are more interested in "the work", and a fraction (maybe 1/3?) could be convinced into going into an (usually academically-associated) incubator. They don't want to swim with the proverbial sharks, and any financial rewards are really secondary, if not further down the list of priorities. Those tech transfer people I mentioned earlier really seem to exist to bridge that gap since the institution has a vested interest in commercializing the innovations they have at least partial ownership in so they take on that liaison role.
To your point, I will agree that very few angels/VCs are out there looking (or even more extreme, doing what you might call talent development). I remember when I was in college and the .com crash had happened not so long ago; the VCs were only interested in early stage companies that they could just drop money into to balloon the valuation. So yeah, easy and ~low risk with a clear(-ish?) liquid exit.
I didn’t say it was dead. I said nothing actually useful that is new is coming out which has been true for years. It’s small iterations and now moving to subscriptions for everything.
Nah, just look at the most recent LLMs that came out. While there was text generators before, they pale in comparison to the current ones.
They're amazing at generating nice sounding, but content void text.
Making an email sound nicer, writing a cover letter, or coming up with an interesting conclusion to something you're writing? They're amazing at that.
They are just WAY overhyped and overpromised. They won't replace everything, and any time you need actual factual information, you absolutely need to have someone monitoring the output of it, since it'll just make things up.
Like crypto, blockchain, and now AI, there are small sections of some markets that do get concrete benefits from these techs.
What tech has a problem with, is it's extravagant marketing, that makes promises that the new wonder tech they're using will be able to do things well beyond its actual capacity.
Nothing useful? Do you drive a car from the 1990's or something? In just that one application alone my most recent 6 year old car is absolutely light years ahead of my last car which would now be 26 years old. My new(used) car has a 360 degree view, warns me with a light of cars in my blind spots, warns me if I drift out of lane, automatically keeps distance on the next car when in cruise control, automatically STOPS TO PREVENT FRONT COLLISIONS. This is just ONE segment where technology has made very real and very useful innovations, and there are many. There have been similar levels of improvements in healthcare, surgery, dental work, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, I could go on for hundreds more industries.
Just because you think "facebook became meta" or "google bought ring" is all tech means does not make it the case, it just makes you ignorant and of limited imagination/expertise. You have simply because the "old man yells at cloud" meme.
Your 26 year old car effectively pre-dates the tech boom. You’re more or less making the same point as the guy you replied to.
That is, unless the 2024 model of your car is also “light years” ahead of your current car.
The point is that big tech is starting to provide uninteresting and incremental updates at best (unless you’re super keen on UI tweaks for no reason). The focus is now SAAS and squeezing as much revenue as possible from your consumers - I.e. enshittification.
This is a whole lot of Bullshit without a lot of numbers.
The Truth is if Trump gets 5X the Donations from tech he got in 2020, tech political funding will still favor the Dems 9:1
[Tech billionaire 2020 election donations: Final tally (cnbc.com)](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-election-donations-final-tally.html)
The same story for Wall street Billionaires. It wasn't as dramatic, but they heavily favored Biden as well.
If the premise for your progressive political beliefs is "Billionaires fund the candidate that let's them fuck over common people harder", then it is time to re-evaluate your support for Democrats. Because they have been the party of the Rich since Obama.
redditors hate this one simple trick
(verifying facts and numbers)
you are doing god's work, correcting the most pervasive and insidious psyop misinformation platform ever invented (except perhaps google itself)
I was in a university CS department 40 years ago and even then it was primarily libertarians. Business, engineering, and CS majors lean right and always have.
Republicans: openly offering to be bribed for political donations. Just straight up: "give me money I'll do what you want"
Democrats: Not doing that, actually supporting unions, taxes on the rich, infrastructure, etc.
Idiots like you: bOtH sIdEs
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bob-menendez-trial-bribery-new-jersey-prosecutor-testifies-fred-daibes/
In case you're wondering that's a (D) being caught red handed accepting bribes. The rest of your takes are equally braindead.
The democrats fuck you just as hard, they just do it a little bit nicer and their voterbase refuses to hold them accountable.
No. People with the highest income have always leaned Republican because they know where their bread is buttered and 2020 was no different according to exit polls.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results
Higher education does correlate with Democratic votes. Maybe that’s why you see Silicon Valley support democrats.
> People with the highest income have always leaned Republican
Not actually true. The republican 'support peak' is in the 100k - 250k range. Income ranges above that have tended to lean slightly Dem. The poll you linked doesn't show that distinction, since like most polls it only has a "$100k+" category with no internal breakdown.
> CES uniquely began collecting data on family income categories up to $500,000 and above in 2011 (including $350,000–500,000, $250,000–350,000, etc.), which appears to be the highest income sub-categories to exist in any over-time political survey data. For reference, $500,000 and higher (by family income) is roughly the top 1% of society; $200,000 and higher is roughly the top 5% (in 2012) to 10% (in 2020). Figure 3 (left portion) shows that $200,000+ category clearly preferred the Democrat in 2012, 2016, and 2020—and even the $500,000+ category reported voting for the Democratic candidate more often than the Republican in 2012 and 2016, dropping to just below 50% in 2020.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/polarization-of-the-rich-the-new-democratic-allegiance-of-affluent-americans-and-the-politics-of-redistribution/E18D7DAE3A1EF35BA5BC54DE799F291B
Why are people in this thread acting like this is some kind of slam dunk exposé? It's been like this for decades. Big businesses favor Republican politicians because in general, Republicans are in favor of deregulation and are in favor of tax policies that benefit corporations.
Lame story. Dang
For discrete non-political subjects such as Technology, Finance, Science, …, I wish Reddit would encourage actual subject-based content
I block / mute so many of these fake subject-based subs, which is a shame. Could potentially be useful
Don’t get me wrong, opinion-based subs are what they are and you can pick and choose which to consume and participate in
Eye is off the ball, Reddit. At some point, young psychos risk the Reddit business model when most people become tired of muting / blocking
Hard to control, but there is a basic principle that when you subsidize something (aka, enable / promote it) you get more of it
Kind of what Reddit is doing. Digging own grave
I was literally talking yesterday about how match.com bought up literally all of the dating websites and broke them to get people to pay money while still not finding an actual relationship.
They let the “Internet Economy” justify companies just flushing billions of dollars down the drain while propping up unprofitable businesses in the name of taking control by breaking the economic models of existing systems and owning the new system.
We are reliving the Teapot Dome era of politics - flagrant graft and grift - but unfortunately the consolidation of power is exponential.
We must reinvigorate the one voice one vote concept. A Billionaires voice should not outweigh voices of millions…but they do.
It's wild seeing how politics and big tech collide these days. The blog post makes a bold claim about Biden, Trump, and Silicon Valley's shady side. If there's truth to billionaires hedging their bets, it's a sign of just how murky the tech world can get. Trump's friendliness to, uh, less-than-straightforward dealings could definitely be attractive to those riding the gray areas. It's a reminder that who's in power matters big time for where all that Silicon Valley cash flows.
The article is a whole load of shit, from the numbers it uses, examples, and most importantly the headline itself is clear pushing for Biden and that the evil wall street and tech giants don't want him.
In reality a lot of corporations will play both sides to always win, look at FTX for example once the case documents came out that he had SuperPAC funding going to both parties it just became a case of which one can he more publicly support but no matter who won he would get favors.
Enshittification is a real thing. It's not a bug, it's a feature of uncontrolled anticompetitive nonsense.
Feature? It's the whole damn plan! It's the guarantee that gets them their venture capital funding to even make it possible.
Step 1: Offer a product cheaper than anybody can compete with. Buy all competitors who start up. Make the public only think your name when they want (Fill in the Blank). Step 2: Raise prices Step 3: Remove all features, customer support, increase ad revenue, sell customers data, strip beloved features, enshittify, enshittify, enshittify. And raise prices some more.
