I think the existence of the internet as a mass-market entertainment platform used by billions of non-tech users is part of it. SV from like the 1970s/1980s seemed a much more innocent place.
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
If you think this is morally acceptable, in which case, what you're doing is essentially trying to trick the algorithm to uprank your content. But people at Facebook/X/Youtube can just update a table row and accomplish 1000x as much as you're trying to do. Their business model is selling a less powerful version of that.
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
I remember reading about Andreessen coaching Zuckerberg, having to spoon feed him answers at trial, and apparently he was one of the masterminds behind the dual class shares/proposed third class of share
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
I mean a lot of successful new tech companies were about side-stepping legislation. Some that are missing here are airbnb which effectively side-stepped fairly strict hotel legislation (Though there is a case to be made that it simply improved short-term lodging), and uber which side-stepped strong taxi/private-hire legislation.
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
I’m old enough to remember the heavenly times before people repeated phrases like “the taxi cartel” as if they were original thoughts vs. cooked up by Uber’s comms team.
you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit.
Years before Uber arrived here local taxi companies already had an iPhone app with geo-location, up-front digital payment, and receipts I could directly import into the company ledger app. Taxis were regulated and forced to give cost up-front in the app and in the window of the vehicle. That is what taking a taxi was here before Uber arrived. That company changed nothing other than to dilute the meaning of worker versus contractor and Uber made it easier for registered sex offenders to become drivers because that company had less stringent requirements.
This is heavily dependent on where we are talking about.
I live in a fairly rich place and here, taxis were fine, too. When Uber came, they mostly just eroded salaries and protections for taxi drivers, while lowering the quality of service for customers (though also, for a short while, the price). The best I can say about it is that it accelerated the digital transformation of the industry a bit.
On the other hand, I heard from several people from other places in the world that the arrival of Uber meant that they could finally get a safe and reliable ride.
Sure, abstractly tech startups in the past have been successful while side-stepping legislation. Do you think they were all good for the world?
And concretely, for the startups listed in the article - such as Doublespeed, which sells access to “phone farms” with thousands of fake social media accounts and ultimately aims to replace human content creators - do you think they will improve society by succeeding?
Edot, we have footage of you stealing a car at gunpoint, then you getting out and breakdancing while turning into an elephant. Any explanation or straight to jail?
Quick google shows that they are based In Tel Aviv and Co-founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. No surprises there. Seems like every sketchy company comes out of there.
Yeah strange how this article is almost entirely focused on consumer apps. These examples might be unhealthy for society, but mostly represent (poor) choices for consumers. Digital cigarettes.
Surveillance tech is the opposite: It represents freedom taken away. That is the more bleak future IMO.
You know how sometimes you're exploring a location in a post-apocalyptic video game and find a message on a 'datapad' or scrawled on the wall in blood or something, as a world building fiction exercise to inform the player how screwed up the dystopia became in its last days before everything went totally to shit? Well, now I have some new material for you...
They're also part of the same group of christian tech feudalists as Thiel and supports trump/project 2025. Seems like they all went insane because the government can still say no to them.
I know this is a very minor point in the article, but reading the message next to the Doublespeed phone farm:
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
Exactly. It will be great for the rich and powerful when common people are drowning in so much mis- and disinformation that the only way to get through a day is to disbelieve everything. There will be even less accountability then.
>Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
It is bad for this guys business to admit it’s unethical and probably has a time limit, so he doesn’t. There’s no big mystery there. If he’s unethical to his victims/spam targets, why would you think his marketing of all things would be honest about the tradeoffs? Even “respectable” companies feel very little qualms about lying by omission in marketing.
I think that's a fair take, but it also just moves it up one layer. Why are the investors falling for this, then? Can they not see the holes in this immediately?
Marketers have a term for this - "breaking through the noise".
