Have you been paying attention to what has been happening for the last year? Now is the era of con artists: break the law, pay a small vic, and you're free to scam again.
Why wouldn't investors give these people money? It's not like being an investor implies having morales, all they care about is making money whether it's legal or not and luckily for them crime not only pays but it's legal now too.
Salespeople are the easiest to sell to. Con artists are the easiest to swindle. The people who believe they're immune to being tricked are always the ones who get tricked the most.
It's a numbers game. You only need one in twenty con artists to become wildly successful before they're caught, and your overall con artist portfolio is guaranteed to win out.
And of course, there's no downside for the investors. If you backed a con artist, you're not culpable - you're a victim.
Building a successful startup is very hard, and not just in the "it's a lot of hard work" sense, but also in terms of making good decisions. For the average person who went to college and worked in some other industry/capacity, the good decisions are very counterintuitive.
Most VCs have no idea how to accuratly judge startups based on their core merit, or how to make good decision in startups (though they may think they do), so instead they focus on things like "will this founder be able to hype up this startup and sell the next round so I can mark it up on my books".
So... You think it's because the VCs are conning their investors and those con-man are the best extend and pretend opportunities?
I can believe in that. But just a couple of years ago it was clearly happening because the VCs wanted those people to sell the companies into some mark and return real money to them. I wonder when did the investors became the marks?
Mayb in some extreme cases, but I wouldn't go so far as using the "con" word most of the time.
The hardest part of startups is probably the making good decisions part. To be a good VC you need to be better at founders at judging startup decisions, AND you need to be good at LP deal flow AND you need to be good at startup deal flow. LP deal flow has to come first (otherwise there is no fund), and because of zirp a lot of VCs got funds up without good startup deal flow or the ability to judge startups well.
In other words it's hard to be good a VC too, but for a while it was artificially easy to be a bad VC.
I mean whenever things like the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and SoftBank came into existence. They've been the biggest marks to unload your dumbest equity into for as long as I've been paying attention (so at least 10-15 years now), and at least as long as Jim Cramer and his ilk have been hyping dog shit IPOs to drop on clueless retail.
I can't even stand to visit YT without the combo of Blocktube/Unhook/uBlock Origin/SponsorBlock/Return YouTube Dislike. (Some people may also find Clickbait Remover useful.)
Blocktube is a godsend; it adds a context menu for blocking videos/channels, and you can block vids/channels/comments based on a regex or keywords (e.g. transparently remove every 'minecraft' or 'roblox' vid, or remove every comment with 'Telegram' in it). It even removes vids before the DOM rendering, so blocked vids don't show up as empty title cards or blank spaces.
Unhook lets you independently toggle visibility of the home feed, the rec sidebar, endscreen recs, comments, shorts, and the unrelated BS they ad to search results. (The latest YT update lets endscreen recs slip through again; be sure to add
youtube.com##.html5-video-player.ended-mode .ytp-fullscreen-grid to your ublock filter to get rid of them again.)
Surprisingly YouTube still generates a feed for every channel's video page, so I just add channels to my RSS reader for updates instead of bothering with the increasingly flaky subscriptions page. (If they ever break this or yt-dlp I'm not even going to bother with YT in the future.)
Remember when Google exec Prabhakar Raghavan (the man who previously ran Yahoo search into the ground) made Google Search worse so they could serve more ads?
This is the YouTube philosophy; make the platform worse to drive 'engagement', completely ignoring the second and third order effects of their 'optimizations'. Want to search by upload date? Sorry, we removed that! Have some slop! Want to look for a video? Here's a bunch of unrelated bullshit instead - have you tried some slop? Also, have some ads.
The experience for creators is even worse. The recommendation algorithm and monetization policies change every month and YT conveniently gets to collect all the ad money if you've been demonitized. They're shoving a bajillion AI tools down creator's throats and even editing videos after they've been uploaded.
In the end, YouTube caters to advertisers. You're just the product.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot shoving slop in a human's face -- forever.
Actually I would like see a post-mortem that showed where all the money actually went; they somehow spent ~85x of what RSI has raised for Star Citizen, and what they had to show for it was worse than some student projects I've seen.
Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?
At least part of the funding went to research on hard science related to VR, such as tracking, lenses, CV, 3D mapping etc. And it paid off, IMO Meta has the best hardware and software foundation for delivering VR, and projects like Hyperscape (off-the-shelf, high-fidelity 3D mapping) are stunning.
Whether it was worth it is another question, but I would not be surprised is recycled to power a futuristic AI interface or something similar at some point.
Even within the XR industry, we had no clue where all that money went. During the metaverse debacle, the entire industry stagnated. Once metaverse failed, XR adjacent shops started to fail. There was no hardware or technique innovation shared with the rest of the industry, and at the time the technology was pretty well settled.
Since then we lost all the medium players and it's basically just Facebook, Valve, and Apple.
Today on "Hacker" News: a third of the commenters wring their hands and question the morality and legality of subverting copy protection on software almost half a century old.
There is no legality to debate. As of 2003 there is a DMCA exemption for "computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete". <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_preservation#Legal_...>
To be fair, I might question the legality of it, although from a purely academic perspective. Like, exactly how illegal could it be, and are there any possible paths of it actually being enforced? That’s an interesting conversation to have.
In practice, I couldn’t care less and it’s obviously morally OK.
I don't think the FSF foundation has been an effectibe organization for a long time, but giving money to the Linix Foundation is even worse. Look at where their money actually goes - a vanishingly small portion is actually used to improve Linux and its ecosystem.
The topic on whether FSF is an effective organization is too big to fit on a comment, but I'll just add my two cents on how the FSF helped me this week:
I was looking into shared key encryption, found Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm, found a GNU implementation called ssss.
Unfortunately there isn't much information on what texts they're actually training this on; how Anglocentric is the dataset? Does it include the Encyclopedia Britannica 9th Edition? What about the 11th? Are Greek and Latin classics in the data? What about Germain, French, Italian (etc. etc.) periodicals, correspondence, and books?
Given this is coming out of Zurich I hope they're using everything, but for now I can only assume.
Still, I'm extremely excited to see this project come to fruition!
thanks. we'll be more precise in the future. ultimately, we took whatever we could get our hands on, that includes newspapers, periodicals, books. its multilingual (including italian, french, spanish etc) though majority is english.
Wow, I just checked and that's really underwhelming: Tiny page size, lots of padding around the images and yet there's often 4 images per page. The layout makes it seem like the size a was late decision, it would be appropriate for a large artbook.
I was trying to buy a copy of the Iliad and found that they combined the reviews of EVERY TRANSLATION AND EVERY EDITION - I found people talking about 30+ versions on the same listing!
Reviews for Fagles's Iliad were combined with Pope's Iliad and Lattimore's Iliad and so on and so forth.
Navigation is also borked for books with many different versions - if you play around with the 'hardback', 'paperback', 'audiobook' buttons at the top of the page you'll find there's no consistency about what edition they lead you to.
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