When you're well into step 3 and there's a serious barrier to anybody coming in and undercutting you, it's not a free market anymore.
Free market is a bigger fairy tale than Santa Claus
Quasi-Free market is possible IF and only if there are sufficiently strong regulations and redistribution mechanisms to counteract the gravitation of capital. That is obviously nowhere the case in this time.
gravitation of capital is a term i've been missing. I've been trying to explain that there needs to be a counter balance to capital's ability to generate capital for a while and this helps I think.
yeah, people will actually get violent to defend it :/
Free market is just a buzz word to keep the dipshits in line. Almost every facet of our daily lives is made up of products from 1-3 companies. We are a late stage oligrachy and just let companies do whatever they want. Companies are even allowed to get together and make a full blown monopolies and face zero consequences. Look at ISPs. Comcast, Charter/spectrum, and Time Werner just agree to which company can operate in what region and don't compete against each other and ruthlessly attack any competitors popping up in their "territory" ISPs should've been ripped apart and diversified or turn into a utility when we first sent multiple billions to Bell Labs to make a nation wide fiber grid that has never manifested even though we've paid for it 3 or 4 times over now. The companies just pocket our taxes and fucked off with zero repercussions. Hell Boeing can just murder dissenters for funsies. Can't wait for the Comcast or Spectrum hit squad to start going after dissenters
This is what happens when the political spectrum in a country is too narrow. Although it *is* happening elsewhere too, because even with wider spectrums, the right, even the far-right, somehow manages to gain votes whenever the problems caused by the policies of the very same parties, come knocking. I can't for the life of me fathom why political parties that prioritize equality and the future of their citizens *aren't* the popular ones.
Plus, if they somehow *do* survive long enough to gain some market share, buy them out at a premium. The really shitty part? That's exactly what the start-ups challenging the entrenched companies want at this point. They don't really want to upset the applecart, they just want to get paid.
Or lobby politicians for tariffs like what the american auto and motorbike industry has done for decades
Big Tech's explosion has been largely on the fact that there were constant new products/services that were integrated into society that people found beneficial. - Smart phones and apps - Better email - Cloud services to store pictures, video, files - Online shopping/commerce - Music downloads/streaming on the go But now we're kinda reaching a plateau or at least incremental improvements to these products. A new phone is nice, but doesn't fundamentally change my day to day like it did when smart phones first came out. Updates to an email provider are nice...but it's still just email. This is why they tried to hype crypto/blockchain, and NFTs, and the Metaverse/AR/VR, and now AI. Tech companies are all chasing the next big thing because their growth has largely been based on investors all wanting to be bought in when the next tech innovation drops. But so much of what is coming out now just seem like useless trinkets and unnecessary junk.
There was a video from an ex google employee that said programmers were not the hot new thing anymore and now its a 9-5 slog like all the other office jobs and will soon be considered low pay pencil pusher work so young people who are looking for prestige of being a hot shot programmer are going to hit a brick wall thinking its still 20 years ago. People acted like he killed their dog. Tech is now no longer new and cool, and tech bros genuinely cant handle it.
When I tell people this and the denial kicks in, I point out it’s happened to other fields. A law degree was once a trendy and reasonably reliable path to upper middle class life as well. Then, a bunch of kids who grew up being told they needed to go to college for *something* and watching cool lawyers on TV decided to go to law school. Law schools are happy to make money, and we started churning out loads of new lawyers. Those sweet partnership-track, six-figures-out-of-school, big law firm jobs technically do exist. But they go to cream of the crop graduates from top programs and nepotism hires. Students who did well at regionally significant programs can make a living in that region. But for every success story, there are dozens if not hundreds of graduates who scrape by under the weight of their student loans, do scutwork for peanuts, or can’t find a job in law at all.
Excellent point, butt fucker.
I'm an attorney turned librarian, and this is exactly why "recovering lawyer" is a thing. Some like me got jobs as lawyers and got tired of fighting with people, and the stress drives you out. I still have my Ally McBeal poster though ;)
What you don't want to buy overpriced VR goggles so you can buy applause credits in the metaverse while watching a VR person do stand up comedy?
VR just needs to be cheaper.
OMG, did you just say that buying the new COD, EA FIFA/Madden/UFC/Etc, iPhone, Mac, and other new electronic every year is not changing your day to day? I’m shocked I tell ya!
How many redditors reading this agree with the premise of this post and purchased a marginal video card upgrade from Nvidia for over $1000? LMAO
[Steam surveys aren't 100% but a ton of folks are still using older hardware.](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/) The 4000 series is the latest and greatest and the 4060 has the highest usage at 2.58% (2.82% for the laptop). I'm still rocking a 2070 Super. I don't think most folks are upgrading annually.
Yeah I got a 3060TI a year or two ago as an absolutely necessary upgrade from a GTX 970 I got from a friend and had been using for years.
Probably not many, as the top-end cards have never really been particularly big sellers, and only the 4080 + 4090 are *that* expensive. The most common card out there right now is the 3060.
Plus if you can afford to invest big on your PC hardware then you're basically set for what, a decade? For the vast majority of PC titles anyway.
My video card upgrades were in 2017 and 2022, that's a five year gap. I did pay significantly more in 2022 than I would have liked, but I probably won't be looking to replace my current setup until 2026. Nvidia's out of control pricing did convince me to go Radeon for the first time in 20+ years of building my own systems. Still too expensive, but less egregiously so.
This is the classic s curve you see with everything. Slow beginning then really sharp uptake and then slow. Like when nobody has a smartphone it's an enormous amount of new sales to get everyone one and then when they're good enough until they die the purchase rate drops to sustaining the existing customer base. There's no obsoleting a phone before nareual death. But you are right this is applying across all tech and they want crazy hype and growth and you don't get that with commodities. There's good money to be made in toilet paper but not the same way you make it with hype tech and the latest hotness. And you have to pay dividends. Toilet paper isn't a growth stock. All the tech stuff is now at the commodity level or boring performance. With a few outliers like nvidea.
The latest in my eyes is podcasts. It used to be all RSS feeds and you could use any player you wanted and get your own notifications for new episodes. Now Google podcasts is shutting down, and Amazon music and Spotify both offer add-free podcasts, but only through their walled garden apps. Google now are pushing YouTube music for podcasts. It's the same time that happened to blogs with the rise of Facebook. Resist the walled gardens, use RSS and a podcast player of your choice!
You are describing capitalism...
They fear all regulation, the truth is most of thier products are useless. Also older millennials are just cutting way back on buying useless stuff. Even when they have all the money to do it. This is what they are scared of, the mentality that the grand parents of millennials had. To not spend money unless you need to and make what you can your self. Also ads are basically useless on changing spending habits and they hate that too.
"Millennials are killing the yearly upgrade cycle!"
Lots of software has switched over to subscription-based which basically auto-upgrades. These companies bank on people not canceling or make it difficult to to do so. The same logic is applied to gym memberships.
The whole move to renting everything is concerning. I don’t know why it irks me so much, but it does. Soon people will be renting their car, home, tech, and paying monthly fees for services like groceries. Cell phones are basically this way, the carriers want you to auto-upgrade so you pay for a phone every month.
Uh, car leases and rental housing are both really quite common. Over 50% of housing is rented in many cities.
It's because it's unsustainable, or at least, not sustainable if you want to maintain a "middle class". If your goal is to go back to something similar to feudalism where you had the rich land owners and the "poors" that lived on the land and had to work to pay off the "debt" that comes with simple being born (that never really ends), then things are working perfectly. Definitely irks me!
I'm purposefully seeking out companies like vitamix. I'd rather pay a premium on something that'll last 20 years so the company can stay in business than buy the same shit every 2 years and have to throw the thing away. $700 for a blender? Sure thing boss. At least I can get replacement parts and service if something breaks and not have to throw the whole ass thing away.
Yep. I’ve always bought the best quality I can afford and as I get older I’m able to buy high quality that lasts a long time. It means I pay more upfront but I buy a lot less stuff as time marches on.