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
You just nailed something for me, so I wanted to say "thank you." It's the _PAID_ advertising that's the issue. I've been struggling with hating advertising, yet having difficulties reconciling how I would know about anything I like if it wasn't advertised. But it's the PAID advertising that spurs the creation of advertisements with spectacle and cheap shit that ends up in landfills and the oceans.
Advertising has a positive function - currently we don't have better (market based) was to make it working other than via paid advertising. The first step is to find the new business models.
It depends on how well the messages are built, but 15 conversions out of 130 is not a number cold outbound produces. I run outbound in Japan and our reply rate sits around 1% - a hundred messages to get one person to write back at all, before anything converts. To land 15 you'd be sending thousands, not 130.
That's exactly what parent post is saying I believe, the conversion rate is huge, clearly, but it can't be sustainable. The point is, that even a small fraction of advertising will be moved over to this cold-DM strategy, the funnel will collapse to the usual rates as soon as people catch on, same as every other "trick". Now, whether there's enough time between today and that hypothetical point in the future to extract profit using it, that's the real question here. I fathom there is, at least for someone, until trust is thoroughly destroyed. Repeat ad nauseum as trust moves and gets expended over and over, until possibly when no one trusts anything on the internet (or really any other theoretical platform with cheap global reach) ever again.
I also wanted to point out, the big 10% rate they're seeing is not for actual conversions, but replies, which are likely correlated, but a reply does not a conversion make. The real rate is presumably lower.
People often forget that the world is not just US or "the West". What he is investing in is a phase that the West certainly is headed into and we will be testing the idea of creating a feedback loop that gives more and more power to people who are successful in one thing to call the shots in another thing. I would say so far those people demonstrated very low efficiency and inability to match the ranks of the China Communist party in pretty much all metrics, including the creepy stuff. One may argue that the Wester way of doing dystopia is self correcting loop, so maybe eventually we may have more advanced and optimized dystopia than what China or Russia can achieve through centrally held power. Alternatively maybe the human nature will prevail this will actually lead to another run of freedom and democracy. Considering the history of Europe, both can happen as stages of a continuous loop.
Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
All investors do this, they don't really have an idea of "the future" they want to build. They just "find something they can throw money at". Their words, not mine.
As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.
> As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.) ... they aren't hypocrites.
I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".
Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
People who are anti-whaling generally think whaling is morally wrong, that no one should be doing whaling, ever.
People who are environmentalists don't think having an impact on the environment is morally wrong. We have to have some impact on the environment in order to live, and nature can take quite a lot of impact, just not all of it from all of us.
All environmentalists believe there's an acceptable human footprint. How big, varies.
A wealthy environmentalist merely believes they're entitled to a bigger share of the acceptable total human footprint because they can pay for it - and my point, the logic of that is not at all controversial in our society.
Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.
One way to cope with the world going to shit is that to pretend that you want it, and thus you're somehow "winning" when the world goes to shit.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
This needs to be taught in school. I’m shocked at how many people don’t get it. I’ve believed this forever which is why I follow the “strange” including weird cultural spaces, fringe para-stuff, whatever.
What it really is is the interface. It’s where things go when they are on their way out, like discarded scientific ideas, but it’s also where new things first appear.
If you watch the fringe you know what’s coming and going.
It can be hard to tell sometimes which it is though, coming or going.
It’s really hard to predict what becomes relevant - I would have never guessed that the “chad/stacy/virgin” archetypes are now so common place that even my grandma knows what it means.
Whereas other huge memes from back then like EFG never got popular.
Along with 4chan back in the day (less today) I'd add pre-porn-ban Tumblr (non-mainstream due to having porn), popular but weird and off-putting sites like Something Awful, niche forums, old school IRC, etc.
Today I feel like a lot of it has retreated into closed groups, which makes it harder to keep an eye on it. Frustrating for someone who likes to watch it, but also might be a good thing since it might insulate it a little from the culture vultures.
Pre-Internet it was music-drug-party culture (those three always went together), which was full of weirdos that ended up setting trends. It was also gay culture especially back when it was much more underground due to persecution.
