Yeah, that's completely unbelievable. You don't just accidentally call Trump a "dictator" or go on an extended tirade about Sam Altman. Clearly, he was speaking how he truly felt and how he's doing damage control.
Whether you align or don't align with these politics, I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked. There's clearly some expectations of privacy (using Signal with expiring messages) and someone leaking this really destroys trust and open communication. It causes people to not engage in open dialog and to move to even smaller and smaller circles. This ends up stifling open and honest debate and results in more narrow, provincial views of the world.
And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone? What "good" was accomplished from this leak and this article? Some advertiser dollars were made -- probably a trivial amount compared to the value of honest debate among the most powerful in tech.
It's not unreasonable to say that the more outsized influence you have over others, the less privacy you can expect to preserve against them (or the harder you have to work to maintain it), both ethically and practically.
There's pretty wide intolerance for leaking everyday discussion by everyday people, but some people are in a position where their actions can very greatly impact others and some of their relationships and discussions have bearing on that. You can't be surprised if the potentially-impacted seek to seize transparency even where it's not handed to them.
> I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked.
The best private chats are those with a few vetted members who understand the consequences of a leak. However, this doesn't fully protect the chat because the leaker, especially if he or she is a skilled liar, could remain anonymous indefinitely.
A common thread among leaks is that people post salacious content under their real names (or pseudonyms that are easily traced) under the guise they are sharing in a "safe space." Nothing is safe from a serial screenshotter.
> And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone?
To stop them from doing what they are trying to do. The goals they are working towards are malign & repugnant and this makes them my adversaries. I'm not interested in a fair fight with a neosegregationist billionaires' coup. They certainly aren't going to give me a sporting chance.
For what it's worth, nothing was leaked in this article except for the existence of these chats. There are no screenshots, and very few concrete details other than some information about membership timelines.
This article contains genuine reporting about the right-wing influencers working to shift the opinions of the richest people in the USA. That seems like a large amount of good to me.
Nah, screw these people. Right wing billionaires actively courting and trying to influence their peers in business and media? This is the smoke-filled room as a group chat with disappearing messages. What good was done here? Well, hopefully, people realize that Marc Andreessen is neglecting his responsibilities to post all day and David Sacks whines when people challenge him. I want to know who's hanging out with Chris Rufo and Tucker Carlson, or introducing oped columnists to Curtis Yarvin, and I want it to be abundantly clear that they suck.
To give an unrelated example, there's currently a huge drama explosion in the vtuber world due to Person X trying to strongarm an artist into not working with Person Y, while X and Y being ostensibly best friends with each other in public.
People do not like being lied to, and they especially do not like someone lying to them while concretely making their life worse.
> compared to the value of honest debate among the most powerful in tech
Yet again this seems to be using "honest" as code for "racism".
For all the snark from people who dislike Elon, this is a bit of a sad ending. I remember when Twitter announced their presence in mid-market and the promises of how it would help the area. What people don't realize is that his will lead to real revenue losses for the city -- the largest companies in SF are overwhelmingly tech. Twitter is in the top 5 when it comes to how much tax they pay. Loss of revenue for the city will translate to cuts.
It doesn't matter, SF residents are so delusional and stockholmed i think they'll put up with literally anything. Even in this thread you have them acting like their city isn't a horrifying disaster to anyone not desensitized to it
Generally this is unlikely the happen (obviously will depend on which EV and which ICE). The reason being is that consumers have generally accepted the cost for cars at a certain level. Rather than dropping the price for cars, they add more features or improve quality to justify a certain price point.
The average ICE engine hasn't changed, from a technology standpoint, has not changed in decades. What's changed is all the internal technology (entertainment systems, parking cameras) as well as trim that's become standard (power everything). These standards are defined by the market. Case in point: see what the standard for cars (both quality and price) are for a given market like US vs India.
It's unlikely they will lower margins so much as to make less money from EV's than from ICE cars. An analogous model are iPhones. The old iPhones could be sold today at a fraction of the price but instead they release new models with better features to justify the higher price point.
(This is all with a caveat that I'm talking about sticker price. Given that EV maintenance should generally be cheaper, without a doubt the target is to have the total cost of ownership be lower than an ICE car as that's how EV's are being positioned today.)
The traditional manufacturers might not, but EVs are lot simpler to make than ICE cars, and that might make it easier for new entrants to enter the market. At the moment that’s somewhat offset by the difficulty in and cost of procuring batteries, but once those become commodities I’d expect (some) EVs to be cheaper.
"new players" is the opposite of what I want for an EV
I want the 2cv/fiat 500/vw beetle equivalent with a nation wide network of mechanics. Tesla is already a pain tlin the ass in that matter and I doubt any "new player" will reach their scale anytime soon
Will people be able to build on the engine like the original? I used to love playing the Day of Defeat mod (ww2 themed) and could definitely see mass appeal for that on top of this new engine.
Not OP but first off I'd say that while some things feel similar, I don't think we're close to how bad it was back then if you look at the magnitude of the fall out. So take these answers understanding that things were worse back then.