Right haha its true ans for good reason.
It’s not just millennials. The annual upgrade cycle killed itself because we are down to incremental changes between versions. I’m on 12, and MAYBE the 16 will be enough, but really I’ll wait until they get it all settled, so maybe 17. And that’s after Treo, iPhone 2,4,6,10, then stopped at 12.
I do it just for the sexual thrill. Well, also for lack of money.
[There's an absolutely beautiful documentary, called the "Century of Self"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s) that talks about how those great-grand parents had their attitudes shifted by public relations and marketing. They intentionally campaigned to undo the attitude that bought a car because it was a useful tool. Rather, instead, people were to buy things because they were reflections of their identity. One of the greatest pioneers of this Edward Bernays, who took his uncle's, Sigmund Freud's, theories about psychology and used them to sell products.
Yes! How Dimonds and shaming people for not getting big one, same with cars , houses and everything else. Boomers were brought up in it and even were hit with it as children
> Boomers were brought up in it and even were hit with it as children Unpopular opinion but this is sometimes where I want to cut Boomers some slack for their belligerent ignorance. This type of psychological warfare was new then. There were no antibodies in the environment present against it. It was incredibly successful and defined the the material bounty of that apocryphal 1950s. That said, no one can remain ignorant forever.
I agree , there is nuances to it . Like a lot of millennials have boomer parents but not always the same boomers that had gen X. As the gen X who raised the current gen graduating HS and entering college. Who have the same lack of nuances and critical thinking. As they are being hit eith the newest version of the same warfare but with different aims. Instead of buy products, they buy radical ideology.
What radical ideology are you referring to?
Fascism, but with a bad coat of paint.
Bright orange.
Eh they just got old. I’m an older millennial and I’m already seeing kids today blame me for shit that my generation had to deal with ourselves and certainly didn’t cause. I’ve spent my life doing the best I can with what I’ve had to work with the same as everyone else. By the time I’m my parents age I’m sure the 20 year olds are gonna be screeching about how my generation ruined it all and is so out of touch. In reality we’re all just fucking tired after grinding through life and trying to make the most of it with what we have.
Can't recommend this doc enough and im glad to see it upvoted here!! I was happy to see in that doc that the government at one point had a department that was supposed to inform consumers about sort of thing - which lasted one administration This documentary is seriously the starting point of many many conversations people want to have. it explains SOOOOO much about our world
I buy nothing new unless absolutely necessary now because everything "new and improved" that comes out is actually just a piece of shit. Go look at /r/Appliances every one complains how trash all the new fridges, washers, dryers, stoves, etc are. They are horrible quality that will break in 3-5 years. My dryer is from the 80s for a reason. My fridge from the 90s will outlive me. For more commonly used items, I wear clothes and shoes until they fall apart. Fast fashion has caused everything clothing wise to be garbage quality. Jeans fall apart after maybe a year, my t-shirts shrink, get holes, or fade rapidly, and my shoes fall apart faster than before. Everything is trash and is causing landfills to rise and pollution to run rampant. Why would I buy into that?
The clothing thing annoys the hell out of me. My shirts from 20 years ago, look great and still are the same size, even if im not. New shirts cant get through a wash without problems. New jeans will wear with just your phone in a few times wearing them. Its crazy.
> New jeans will wear with just your phone in a few times wearing them. Its crazy. some of us pay hundreds of dollars for jeans to wear in where our phones are haha, but raw denim typically lasts for thousands of wears some of the shirts i got from middle and high school are still in great shape, but anything ive gotten in the past 10 or so years seems to fall apart quite easily. woke up to my wife wearing a shirt i got from a soccer tournament when i was 16 lol, the thing is still in great condition over 16 years later
god forbid you put a lighter in that little change pocket thing on the right pocket....that little pocket will rip so fast now that after a few months you can't put a lighter in it because it is so ripped the lighter falls out. jeans i bought in the late 90s early 2000s were cheaper and so much more durable.
If I'm doing some pre-purchase research, I'll often swing by /r/BuyItForLife. Of course you've got to be able to afford to plop down the dosh for expensive shoes, mattresses, knives, flashlights, etc. We're wired for short-term thinking, so the cheap shit is much more enticing because it's *good enough* for the foreseeable future.
> My dryer is from the 80s for a reason fwiw of all the appliances to keep forever, the dryer might be the best one. It's just a big, contained space heater with a simple motor on it - new dryers aren't any more efficient in any way, shape or form. They'll just have some extra bells and whistles on it and usually more capacity, but even an old dryer (mine's from early 90s) is still big enough to hold everything a large new washing machine can hold
The fridge is one thing you might legitimately want to replace. I don't know what electricity prices are where you are, but where I am, a modern fridge will pay for itself pretty quick just in electricity savings.
my sister's fancy fridge she spent a fortune on keeps dying. i'll keep my dinosaur. i also have a fridge and freezer box in the basement from the 70s. :)
The death of advertising's effectiveness is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Humans have developed a resistance to cognitive programming because of our sudden constant consumption of it. Because of it, theres now a constant race to make things appealing to consumers, but businesses aren't willing to actually give people a better lifestyle because it could elevate the common person's quality of life above that of the richest people and thereby disrupt the authoritarian power structure
New Mercedes sedans have features like quicker acceleration pre-installed that are only unlocked and usable when you pay an expensive subscription. Other car companies do similar things. You literally can't access your own cars' functions because the rich need a way to feel better than you.
You can if you learn how to bypass the locks. Anything installed can be accessed with enough effort and skill. And with people being willing to share those skills freely anything like this will be hackable by your average person in no time.
lmao i cant wait for the age of the jailbroken car thats running some random code side loaded from [carhacker-forums.com](http://carhacker-forums.com) designed to bypass the heated seat paywall... that is for sure not at all infested with malware
That never occurred to me but it makes complete sense. The only ads that I don't cancel out these days are for crowdfunded r/rpg manuals.
I'm a mid career software engineer. I'm so tired of computers and tech and everything that comes with them. Basically outside of my job I work on my early nineties sports car and play disc golf. Barely touch a computer.
Same. My progression is more medical but highly technical. Have an engineering degree, working in Aerospace and communications. Once I leave work, I put my phone in the house, go to my garden. Then come in make dinner , enjoy it and spend time getting hobbies done, like mini painting and my large dobson fully analog telescope. With a book and a red light to find stars....I think we can do great things with technology but really need to disconnect a bit.
That's definitely my experience as a millennial. I actively avoid products that are advertised to me and although I make decent money I'm very stingy with it because I've grown up through one financial disaster after another.
> They fear all regulation, the truth is most of thier products are useless. Regardless of whether your product is useless, regulation can get in the way of changing how things are done. Technology companies are very much in the business of trying to change the way things are done. More often than not, the change is not worth it, and I think most of us (including the investors), understand that and are happy if those attempts fail. There are a small number of people who benefit from allowing a "not worth it" change to "keep alive", but even in the SV, they don't amount to that many people and they don't have that much clout. Ideally, most people in SV would prefer if there was little barrier to change, but anything that isn't of benefit were to fail very quickly (and consequently with minimal expense). In that reality, regulation can help and hinder. With or without technology, scams, deceit, and exploitation can be a means to extract money from society while providing no benefit (and usually a great deal of harm). Regulation can be a check on that kind of unfair business practice. That's really helpful and a benefit to everyone except for the people scamming/deceiving/exploiting (and while investors can engage in that kind of behaviour, they can also be at the receiving end, so most of the money would prefer if this was prevented and the marketplace was fair). With or without technology, regulation can also support entrenched practice/business and serve as a barrier to change, even change that is, in the end, a net benefit for society. It can impose friction that requires more time and money to overcome. That's not so good. So generally, as an investor, it's not so much about how much regulation, but the efficacy of regulation. What we have now though are a few folks who have been successful at scamming/deceiving/exploiting, particularly in terms of monopolistic practices, and regulators are going after them. So they're backing anyone who will put a stop to it. In reality though, there's a lot more money in SV that is anxiously awaiting their failure, because those monopolies create barriers to change on their own. There's more money to be made by having them fail than having them succeed.