I wish people understood this because it's why deplatforming doesn't work. When the fascist right was deplatformed, that gave them power. It made them fringe, which made them cool. If they'd been kept on the big socials the actually fringe places would have made fun of them, which was happening before deplatforming. "Oh look boomers on Reddit who take Q seriously... lol..." Being mainstream makes you not cool and on your way out. Deplatforming probably got Trump elected a second time.
Thanks for sharing that, and I think it’s a bit more complex comment but just my thoughts from the top of my drunk head:
I think most of the sub cultures you mentioned are now firmly in the mainstream culture - it might just be my bubble/bias - but gay/black/furry/genderfluid/fandom/rave/techno culture is nowadays so prevalent that it doesn’t even register as something unusual.
To me that is a huge difference to 10-15 years+ ago and tumblr besides the chans is definitely one of the places that drove this change; also all the other significant social media’s of that era also had an influence of course. But the anonymity that 4chan provided was kind of unique and so the more extreme/unusual cultures gravitated there I think. Tumblr was special too for sure.
Sure, but that's tangential, isn't it? 4chan didn't invent "accelerationism"/siding with the face-eating leopards as a means to feel in control over your life. It was just one of many places where that attitude lived (though, maybe one of the rather few where it was openly discussed).
You think you "cope" and are being resilient, but enough people doing that actually leads to the said bleak future, at which point it doesn't matter who's to blame.
You know I didn't just come out and say that. I actually liked Ben and his character. Let's just say I got disillusioned about all of them in the correct order.
> Lee's stated goal was to “desensitize everyone to the phrase ‘cheating.’” If you say it enough, he argues, “cheat begins to lose its meaning.” A16z praised Lee's approach as “rooted in deliberate strategy and intentionality.”
Lee is a product of his environment. Tech interviews are bullshit and he exposed it. School work is mostly bullshit and he exposed it.
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
If you see a pile of trash by the side of the road and tell yourself it is ok to dump your trash there, well, you just explained why there is a pile of trash there in the first place.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
Millions decided to reward a liar and cheater with the highest office in the country. Twice! At one point, socially attuned people are going to go that way. And even if you try to educate your children well, they see in their formative years what society rewards.
Yes, but they should be criticized all the while... obviously.
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
I didn't say to make fun of people who are disadvantaged. I said to make fun of liars and cheaters and ensure that everyone is reaffirmed that lying and cheating is low status.
Has it ever occurred to these low status people that their low status is due to their bad choices in life? No, it's all the fault of others: the black people, the brown people, the weird people...
I don't understand why you think one single president is responsible for a class of behavior that is likely as old as human civilization. Should we blame Elizabeth Holmes on him too? What about Enron?
Did Enron had access to nuclear codes? Did Holmes have complete immunity due to her function given by the Supreme Court? Did they try to overthrow the presidential election results ? Were they elected by millions after trying to putsch the government?
It is incredible that you think that Trump being president is normal. I didn't say he was responsible for this behavior; I am saying that him and his supporters are responsible for normalizing immoral, unethical, unacceptable behavior.
I disagree that tech interviews are bullshit. The biggest tech companies (MS, Google) have invested many dollars, and changed course at least once (remember MS's lateral thinking questions? How many screws in an airplane?) in looking for the most effective ways to quickly gauge whether someone is likely to be a productive SWE. They have done this because they correctly believe that there is a wide range of candidate abilities out there and it is critical to hire as few "lemons" as possible; in particular, not hiring lemons is much more important than neglecting to hire someone who would have been really good. Thinking about it from their POV makes this immediately clear.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system?
It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.
Yes. Lateral thinking is valuable, and the industry didn't at the time know any better ways to test it. Now we have system design questions, so we can get the same signal asking candidates for ad hoc estimates of QPS or whatever.
The operative part of schoolwork is … not the work part? Of course school work is bullshit, in the sense that the teacher already knows what 7x9 is or who fought at Waterloo or whatever. The point is not the work product, it’s that the student produced it and has been incrementally improved by the experience!