1. It felt like a nuclear winter for tech jobs between 2000/2001 and 2004/2005. Jobs were available but it was way more competitive to get them and you were a lot less likely to get that dream job. You either settled for a crappier job or you changed directions. Many younger people just went back to school (get the master, law degree, etc.) as an alternative.
It felt like the party was over. All the great company perks disappeared. Traffic on freeways disappeared. The mood was very flat. It wasn't sexy being in tech like it is today. Nowadays people just talk about TC or stock. That kind of talk disappears.
2. Like I mentioned above, it was about a 3-5 year period. Again, not all situations are the same. But whenever you have large macroeconomic problems, they take time to sort out. It also depends on how quickly the downside factors resolve themselves. The longer it takes to solve those, the longer a recovery is dragged out.
It also depends on what the growth engine is for pulling things back up. Back then, there was a resurgence in internet business starting around 2005 when "web 2.0" got popular and many new businesses came on the scene. This includes social networking, ecommerce, web publishing.
My company made imaging peripherals, and were very conservative, so they weren't on a bandwagon. Our jobs were OK.
I feel like the .com crash was pretty telegraphed. People who could spell "HTTP" were being hired as Chief In Charge Of Everything Web Gods, and they were spending company money like candy.
It cleared the way for companies like Google and MySpace (which met its end, not long after).
My company got fat on consumer cameras, which were destroyed in about 2010, after the smartphone revolution started to really get going. The next seven years were kind of a mad scramble for market share, while the managers kept doing everything but admitting that they really screwed the pooch, by not anticipating the rise of cellphone cameras.
Come to think of it, there is a lot of that "Nobody saw it coming" language, here, as well.
I am very fiscally conservative, and my indicator of a coming reckoning, was watching all the Scrooge McDucks, diving into their piles of money. That doesn't end well (see: 1929).
In early 2000 within a few months the traffic on 680 south over the Sunol Grade(main road to the SV from points NE) went from dead stopped at 4:30am, to no traffic at all at 7:30am. It was breathtaking.
I managed to hole up in a consulting gig in manufacturing. We had our rates shaved 20% and felt lucky. Everyone who had left for greener pastures called up looking for work over the next year. I mean everyone. It was sad.
As described above, there were no jobs to had.
I recall a new building put up around the 580/680 interchange. I used it as my canary, when it was occupied I would call the recovery happening. It was empty from 2000-2003.
2008 was bad for other sectors, tech had issues, but nothing like 2000.
What's going on now isn't the same. There are specific pullbacks. Twitter is about the Elon buyout. In other places there is money. And in my manufacturing universe I'm having trouble finding people.
When you want to do broad company-wide layoffs, you have to adopt some broad strategies, otherwise it'll be way too much work to find 15% of the company. It's like trying to do surgery with a scalpel when you really need a saw to amputate an arm.
Imagine the mechanics if they involved every single low-level manager in decision making. You'd never find 15%. Everyone would justify where a person on their team or their team as a whole deserves to be saved. So you apply broader rules (eg certain products, certain types of jobs, performance based). The upside is that you can avoid people-specific favoritism. The downside is that you lose good people in those areas as you're not distinguishing good from bad.
My current company did a layoff, not quite 15%, but in that ballpark. They went down as far as the directors and gave them a number. I.e. pick X people to lose. This was in addition to some specific cuts where they axed the entire product and all teams associated with it.
It definitely allowed management to cut a few people that had been on their short list for a while.
I was a big fan of the NYT. I’ve always considered them a trustworthy source of news.
However, their coverage of Facebook since the election has showed me how much bias there is in the media as well as how much an entity can serve their own agenda.
Unfortunately the truth behind these integrations are beyond what your average person can understand. Your average person doesn’t understand how OAuth and user consent / permissioning works. And so media can prey on the ignorance of people to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. NYTimes comes off just as bad as Fox News.
I bet you none of the authors have ever implemented 3rd party auth. I doubt any engineers were consulted. Instead they quote so called “media experts” that are just professors at universities who again know nothing about the technical integration and how it works.
I’ve seen some people who understand how OAuth works but these are clearly engineers. NYTimes could’ve used the opportunity to explain how people gave consent but instead chooses a different narrative in order to 1) get page views; 2) attack an arguably competitor in the media space and 3) blame FB for getting Trump elected.
In the beginning, Facebook was, to some extent, private. I'm thinking back to the days when they were rolled out college by college. Even after then, mostly people of a certain generation were on FB.
Since then, their reach has gone global and it reached the late adopters: parent, grandparents, uncles and aunts. As that circle became larger, Facebook felt less private.
What the article seems to have missed is that the popularity around other sharing models is actually relatively new. 1-1 messaging, at least on mobile, really only got huge within the last 2-4 years. How old is Snapchat? < 3 years? And it's been mainstream-ish for less than that. Secret, Whisper, Kik... all of these apps with different sharing models are a pretty recent phenomenon.
It seems pretty silly to call this an "about face" considering the span of time considered. Opinions always evolve over time. Look at Steve Jobs: Famously known for saying that Apple would "never" make a tablet smaller than the original iPad. Lo and behold, they did.
Products and the philosophy around them change over time, especially in an area like tech which is quick moving and ever-changing.