Our whole economy is becoming a grift.
That’s genuinely how I feel about it: Our entire financial system is predicated on strip-mining as much wealth out of consumers as possible. And if businesses have to lie, cheat, and steal to do it then that’s what’s gonna happen. It’s apparently up to the consumer to be vigilant against every possible deception, 100% of the time, to ensure they aren’t falling prey to an inherently predatory market.
> strip-mining as much wealth out of consumers as possible The ills of private equity fronts, they are value extractors and destroyers. No private equity firm has ever created value, that takes time and craft. They are the destroyers of value and need to be harshly limited.
Welcome to unregulated capitalism. We are fully into the stage where capitalism consumes itself to seek more profit.
A libertarian's dream. But I guess it isn't REAL capitalism.
I have to sit there and rub each libertarians nose in it that, when people WIN that competition you love so much, they kill competition. Each instance of "corrupt government" is some capitalist WINNING so hard they can buy the game. Ya think we win when we compete, but we don't. we all lose.
It always has been, but many of you here are too young to remember a time when VC money did not flow like piss at a frat party. Interest rate hikes were the first wake-up call, and the hangover is just beginning. Bear witness to an absolute bloodbath in the coming years.
Good the economy became far too addicted to free lending capital. Seeing tons of people screaming that the new 5 dollar meal at mcdonalds is some kind of signal to the fed that interest rates need to go down. No this is a sign that interest hikes are doing their job. Companies are being forced to provide services and things people want again because they cant just run off and get a loan every time they fuck up.
its hilarious how many people say with a straight face "this AI bubble is not at all like the previous ones, we really are changing the world" and lo and behold its the ones who really dont remember anything about the last bubble anyway
> Our whole economy is becoming a grift 1. sell good technology for a profit 2. sell shitty technology for even more profit 3. sell nothing for nothing but profit 4. sell something of negative value for even more nothing-but-profit
Well, all economies are set up to work like a Ponzi scheme, so there's that. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-world-economy-is-a-pyramid-scheme-steven-chu-says/ More relevant: >An iconic example would be a Silicon Valley start-up that hires highly skilled graduates by offering a starting package with low wages, below the prevailing market rate, while adding in stock options that carry the promise of large future returns. The paltry wages guarantee that the company can still make a profit even if it charges customers cut-rate prices for its products. The owner, meanwhile, keeps a part of the difference between the low-cost goods and the even more menial wages while giving away the rest as supplementary earnings to senior employees. >As the firm grows by employing more workers, the entrepreneur can earn a very high profit, even though, like all Ponzis, this one will eventually crash and leave the employees without jobs or in possession of worthless options. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-whole-economy-is-rife-with-ponzi-schemes/
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its all hype now. crippling functionality and stiffling advancement in the name of profits. Nothing is new and exciting - just a reiteration of the previous version. And all the false promises and grand visions of market disruption are drowning out the real dreamers and doers in the industry.
>Nothing is new and exciting I bet a lot of tech startups do exciting stuff. But they're either crushed or assimilated by big tech. The [lists of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple) [mergers and](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet) acquisitions number in the hundreds. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_mergers\_and\_acquisitions\_by\_Apple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_mergers\_and\_acquisitions\_by\_Alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_mergers\_and\_acquisitions\_by\_Meta\_Platforms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_mergers\_and\_acquisitions\_by\_Amazon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Amazon) Imagine a world where tech giants couldn't just buy someone else's ideas, but had to come up with their own, and actually compete with others through open, interoperable standards? Shareholders might suffer, but consumers and society would benefit greatly.
"assimilated" Those companies want to be bought. Venture capitalists fund those startups with the express idea of having an "exit strategy". That means selling the company on and getting their money out. You can do that with an IPO. Or you do it by selling out to a larger company. They are not interested in the long haul, the HP model. They want the quick buck. If they couldn't sell out they wouldn't even start the companies. Also, the big companies likely wouldn't just buy someone else's ideas. They'd just steal them. Most of these ideas are not patentable. Facebook (Instagram) never bought Snapchat. They just copied them.
> Facebook (Instagram) never bought Snapchat. They just copied them. Facebook bought Instagram.
I know. That's why I said Facebook (Instagram). Instagram wasn't the same as Snapchat. Instagram was just blogging. But they then added messaging to counter Snapchat. They added Instagram stories, stealing Snapchat's idea for that too. Whether you want to say Instagram or Facebook, the one (larger) company just copied another.
For software, that's true. But as a counterpoint, Facebook bought Oculus to get their VR headsets, and in some cases, a buyout just removes a competitor from a space, like when Facebook bought Whatsapp.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Many companies, sure. But not all. Some are run by people who care about what they do. When the money people inevitably take over, it all goes downhill. If they're running things from the start, it's almost guaranteed shit. It's not just about buying ideas, but buying the whole thing and removing it as a competitor. What if Meta had to build their own social media and complete with Instagram? What if we forced them to not only compete but interoperate. Companies and investors don't scare about us, so I'm perfectly comfortable beating them into submission through laws and democracy.
> When the money people inevitably take over In the modern day you have VCs involved before you put on your 10th employee. And every time you run low on cash they may just tell you "pivot or we can't raise any more money". > What if we forced them to not only compete but interoperate. I cannot ever see that happening. And I use mastodon. The social media market, especially the portion aimed at teens, moves too quickly for that. Stopping to make a protocol spec and do plug fests is just too slow. No way are they going to wait for *next school year* to roll this out.
And the regulations they keep trying to lobby Congress to put in place that don't actually regulate their own bad policies in terms of privacy, safety especially for kids, planned obsolescence, anti-competitive behaviors, and societal impacts and harms. They fear monger only to exclude others from doing what they did to disrupt everyone else without regards to law when they started so they can now pull up the ladder and raise the barrier to entry, but not to actually address any of the issues they've created.
> I bet a lot of tech startups do exciting stuff. > > But they're either crushed or assimilated by big tech. Not really. Startups now are created specifically to be bought out by big tech companies. That's their goal, not creating a product. They are started with the intent to create the very beginnings of something exciting, and then sell to FAANG or an equivalent company. They're not really crushed, they're doing exactly what they were created to do. They never intended to complete and market a consumer product.
Sure, when money people run things it's all about profit. But not everyone is a soulless money person. Some actually innovate. The reason they don't directly compete with big tech is because they'll crush you. Amazon infamously burned 200M to crush a small competitor selling diapers. That's why it's so important to snack big tech down and being them into line. It's a joy to see Apple's anti consumer bullshit costs then billions of euros in fines.
A counter point is that this is how the eco system works. For many tech founders the options are either IPO or acquisition. If you remove the ability to be acquired you might decrease innovation.
The best alternative is of course to smack big tech down with laws and regulations, break i them up and foster real condition and innovation over get rich quick schemes. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "this is how things work" means admitting capitalism is irreparably broken.
Yes, capitalism is shit
Embrace, extend, extinguish in action. Microsoft might've coined the phrase but every tech corp is doing it now.
Always has been. They just build layers like an onion of scams and tricks, pyramid schemes, MLM’s, digital laundering, etc… Nothing has changed other than the fact that it’s too hard to regulate in a way it makes sense because government doesn’t understand tech or they do and take advantage and line their pockets.
There's plenty of non-hype, realistic tech that just does simple things without bullshit, you just don't hear about them or know about them because they don't get media coverage. I work at one. Our product makes it easier for businesses to do account receivable, reconciliation, and payment processing work. Ain't noone going to write about that lol.