I cant believe I'm actually going to try to explain how your joke wasn't a joke, because you missed the initial joke. But here we are... the "meme" is leopards ate my face https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/, and they said "cheetahs at my face". And for some inexplicable reason you then tried to correct/FTFY to proper "Cheaters" spelling, ruining the joke/pun entirely. Erroneous pedants are surely the saddest of people...
Y Combinator's application still asks: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." They don't actually use the word "cheat" but that's what they're asking for: Are you willing to cheat if it gives you an advantage?
Is that really a surprising trait to expect from a venture capitalist persona? As we go on, especially as most of the simple problems get solved, the system everyone blindly trusted has turned to uphold generally positive trends has turned to lies, manipulation, exploitative practices, loophole engineering and abuse. What I would expect from a successful VC applicant today isn't savvy business sense and actual good ideas, but an unrelenting willingness to do anything short of putting your life on the line for profit. There's no such thing as going low for these people, they are rewarded for using every trick in the book to earn an extra cent.
Eh everyone I know in YC answered this in an ethical way. In fact, I suspect YC keeps this wording to catch people admitting to something unethical while rewarding people who see something in a system that could be different.
My answer that got me accepted was that there was a lip syncing competition at my college that was dwindling because everyone had to submit a CD and sign up in advance. It also was held in an auditorium.
When I took over, I moved it to Spotify and moved the venue to the lawn, and we went from ~20 people the previous year to 1.2k the year I ran it.
I left out that the rule at the time was all songs had to be reviewed by the administration, which I didn't comply with. I'm not saying my story is the greatest; quite the opposite. I was trying to show that "hacking" isn't inherently unethical or even particularly interesting.
Cheating is giving yourself an unfair advantage to the detriment of others, whether any explicit rules are clearly broken or not. That covers your definition of "hacking".
society is a coordination problem which involves costly cooperation of individuals to gain surplus for society as a whole, when selfish defection is advantageous.
being largely ethical and being ruled is so baked into the identity of a citizen that we do not see mass defection. someone who does defect by being unethical gains and maybe rules others.
there is no requirement for a cooperative agreement or social contract signed by the leader or plutocrats of a society. they can and do defect by being corrupt.
more people are realising in the middle class that they too can defect and gain personally at others' expense. for example, realising that not recycling saves time and harms only others, or starting these companies listed in the article.
the more people that do defect, the less cooperation, which is basically a social breakdown. under mass defection you have the law of the jungle, which is realistically the existing paradigm of marc andreessen and peers, they are sociopathic.
this is all to say that A16Z can cheat in the knowledge that only comparable competitors will cheat, the people as a whole who are harmed will not.
And to think him and Faye Wong are virtually the same age. She, a beautiful actress singer-songwriter, and him, a rather bulbous egg-headed villain. Are we SURE what you do doesn't influence how radiant you appear to others?
I have you now, Mr. Bond. But instead of quickly disposing of you, I shall spend a 20 minute monologue on How We Must Build Things while you inexorably escape
What are you talking about, he's a visionary who's greatly improved the world? He cut his teeth with Jim Clark who's central thesis was pay employees more, and Marc has carried this vision forward investing in some of the most important companies in our nations history. Even outside of startups he's risked his career to defend our nations democracy, and has been an advocate for personal freedoms. If it weren't for people like him employees may not regularly get stock options, and would certainly not make as much.
Being scared of the future doesn't mean the people building it are evil.
Stock options are wage theft for the vast majority of employees taking it, it's gambling and the vast majority of bets don't pay off. It is genius, convincing people to work for less or free.
Except employees aren’t working for free. They’re working for normal salaries, plus stock. What Jim pioneered (and Marc built on) was the idea that founding engineers might end up insanely rich, and because Marc is an investor he can push this ideology to all of the companies that take investment from him
This is a tech form centered around startups, run by a private equity firm (YC). Marc and Jim Clark were and are visionaries, who have not only been financially successful but Jim's thesis which Marc continued was that engineers were underpaid, and by paying them more you can create a better product. It's because of these people that a generic android app developer at ChatGPT makes ~400k/year + stock.