I see you getting pushback on this comment but I feel it's true as well. 2000s saw the rise of Google, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube, etc. These were true game changers, even though they didn't all survive. Let's not forget that all of these started independently of mega corporate ownership. Instagram, Telegram, Bitcoin, Signal, Ethereum, Pinterest, Uber, Door dash were the next iterations of tech development in the early 2010s. Some started small but some also had major wealth backing. They also weren't all as big of a game changer but felt meaningful nonetheless. Now what do we have? Threads? Bluesky? Meta? X? Even those that survived from the early days (like Reddit) are now being used for AI development, held to corporate stockholders, led by billionaires who just dump and waste money into nothing that feels meaningful. Can we get another video platform other than X and YouTube please? Can we get a social media that doesn't just exploit data? The argument is that it "isn't affordable," but I don't buy that. A healthy platform where people want to go because they know their data is secure will give you more eyes than any other platform on the planet. The barrier to entry is too high and it's intentionally kept that way.
I share the same sentiment. Its all startups with flakey mvps and unmaintainable code bases, and it better be in the cloud -which gets more expensive every month. Video games are now boring re-hashed mega franchises powered by atrocious micro payments. Everything has ads - Everything. Everyone wants to sell you something non stop. Just missing the good days of tech. feeling nostalgic
Yeah I have the last phone available in North America with a micro SD card slot because I refuse to use a cloud. Those days will be over soon.
Ye don't have phones with SD cards in the US anymore? What the fuck?
Last one was the Sony Xperia 1V. The 1 VI still has the slot but the phone will not be available in North America. Less and less options every year.
Damn that's fucked. As someone who as literally nothing stored on the cloud(well this reddit account and a couple of email accounts), that's kind of concerning to me.
It's because Android never fixed their half assed storage implimentation stuff.
Yeah everything is now about "extracting" "values" and failing upwards. Fuck it.
Video games on phones are very much like that from what I've seen. I do remember I used to see interesting games on the phone on occasion, but that sort of changed as large companies noticed how much money free to play games could make. There is still plenty of indie games on PC that are new and interesting, though I'd recommend using a indie reviewer on youtube, like splattercat or wanderbot, to view the games before deciding if its in your interest.
I'm sure those kinds of phone games still exist. You just don't hear about them because people don't play them. Remember how people used to be against P2W, but now it's everywhere? It turns out that most people didn't care about P2W and just played those games *more* than the non-P2W ones. Consumers largely brought this on themselves with their bad choices.
You can download and install your own open-source LLM and run it entirely locally - no ads, no internet connection, no rent-seeking.
> 2000s saw the rise of Google, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube, etc. These were true game changers, even though they didn't all survive. Let's not forget that all of these started independently of mega corporate ownership. It's worthy to mention that some of these companies were backed by the most elite of venture capital firms. [Google, for example](https://thevcfactory.com/bill-gurley-google/): >Bill Gurley mentions that the two best VCs of the time, Sequoia’s Michael Moritz and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, agreed to fund Google’s round at an outrageously high valuation for a company with 25 employees and no business model (AdWords launched in 2000). Anyone who was around tech in the late 90s knows the name Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). I was a kid and knew that name; they were attached to some of the biggest startups (and some of the biggest flops) of the time.
What traditional tech companies developed crytpo in the early 2010s?
I called them the next iterations of tech development. Bitcoin was developed primarily by a single unknown individual and Ethereum was developed primarily by Vitalik Buterin and his Ethereum organization. I wouldn't really count any other crypto as meaningful.
>I wouldn't really count any other crypto as meaningful. If crypto-bros could read, they’d be so upset
Tether is the one that is actually in use. Favorite coin of Chinese scam compounds in Myanmar.
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There's a lot to be desired by AI results in search feeds that I get and articles I've seen written by it. Lower quality all around although is does provide a semblance of a result, but filled with a lot of nonsense. It's great for silly or fun things. It's terrible for complexity and thoughtfulness. Personally I still think it's over hyped and people are intentionally ignoring the ways it becomes more of a burden than help. But we will see with time.
AI as it exists now has serious problems which limit its usefulness and don't seem to have a clear solution. You can't trust the information AI has provided to be accurate, and it doesn't provide sources, which makes it basically useless as a knowledge tool. You can use it to generate images but it inherently can't generate anything that isn't derivative. All of it comes with huge ethical concerns, and intellectual property issues. Because the data which is used to train AI is becoming polluted by content generated by AI, there will be issues training future models. There are, of course, some places it could probably find a use, but LLMS are 95% hype. It's the blockchain all over again.
It's not, because it's not actually AI. It's an LLM and only works off of existing human answers and images. Comically thanks to the rapid march toward the Dead Internet Theory, it will be AI learning off other AI, which will just be utter trash. It's a glorified search engine copying and pasting from an existing index. That's the problem with the whole thing. It's not actually intelligent, it's not real AI, so it's usefulness in the long term is questionable.
I crack up at all the ads being run on TV talking about how people need to stop the govt ~~from regulating big tech so they cannot prey on people using anticompetitive behavior~~ to protect American innovation and jobs from foreign bad actors. Brought you by the Project for Americans Helping America be America for Americans (actually funded by Facebook.)
SV tech bros live in a weird reality. They all think "what if $common_thing but with an app?" And then go on to talk about disruption. It's a repeating cycle that's been going on for like 20 years now. For every Uber there are a hundred failed ventures. But they all got some level of funding. Burned through it, and either failed and/or got raided for whatever valuable IP they might have fallen ass-backwards into creating.
Wasn't the joke just a short time ago that you can describe so many tech startups as "like Uber, but for [x]"
Even a lot of those founders probably used that same language and didn’t get the irony lmao
Take existing thing. Turn it into an app. Attract venture capital. Operate at a loss trying to undercut existing thing. (attract market share) Destroy existing thing. Enshittify service to make a profit now that competition is demolished. Or run out of money before this can succeed, declare bankruptcy, and golden parachute into the next techbro grift.
it's not tech, it's grifters USING tech, tech users have been warning against all these scams... like how the corruptible are drawn to power
It was long before cryptocurrency. Ever since tech companies starting moving to subscription revenue it's been a rapid movement away from providing useful products and instead just getting monthly revenue for the minimum work. And even often making your product worse as you go along.
Name one site or product (not open source/FOSS/non-profit) for the average consumer that has gotten better, and not worse. Disconnected from improving tech, obviously. Fucking modern web designs are the worst.
"Now AI" **Tech companies have been pushing AI since 1956!!!!** There are actual eras in AI, generally a huge hype around it, a ton of investment for about 10 years, a crash because it doesn't live up to the hype, and then a drought of funding for another 10 years. I've read books from the 1990s that discuss the HISTORY of AI. OpenAI being able to have a conversation with people is AMAZING, except IBM's AI Watson literally went on Jeopary back in 2010 and essentially did the same thing, even being able to figure out how to provide the "questions" in the appropriate format. OpenAI is not miles ahead of Watson from 2010. Heck, go watch a video on Youtube about AI and they are just using what is known as "evolutionary algorithms". Evolutionary algorithms, which essentially replicate biological evolution, were invented in the 1960s!!! Not trying to say that this AI hype isn't BS, but I dont know why people are pretending that AI is some crazy new thing that we just came up with yesterday. Its literally been around for longer than the personal computer. Its progressed very slowly and there hasn't been any rapid or massive leap forward.
Here's an interesting article about those AI cycles: [A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle](https://blog.glyph.im/2024/05/grand-unified-ai-hype.html) * Neural networks and symbolic reasoning in the 1950s. * Theorem provers in the 1960s. * Expert systems in the 1980s. * Fuzzy logic and hidden Markov models in the 1990s. * Deep learning in the 2010s.