I don't know what you think your comment adds to the conversation but I assure you it's not insightful, and if you dislike venture capitalists this is a bad place for you to spend your time.
Then let the Banhammer of the Sanctus Capitalista strike this court jester down!
Lighten up, man. These people don't care about you, and I assure you they're not reading your comments waiting to hire you. Why should I care about them when they are doing everything in their power to make this world a worse place?
Probably it's a random sample of AI companies. Curing cancer is the marketing slogan, AI is not capable of doing that. But it's good enough to impress bankers and lawyers who will keep inflating the bubble for the foreseeable future.
"Curing cancer" reminds me of a specific late-70s penny-stock grift, where companies promising a vaccine for cancer (but with no product or R&D) would be pumped-and-dumped.
The guy that quoted some of the early fascists in his reactionary manifesto that included a list of enemies wants to build a bleak future? Say it ain't so!
Of course, isn’t Andreessen the one who believes introspection is a waste of time, a fad from the 1900s the only outcome of which is to slow one down? Why even consider the long term consequences of your actions when they can make you billions of dollars in the short term? Introspection, like empathy, is for suckers and losers.
For me it's insane, how in this day and age, we don't conduct DSM-V / ICD tests (interviews) that screen for Cluster B personality disorders on everyone, and bar, at least those with anti-social PD, psychopathy, or extreme forms of narcissism, to work in positions of influence or power over others.
Well that's predicated on those tests being infallible, not open to personal interpretation, and not subject to sabotage ("hey Mr. Psychiatrist evaluating Person X, we at <competitor> think X is a total sociopath, perhaps you might be convinced to see it our way"). And that's not even getting into how what the DSM labels certain things as being "mental illness" or the like is subject to change over time.
You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?
People don't like to entertain the idea that determinism could exist. Specifically, the idea that some people are just born bad, mean, or unintelligent. When people commit crimes there is endless hand-wringing about how "society" failed them. They blame it on poverty, or abuse, or inequality, or racism, or anything which absolves the individual of their agency.
For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.
AFAIK only psychopathy is purely genetic. The rest i believe are susceptible (although very resistant) to treatment as they are only partially genetic, and partially environmental (suffered abuse, neglect).
Some people are commenting people would fake/dupe the testers. Sure, some would be able to. But many (i'd wager the vast majority) wouldn't. People don't realise how difficult it actually is to fake being normal. The only reason people with cluster B seem to dupe so many is because we live in a day and age where they are able to jump from relationship to relationship and cut ties with the people they've mistreated or "found them out".
I'm sorry but this is such an unhelpful knee-jerk reaction.
When the outcome of such a test could literally destroy your future career, you don't think people would be motivated to deceive the interviewer? We are talking about highly motivated, often highly charismatic people.
Given all the surveillance, wouldn't the best solution be to use that to identify future sociopaths, narcissists, etc and stop them that way? Forget a test they can bypass or cheat, identify signs of questionable behaviour (like cruelty to animals, bullying, etc) and label them that way.
If someone hits the signs for a future serial killer, block them from ever getting any sort of job beyond menial work.
Lol. This is so incredibly backwards and stupid. Have you ran through any part of how this would work in your head? Not to mention how insane it is to ban people based on a test that is not scientific to begin with, not to mention gameable to the point it would have the exact opposite effect you desire.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 10.9 ms ] threadDoes SV now optimize for evilness?
Since when has it not ?
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
What if what happens today seems quaint in the future?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41056765
I won't be surprised when "The Com"[1] will be revealed to be a project of some rich SV accelerationist.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit.
nevermind all the crime, slashed tires and arson
I actually did, though not frequently (mostly just getting to and from the airport). They were fine. Car always showed up, I never got ripped off.
I accept that Uber and Lyft made getting taxis easier for more than just those use cases.