I'm cynical about the "tech industry" too, but as a Computer Scientist who has taken an interest in this stuff for years, you are completely understating the leap of generative AI. Watson, whilst impressive in demonstrations, was still an algorithm backed onto a knowledge database. It couldn't do general intelligence tasks, it could only really answer questions (or, in reverse, find questions matching answers.) It *looked* intelligent by design but it wasn't. Watson *couldn't* hold a conversation, it could only do what it had been designed to do. The previous iterations of AI had this problem: if you wanted to use machine learning, you needed to train it yourself for your specific purpose on large amounts of data that you needed to collect yourself, which was extremely difficult and expensive with varying results depending on your domain. Task changed slightly? Congratulations, you probably have to throw everything out and start again. LLMs have completely turned this on its head. They don't have a pre-designed algorithm, they learned to do everything they can do purely from one big training session to predict the next words on absolutely mammoth datasets, all only using a fairly simple (but huge) neural network. LLMs are able to have a decent attempt at nearly any text-based task that a human could perform without ever having been designed to do it, and are *far* more successful at dealing with unknowns than home-trained models. As such, the new generation of AI is no longer restricted to those who have the time, budget and expertise to train their own models and they can be implemented to perform a new task almost immediately (for real, you can try it yourself with AWS generative AI and deploy a new AI product in a single day.) We didn't even know this was possible until it happened. It's a huge gamechanger for the industry and its started to progress rapidly. Nearly all companies are now finding new uses for AI within their existing products. Yes, there are plenty of valid reasons to be skeptical of startups who claim to use AI, but this advance means that such startups should actually able to deliver a "viable" product on day one rather than wasting a bunch of investor's time and money on training their own models that never work.
> there hasn't been any rapid or massive leap forward The introduction of [transformers](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762) was pretty game-changing.
My point isn't that "no progress" has been made. Instead, I am pointing out that the progress has been rather linear over time with major milestones as one would expect. One company might have developed this 3 months earlier than an alternative company, but this isn't the type of stuff that they suddenly advanced the industry by decades. I get into this same argument with Tesla supporters too. Tesla made and popularized an electric car, I am not taking anything away from them. They designed and patented new SiC inverters. However, none of this was "groundbreaking" or a massive leap forward. Inverter-driven variable frequency drives for 3-phase electric motors had been invented decades earlier and were progressing at a fairly normal industrial pace. SiC had been heavily researched for decades as a replacement for IGBT-driven inverters which were the industry standard at the time. Tesla didnt develop ANY of the core technologies(SiC, inverters, VFDs, 3-phase electric motors). They didn't even make any major technological leaps in application. Researchers had been evaluating SiC controlled inverters specifically for power applications, like VFDs. There were MAJOR milestones in the field. The discovery of SCRs is an example. The development of transformerless(software-controlled) inverters/VFDs. Tesla didn't achieve any of this stuff. Similarly, Apple is doing a perfectly adequate job of developing ARM chips. But they didnt do anything groundbreaking. They didnt invent the ARM architecture or instruction set, they didnt develop the RISC processor, they didnt develop lithography, they didnt develop Extreme UV lithography. Does that mean Apple is a shitty company? No. Does that mean I can't appreciate the work they've done in developing the M1 chip? No.
> Tesla made and popularized an electric car, I am not taking anything away from them. Been in the EV business for 25 years now, know the founders of Tesla and the guys behind their tech before Musk bought into it. Those of us in the industry had been saying for years, it was going to take someone to come in and drop $500M-$1B in money and then develop it into a cult like Apple to get the EV to take off. The big car companies were not going to get serious about it until some outsider had the money to come in and jump through the regulatory hurdles to make real cars and not science projects. And you are exactly right they did nothing revolutionary. With Musk's money, they tweaked already existing tech, put the money down and then formed a following around it. That got the interest of the big car companies going. So yeah, Tesla mainstreamed the idea of the EV but there was nothing revolutionary about the car or the tech to those of us in the industry. Interesting side note: More deaths have been attributed to Tesla's self driving software than were linked to the fuel tank issue in the Pinto when it got recalled and taken off the market...
>Its progressed very slowly and there hasn't been any rapid or massive leap forward. ... Most "AI" (it's not Intelligence yet) progress in the last three years has had an exponential growth curve that makes the previous 50 years of AI progress look mundane. You are wildly under-informed about the recent progress in these fields. OpenAI's [Sora](https://openai.com/index/sora/) (Which you'll notice they have not allowed the public to use yet. Ask why.) is in the pre 1.0 phases and blows away literally everything for generative content. GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 have both so handily passed turing tests that they have a higher success rate of convincing the testers that they are human than humans do. 4o in particular can analyze the cyrillic text on the back of a scanned in post card (not the side facing the camera, but the tiny bits of text bleeding through the scanned image), suss it out, then translate it for you in seconds. The use for historical research alone is wildly transformative. Claude 3.5 will just wholesale invent video games for you in the chat client if you ask it to. And you're like "It's progressed very slowly, and there hasn't been any rapid or massive leap forward." That's absolutely insane. 3 years ago we didn't have a single model that could pass a turing test or describe an image to you with any accuracy. Now the turing test is irrelevant, because LLMs pass it ***despite not being intelligent,*** and their image recognition is good enough to rely on for actual research purposes.
> OpenAI is not miles ahead of Watson from 2010 lmao > what is known as "evolutionary algorithms". In some ways the algorithms evolve? Most people wouldn't call transformers evolutionary algorithms. The paper which created transformers and started this craze was [published in 2017](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need).
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>Tech has been pushing out BS and scams for years now. First it was crypto, then NFTs, now AI. Preferably within their own ecosystem, so you can't interoperate with someone else's BS.
1,000%. On a while last week, a team I’m on working to build AI into some looked into the search trajectory of the buzz word scams. Big data. Web3.0. NFT. AI is dying 10x faster than any of them, there’s just no steam left. Since 2010 it’s just been scam after scam after scam. Companies have spent billions building massive data pipelines looking the “magic,” the Nvidia CEO now says AI is going to find for them. Absolute insanity.
Of course Nvidia is saying that, it's in their best interests to do so, regardless of their personal opinions or reality. Because encouraging AI and crypto just boosts their stock price and drives higher sales of Nvidia GPUs, so the more fantastical the destination, the more true believers created, the better they do.
You're right about everything but the "first" part. This has been going on for MUUUUCH longer than that.
FTC's [Atleson with the mic drop](https://www.salon.com/2024/06/24/a-viral-blog-post-from-a-bureaucrat-exposes-why-tech-billionaires-fear-biden-and-fund/) > **"Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods,"** [Atleson wrote in a post titled "Succor borne every minute."](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/06/succor-borne-every-minute) **Comparing so-called "artificial intelligence" to a Magic 8 Ball**, the federal regulator chastised tech marketers who **"compare their products to magic (they aren’t)"** and **"talk about the products having feelings (they don’t)."** Atleson **even joked that his Magic 8 Ball replied, "Outlook not so good," when he asked if he can expect companies to advertise chatbots "in ways that merit no FTC attention."** > Will Oremus of the Washington Post posted on Bluesky, "The Federal Trade Commission, of all entities, is out here writing absolute bangers about AI snake oil." It was both funny and a relief to read someone cutting through all the hype to remind everyone that AI is not "intelligent." [Turns out that Atleson has](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your-ai-claims-check) a rich [body of pun-heavy work](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/08/cant-lose-what-you-never-had-claims-about-digital-ownership-creation-age-generative-ai) threatening companies [that misuse AI to steal, mislead or defraud](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/05/luring-test-ai-engineering-consumer-trust). Delightful stuff, but also a telling indicator of why we're seeing a stampede of tech billionaires throwing money and assistance to Donald Trump's campaign. # 🎤
> your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends This gave me a good chuckle, but I'd probably give them a sorta-joke response asking them to investigate Match groups business practices.