I live in a fairly rich place and here, taxis were fine, too. When Uber came, they mostly just eroded salaries and protections for taxi drivers, while lowering the quality of service for customers (though also, for a short while, the price). The best I can say about it is that it accelerated the digital transformation of the industry a bit.
On the other hand, I heard from several people from other places in the world that the arrival of Uber meant that they could finally get a safe and reliable ride.
And concretely, for the startups listed in the article - such as Doublespeed, which sells access to “phone farms” with thousands of fake social media accounts and ultimately aims to replace human content creators - do you think they will improve society by succeeding?
https://www.techspot.com/news/113395-flock-biggest-investor-...
What’s next? $20m series B in ByBy, a horizontally integrated trash disposal, concrete shoe manufacture, lye bath, and pig farm operation?
Surveillance tech is the opposite: It represents freedom taken away. That is the more bleak future IMO.
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions? It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.
The windfall may not even justify the initial expenditure before it's exhausted.
Which is how it should have been from the get-go.
Unless you take a global census of every possible resource, as well as it’s replenishment rate, you can’t know how to rate limit it
All overconsumption is only recognized after the fact
It’s one of the most intractable problems in the universe
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
Social animals do this too - even vampire bats ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4685829/ )
The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality.
I also wanted to point out, the big 10% rate they're seeing is not for actual conversions, but replies, which are likely correlated, but a reply does not a conversion make. The real rate is presumably lower.
Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".
Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
People who are environmentalists don't think having an impact on the environment is morally wrong. We have to have some impact on the environment in order to live, and nature can take quite a lot of impact, just not all of it from all of us.
All environmentalists believe there's an acceptable human footprint. How big, varies.
A wealthy environmentalist merely believes they're entitled to a bigger share of the acceptable total human footprint because they can pay for it - and my point, the logic of that is not at all controversial in our society.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
Most of the incel, anime, doomed, and bro culture that was prevalent / nascent there 15-20 years ago is now super mainstream.
What it really is is the interface. It’s where things go when they are on their way out, like discarded scientific ideas, but it’s also where new things first appear.
If you watch the fringe you know what’s coming and going.
It can be hard to tell sometimes which it is though, coming or going.
It’s really hard to predict what becomes relevant - I would have never guessed that the “chad/stacy/virgin” archetypes are now so common place that even my grandma knows what it means.
Whereas other huge memes from back then like EFG never got popular.
Today I feel like a lot of it has retreated into closed groups, which makes it harder to keep an eye on it. Frustrating for someone who likes to watch it, but also might be a good thing since it might insulate it a little from the culture vultures.
Pre-Internet it was music-drug-party culture (those three always went together), which was full of weirdos that ended up setting trends. It was also gay culture especially back when it was much more underground due to persecution.
I wish people understood this because it's why deplatforming doesn't work. When the fascist right was deplatformed, that gave them power. It made them fringe, which made them cool. If they'd been kept on the big socials the actually fringe places would have made fun of them, which was happening before deplatforming. "Oh look boomers on Reddit who take Q seriously... lol..." Being mainstream makes you not cool and on your way out. Deplatforming probably got Trump elected a second time.
I think most of the sub cultures you mentioned are now firmly in the mainstream culture - it might just be my bubble/bias - but gay/black/furry/genderfluid/fandom/rave/techno culture is nowadays so prevalent that it doesn’t even register as something unusual.
To me that is a huge difference to 10-15 years+ ago and tumblr besides the chans is definitely one of the places that drove this change; also all the other significant social media’s of that era also had an influence of course. But the anonymity that 4chan provided was kind of unique and so the more extreme/unusual cultures gravitated there I think. Tumblr was special too for sure.
Nor did every thing 4chan invent catch on.
The theses and rules vary, of course, because there are many investors.
This one seems to have a thesis of “make 80s and 90s noir cyberpunk real.”
You know I didn't just come out and say that. I actually liked Ben and his character. Let's just say I got disillusioned about all of them in the correct order.
Talk is so cheap you wouldn't believe.
They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
You mean like how Trump mocked a disabled reporter at one of his early campaign rallies?
Americans actually agree on this, by and large.
Has it ever occurred to these low status people that their low status is due to their bad choices in life? No, it's all the fault of others: the black people, the brown people, the weird people...
If one abandons their principles as soon as a sufficient reward is offered, then they have no integrity.
So let your children see and learn what society rewards AND teach them integrity.
It is incredible that you think that Trump being president is normal. I didn't say he was responsible for this behavior; I am saying that him and his supporters are responsible for normalizing immoral, unethical, unacceptable behavior.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system? It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.
"I don't get it, why are they confessing? They are not confessing. They are bragging"
Why should they put their own life on the line when there are so many others whose lives could be used instead?
My answer that got me accepted was that there was a lip syncing competition at my college that was dwindling because everyone had to submit a CD and sign up in advance. It also was held in an auditorium.
When I took over, I moved it to Spotify and moved the venue to the lawn, and we went from ~20 people the previous year to 1.2k the year I ran it.
Here's pg's definition of a hacker: https://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
I left out that the rule at the time was all songs had to be reviewed by the administration, which I didn't comply with. I'm not saying my story is the greatest; quite the opposite. I was trying to show that "hacking" isn't inherently unethical or even particularly interesting.
Hacking is looking at the rules and finding smart ways of following them. A lawyer or accountant finding legal loopholes is hacking.
The clearest place to see hacking is within games where one follows the rules and does not cheat.
Avoid thinking that hacking is unethical behaviour. A common mistake of people that don't understand the culture.
Like many great words, the meaning does depend on who uses the word. But the people who created the usage didn't use it for cheating.
being largely ethical and being ruled is so baked into the identity of a citizen that we do not see mass defection. someone who does defect by being unethical gains and maybe rules others.
there is no requirement for a cooperative agreement or social contract signed by the leader or plutocrats of a society. they can and do defect by being corrupt.
more people are realising in the middle class that they too can defect and gain personally at others' expense. for example, realising that not recycling saves time and harms only others, or starting these companies listed in the article.
the more people that do defect, the less cooperation, which is basically a social breakdown. under mass defection you have the law of the jungle, which is realistically the existing paradigm of marc andreessen and peers, they are sociopathic.
this is all to say that A16Z can cheat in the knowledge that only comparable competitors will cheat, the people as a whole who are harmed will not.
Being scared of the future doesn't mean the people building it are evil.
I don't know what you think your comment adds to the conversation but I assure you it's not insightful, and if you dislike venture capitalists this is a bad place for you to spend your time.
Lighten up, man. These people don't care about you, and I assure you they're not reading your comments waiting to hire you. Why should I care about them when they are doing everything in their power to make this world a worse place?
That's really it, isn't it. How do we make smarter people, without them getting insufferable?
Yes, smarter people, that's we need of course. No nuance needed. Smarter grifters, smarter drug dealers, smarter dictators, smarter serial killers.
Smarter and more empathetic people would be better I think.
History doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme.
"I have zero introspection. As little as possible" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk
We can tell, Marc. It's not a good thing. It's the sort of thing oblivious villains say.
You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?
For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.
Some people are commenting people would fake/dupe the testers. Sure, some would be able to. But many (i'd wager the vast majority) wouldn't. People don't realise how difficult it actually is to fake being normal. The only reason people with cluster B seem to dupe so many is because we live in a day and age where they are able to jump from relationship to relationship and cut ties with the people they've mistreated or "found them out".
These are the specific traits which allow them to reach the positions of influence or power.
Those are the winners ofc, while there are innumerable losers along the way.
When the outcome of such a test could literally destroy your future career, you don't think people would be motivated to deceive the interviewer? We are talking about highly motivated, often highly charismatic people.
If someone hits the signs for a future serial killer, block them from ever getting any sort of job beyond menial work.