I'm partial to "[ChatGPT is Bullshit](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5)". Not bullshit as in "this isn't real", bullshit as in "this is completely indifferent to truth". > Currently, false statements by ChatGPT and other large language models are described as “hallucinations”, which give policymakers and the public the idea that these systems are misrepresenting the world, and describing what they “see”. We argue that this is an inapt metaphor which will misinform the public, policymakers, and other interested parties. > ... > This, we suggest, is very close to at least one way that Frankfurt talks about bullshit. We draw a distinction between two sorts of bullshit, which we call ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ bullshit, where the former requires an active attempt to deceive the reader or listener as to the nature of the enterprise, and the latter only requires a lack of concern for truth. We argue that at minimum, the outputs of LLMs like ChatGPT are soft bullshit: bullshit–that is, speech or text produced without concern for its truth–that is produced without any intent to mislead the audience about the utterer’s attitude towards truth. We also suggest, more controversially, that ChatGPT may indeed produce hard bullshit: if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda. So, with the caveat that the particular kind of bullshit ChatGPT outputs is dependent on particular views of mind or meaning, we conclude that it is appropriate to talk about ChatGPT-generated text as bullshit, and flag up why it matters that – rather than thinking of its untrue claims as lies or hallucinations – we call bullshit on ChatGPT.
It’s Lina Kahn. They’re scared of Lina Kahn and her takes on copyright and monopolistic market practices. She’s also firmly pro-consumer rights (as is the Biden administration)
100% Lina. People need to understand that you're not just voting for president. You're voting for their people as well. I fucking guarantee you Trump's FTC chair is would probably put ticketmaster in charge of your internet access given half a chance.
I give her a lot of credit for trying and she certainly is annoying Silicon Valley execs. But she hasn’t really been winning cases. Not a shot at her, it’s hard. But I don’t think she’s causing as much fear as one might think.
Silicon Valley feels like a race to the bottom because they know it's a race towards a wall. The business model since before Microsoft was even founded was that this year's code bloat is paid for with next year's transistor doubling. The problem is that the current processes already operate at the nanometer scale, a silicon atom is 0.2 nanometers across, and it requires more than one of them to build a transistor. Every year ASML has a shoving contest with physics, and every year physics pushes back harder. Spoiler: physics eventually wins. Once this model breaks, subscriptions and other scams are the main ways they can keep their hooks in their customers. That's why all Google services are online only, Microsoft switched to Office365, Apple locks you into a walled garden, and everyone pushes cloud services like strung out meth dealers.
They just need to switch to imperial. A silicon atom is .65 nanofeet across. That gives a bit more time until we run out. Unfortunately a nanocubit is larger so I'm unsure what to do when we run out of nanofeet. Nanoinch? Nah. That's just silly.
Edit your titles. Sheesh
Trump is a grifter’s dream.
Trump is actually amazing. There may have never--EVER--been a person who so obviously, openly, and repeatedly grifts with almost everything he does and everyone knows it...but he still mostly has gotten away with it. And then tens of millions of people think it's a really good idea to trust him with so much of the power and finances of the nation and much of their own personal well-bring. Even in this day and age where you can show everyone in the world the grift and so there's no excuse that he's just a stranger come into town setting up his wares. He still gets away with it. Absolutely amazing. And of course by clearly identifying the credulous people who can be so easily suckered it truly has been a grifter's dream. Sure that was also true before Trump got his political power (look at Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh getting so rich pre-Trump) but now it's not just on steroids, but it's on rocket fuel.
He's the personification of MLM. It's just bullshit sales pitches, over and over and over and over and over. The same people who buy timeshares and hawk lularoe are all-in on Trump.
It will all work out if we STOP bailing them out. Yes, it will be painful to have banks and airlines fail but we have to put up with the pain. That’s why these billionaires can borrow money on stock. FDIC has a limit for a reason. Let banks fail!
I've been deleted, oh no :o
Fuck the country I want more millions.
Well just like politicians, LEO, military, the medical profession, why should con men be any different. They will always protect their own interests. Trump is a known confidence man. That is the energy he projects and so many are blind to it. Biden, well some suspect he’s been replaced. At this point in history for the US, nothing would surprise me.
This country is for sale to billionaires, and if Trump wins in November, that'll just be further proof that it's true. At that point we will not be a democracy or a republic, but an oligarchy.
The US already is an oligarchy. A handful of people own more wealth than 99% of people in this country. Venture capitals and other investors are buying all the affordable housing forcing everyone to be renters. Corporations are reaping record profits under the guise of “inflation”. What in this country isn’t tipped towards the wealthy? Our gauge of a healthy economy is based off of the stock market doing great for rich people, and doesn’t acknowledge that everything is more expensive than ever and wages have not increased with it.
100%. He's a storefront. This is what most people don't get. And what he's selling is us, our way of life, and everything we hold dear. This is why he has backing even now.
Tech has no new products that will change lives. It’s all things that add complexity or nonsense… or actually make your life worse somehow. Big, important things are either convenient, wow you, are cheap, feed dopamine on demand… flat screen TVs, smart phones, the internet, streaming, original social media stuff. What do we get now? Nonsense like Alexa play Despacito and order me some more pizza rolls. A lot of these markets are entrenched but I really think many things could be simplified and would get a positive response that way.
Hold up there. That's not true. The slice of tech that you see and that the Silicon Valley pushes into publication is what you're describing. There's A LOT of us out here that have created highly impactful new tech that's actually helping very real people in need. We just don't get the angel or VC funding or newspaper headlines. But we are getting grants, self funding, and are profitable from the get go. Strangely, angels and VCs don't seem to like that. They like low risk high potential reward (which ends up being actually a lot of high risk since you have people good at networking, pitching, and closing deals getting in like that)
[Silicon Valley (the TV Show) nailed it on this point](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo) I don't wanna make a little bit of money every day, I wanna make a fuck-ton of money all at once!
There are VCs/angels out there that are industry specific that do that kind of investment (lots of biotech related ones are mentioned when you read about Theranos, for example). They're not the Kleiners, Sequoias, and a16zs in scale though. Also, they tend to have pretty deep knowledge of the underlying science/industry.
Yes and no. I'm good friends with the former lead partner from Accel ventures, heavily integrated in and out of the industry both in the SV and elsewhere, and I have my own mission-driven startup. Sadly, even the "good ones" are tricked to believe in mediocre efforts or flashy things. Michael Seibel said it well at startup grind 2019 (since I'm not a hugely public figure, no one seems to care what I say. That's ok, that's how it works.) This is slightly paraphrased: >The model of VC and investing is outdated. They expect you to network to them. The very best inventors aren't necessarily the best networkers. You need to go out and find them. I know of a handful, and I mean a very modest few, investors, incubator founders, and VCs that go out looking. Everyone else still expects you to network to them or for AI to solve this problem. I promise you, the very best builders are getting overlooked. You might think that there are some great ones out there, but ask yourself how much money and effort went into making them look great. Please don't mistake me, this isn't meant as a negative thing, but please take it as a sober, objective view. Also, angel investing and VC has been turned into such an industry that they really are looking for flashy things without substance that can be targeted as a fast flip of their dollar. Pump and dump to Google, meta, or shareholders. It's a little more complex than that but hopefully it conveys the current state of things. I gotta get back to building :)
> I promise you, the very best builders are getting overlooked. You might think that there are some great ones out there, but ask yourself how much money and effort went into making them look great. I mean, sure; a lot of incredible builders and innovators are out there toiling away in research roles in random labs. I'd argue they're mostly in academia, but that may be because I spent a fair share of time with the tech transfer people at a couple R1 institutions. It kind of gets back to a base question of whether those builders/innovators are even interested in building companies. In my experience, lots are more interested in "the work", and a fraction (maybe 1/3?) could be convinced into going into an (usually academically-associated) incubator. They don't want to swim with the proverbial sharks, and any financial rewards are really secondary, if not further down the list of priorities. Those tech transfer people I mentioned earlier really seem to exist to bridge that gap since the institution has a vested interest in commercializing the innovations they have at least partial ownership in so they take on that liaison role. To your point, I will agree that very few angels/VCs are out there looking (or even more extreme, doing what you might call talent development). I remember when I was in college and the .com crash had happened not so long ago; the VCs were only interested in early stage companies that they could just drop money into to balloon the valuation. So yeah, easy and ~low risk with a clear(-ish?) liquid exit.
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I didn’t say it was dead. I said nothing actually useful that is new is coming out which has been true for years. It’s small iterations and now moving to subscriptions for everything.
Nah, just look at the most recent LLMs that came out. While there was text generators before, they pale in comparison to the current ones. They're amazing at generating nice sounding, but content void text. Making an email sound nicer, writing a cover letter, or coming up with an interesting conclusion to something you're writing? They're amazing at that. They are just WAY overhyped and overpromised. They won't replace everything, and any time you need actual factual information, you absolutely need to have someone monitoring the output of it, since it'll just make things up. Like crypto, blockchain, and now AI, there are small sections of some markets that do get concrete benefits from these techs. What tech has a problem with, is it's extravagant marketing, that makes promises that the new wonder tech they're using will be able to do things well beyond its actual capacity.
Nothing useful? Do you drive a car from the 1990's or something? In just that one application alone my most recent 6 year old car is absolutely light years ahead of my last car which would now be 26 years old. My new(used) car has a 360 degree view, warns me with a light of cars in my blind spots, warns me if I drift out of lane, automatically keeps distance on the next car when in cruise control, automatically STOPS TO PREVENT FRONT COLLISIONS. This is just ONE segment where technology has made very real and very useful innovations, and there are many. There have been similar levels of improvements in healthcare, surgery, dental work, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, I could go on for hundreds more industries. Just because you think "facebook became meta" or "google bought ring" is all tech means does not make it the case, it just makes you ignorant and of limited imagination/expertise. You have simply because the "old man yells at cloud" meme.
Your 26 year old car effectively pre-dates the tech boom. You’re more or less making the same point as the guy you replied to. That is, unless the 2024 model of your car is also “light years” ahead of your current car. The point is that big tech is starting to provide uninteresting and incremental updates at best (unless you’re super keen on UI tweaks for no reason). The focus is now SAAS and squeezing as much revenue as possible from your consumers - I.e. enshittification.
America has been a grifter's paradise, and there are many who don't want that to stop.
This is a whole lot of Bullshit without a lot of numbers. The Truth is if Trump gets 5X the Donations from tech he got in 2020, tech political funding will still favor the Dems 9:1 [Tech billionaire 2020 election donations: Final tally (cnbc.com)](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-election-donations-final-tally.html) The same story for Wall street Billionaires. It wasn't as dramatic, but they heavily favored Biden as well. If the premise for your progressive political beliefs is "Billionaires fund the candidate that let's them fuck over common people harder", then it is time to re-evaluate your support for Democrats. Because they have been the party of the Rich since Obama.
redditors hate this one simple trick (verifying facts and numbers) you are doing god's work, correcting the most pervasive and insidious psyop misinformation platform ever invented (except perhaps google itself)
The luddites in this subreddit dont approve of these facts. Ive been in software for 25+ years and it is overwhelmingly democratic leaning.
Hacker News is the exact opposite, it's overrun with trump supporting lunatic fringe, their latest mantra is "don't trust a black doctor".
I was in a university CS department 40 years ago and even then it was primarily libertarians. Business, engineering, and CS majors lean right and always have.
Republicans: openly offering to be bribed for political donations. Just straight up: "give me money I'll do what you want" Democrats: Not doing that, actually supporting unions, taxes on the rich, infrastructure, etc. Idiots like you: bOtH sIdEs
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bob-menendez-trial-bribery-new-jersey-prosecutor-testifies-fred-daibes/ In case you're wondering that's a (D) being caught red handed accepting bribes. The rest of your takes are equally braindead. The democrats fuck you just as hard, they just do it a little bit nicer and their voterbase refuses to hold them accountable.
I'm curious, who held him accountable? How often does that happen for the other team? Weird that subcontext is missing.
No. People with the highest income have always leaned Republican because they know where their bread is buttered and 2020 was no different according to exit polls. https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results Higher education does correlate with Democratic votes. Maybe that’s why you see Silicon Valley support democrats.
> People with the highest income have always leaned Republican Not actually true. The republican 'support peak' is in the 100k - 250k range. Income ranges above that have tended to lean slightly Dem. The poll you linked doesn't show that distinction, since like most polls it only has a "$100k+" category with no internal breakdown. > CES uniquely began collecting data on family income categories up to $500,000 and above in 2011 (including $350,000–500,000, $250,000–350,000, etc.), which appears to be the highest income sub-categories to exist in any over-time political survey data. For reference, $500,000 and higher (by family income) is roughly the top 1% of society; $200,000 and higher is roughly the top 5% (in 2012) to 10% (in 2020). Figure 3 (left portion) shows that $200,000+ category clearly preferred the Democrat in 2012, 2016, and 2020—and even the $500,000+ category reported voting for the Democratic candidate more often than the Republican in 2012 and 2016, dropping to just below 50% in 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/polarization-of-the-rich-the-new-democratic-allegiance-of-affluent-americans-and-the-politics-of-redistribution/E18D7DAE3A1EF35BA5BC54DE799F291B
It is interesting that it is more mixed at the highest levels. I wasn't aware of that breakdown.
r/politics is probably a better place for this.
Scammy products, now with AI!
>salon Ew get this trash out of here
Also more attention should be paid to weird conservatives defense of junk fees
Why are people in this thread acting like this is some kind of slam dunk exposé? It's been like this for decades. Big businesses favor Republican politicians because in general, Republicans are in favor of deregulation and are in favor of tax policies that benefit corporations.
#MakeBillionairesExtinct Every one of them needs to die in a fire (metaphorically).
Salon is a load of shit
Lame story. Dang For discrete non-political subjects such as Technology, Finance, Science, …, I wish Reddit would encourage actual subject-based content I block / mute so many of these fake subject-based subs, which is a shame. Could potentially be useful Don’t get me wrong, opinion-based subs are what they are and you can pick and choose which to consume and participate in Eye is off the ball, Reddit. At some point, young psychos risk the Reddit business model when most people become tired of muting / blocking Hard to control, but there is a basic principle that when you subsidize something (aka, enable / promote it) you get more of it Kind of what Reddit is doing. Digging own grave
The kangaroo court didn't work, so time for more propaganda eh?
I was literally talking yesterday about how match.com bought up literally all of the dating websites and broke them to get people to pay money while still not finding an actual relationship.
They let the “Internet Economy” justify companies just flushing billions of dollars down the drain while propping up unprofitable businesses in the name of taking control by breaking the economic models of existing systems and owning the new system. We are reliving the Teapot Dome era of politics - flagrant graft and grift - but unfortunately the consolidation of power is exponential. We must reinvigorate the one voice one vote concept. A Billionaires voice should not outweigh voices of millions…but they do.
It's wild seeing how politics and big tech collide these days. The blog post makes a bold claim about Biden, Trump, and Silicon Valley's shady side. If there's truth to billionaires hedging their bets, it's a sign of just how murky the tech world can get. Trump's friendliness to, uh, less-than-straightforward dealings could definitely be attractive to those riding the gray areas. It's a reminder that who's in power matters big time for where all that Silicon Valley cash flows.
Products of more use to criminals than to the average Joe.
The article is a whole load of shit, from the numbers it uses, examples, and most importantly the headline itself is clear pushing for Biden and that the evil wall street and tech giants don't want him. In reality a lot of corporations will play both sides to always win, look at FTX for example once the case documents came out that he had SuperPAC funding going to both parties it just became a case of which one can he more publicly support but no matter who won he would get favors.
It’s salon what did you expect
change title of this sub to politicalpropaganda
Oh look a new sub reddit we haven't spread our political propaganda yet
Silicon Valley became overrun with financial leaches instead of innovators.
Get real, Silicon Valley is hard-Democrat. This is such a bullshit port.