kirse
Might be a drop in the bucket, but it doesn't take many votes to make a difference in the spam world.
I'm sure this will evolve soon enough and email delivery might increasingly become pay-to-play with all sort of backroom agreements, if it isn't already.
Is this writer really that stupid or is this just a deep whoosh I'm missing. I can't decide.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/china-wants-to-ri...
I'm sure it's not "xenophobic moral panic" when China does it though, right?
No, TikTok is essentially digital opium. And China itself has confirmed that reality by 1) restricting their citizens' daily access and 2) significantly filtering the content they can see on it:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...
It would only be fair of the US to follow China's example of protecting its citizens from numbing out on TikTok digital garbage. We should most certainly should follow suit with an equivalently restrictive measure.
If that's true, I certainly couldn't find a table on allowable rate ranges when I did some basic research on pricing and what factors influence it. Certainly open to being schooled on how auto insurance works.
I vent my frustration to a few agents about the yearly rate increase insanity and they all shrug, give their non-empathetic "I understand" telephone script and blame it on the "system" calculating the prices and make some useless excuse about inflation.
I've got a clean driving record, a fully paid-off cheap vehicle, in a reasonably responsible age bracket, and the cost of decent auto insurance these days is essentially another car payment. Within 5 years I'll have paid back the insurance company 60-70% the value of the vehicle. The Gov/FTC needs to take a look at these companies, especially if they're forcing us to hold the insurance to reasonably participate in society.
There's no doubt about this. I spent a few months of my life doing FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) before all the white-labeled Alibaba trash dominated the Amazon search results, and it was very easy to find things in the local Target, BigLots, etc. that could be sent into Amazon and sold at 30/50/100% markups, and it would still fly off the commingled shelves.
Amazon got everyone used to the assumption that Amazon prices were the lowest, then introduced the behavioral convenience of Prime, and then slowly allowed prices to float upwards once that Prime behavior was entrained.
The Prime membership has recently reached an inflection point where the value paid is not worth the value received, I just recently let my 15-yr Prime expire for that reason.
Between the suspiciously inconvenient outages during market volatility and their forced switch-over to Plaid for bank account verification (during which they unlinked my previously verified accounts), I'm pretty much fed up with their absolute garbage customer experience over the past 3-4 years.
Problem is Binance is not any better either. If someone rolled out a boutique crypto exchange that offers a quality customer experience & phone support similar to TDA/ThinkOrSwim I would gladly sign up in a second.
Interesting that YC is willing to toe the IP theft line on this one. I think plenty of us do in fact realize that homegrown corporate ideas / apps could likely be turned into external new businesses, but then the blurred ethics and legality of doing so occurs a few thoughts later.
An F100 I worked for had an entire corporate group for the purposes of spinning off their IP so that it could be done ethically/legally and give the employees' new startup the boost it needed. Several of these startups have gone on to $MMM/$B valuations. If you're at Boring BigCo and thinking of ripping one of their developed ideas for a small YC check, I'd advise against it.
We've experienced a massive dilution in language over the past decade or so. I'm not sure if it's because we're churning out more black & white thinkers or incentivizing folks with a victim mindset, but all sorts of words like *-phobic, gaslighting, trauma, etc. have become significantly overused given their traditional symptomatic markers.
It's the language equivalent of WebMD - basically implying that a grab bag of cold symptoms are in fact brain cancer. On one hand it's good that the next generation thinks a breakup is "traumatic", because it means people are experiencing less absolute trauma. On the other hand words have meanings so we can accurately describe the world.
It's because the appendix-is-useless "belief" comes with decades of evolution vs. intelligent design emotion behind it, starting with Darwin himself.
Because the guy is framing his discouragement as "coming from a place of love" when in reality it takes roughly 2-3 weeks to go from zero-to-[LLC accepting payments on Stripe]. Which means it's really not that "fucking hard" at all to start small and begin the search for paying customers.
I've been on this board for 17 years back when it was originally called "Startup News" and full of new-company founders, sold 2 small SW apps back in 2009, and have also done the F100 corporate adventure. The emotional challenges of starting your own company can be easier than the 9-5.
"Fucking hard" compared to what? Things I'd qualify under the category of "fucking hard":
- Agricultural Farming
- Lifetime debilitating disease / health issue
- Being enslaved or a POW
- Living in a 3rd world country
- Moving West in the 1800s
- Fighting in the American Revolutionary or Civil War
This narrative that starting a company is "fucking hard" is all part of the SV/SF mythos that needs a smooth stone straight to the forehead.
This was my recent experience. I was offered an EV car as a rental upgrade in a major city because the local rental place didn't have an EV charger. I figured what the hell because it was a relaxed holiday vacation. Turns out that was a hilariously bad idea.
Ended up spending at least 5-6 hours of my week vacation trying to avoid the EV going to 0% battery. Half of that time was spent on Google Maps - trying to find chargers with the right plug, ones that aren't broken, ones that were available, downloading various apps, etc. Then when I did find a charger I sat in the parking lot waiting for it to juice up.
All of that effort and I still could only give myself the miles back that I spent finding chargers, it was even funnier when the cold weather took miles away. Finally ended up luckily finding one at a local movie theater and asked family to shuttle me back and forth because of how long it took to charge.
Not a knock on EV's really, mostly the charging infrastructure and the rental experience.
https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_m600-pictures-1425.ph...
And these:
https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6820-pictures-565.php
Had the N900 and N95 as well. Back then it was easy to have a cool/unique phone because carriers weren't on top of their hardware lineups. Now everything is a boring rounded-corners slate. Even Sony gave up with the squared-edges on their Xperia lineup. I'm optimistic that rollable screens will bring back some real innovation beyond just clam-shells.
[1] https://www.americanrallyassociation.org/
I've always said that self-crashing cars will win my stamp of approval when they can compete in stage rally. It'd likely push the Waymo team to evolve even further by getting involved in something like that, even with just the basics.
- https://chat.openai.com/g/g-LQHhJCXhW-autoexpert-chat
Phind has a whole Discord channel and they're pretty focused on building a great tool aimed at programmers. It's approaching pinned-tab status for me.
Between EVs and crossovers we're suffocating in this current era of uninspired automotive design where it seems like mfgrs take a single car model, open it in Photoshop, resize by 50/70/110/130%, slap on new badge and call it a day. Audi & Subaru are some of the worst modern offenders here.
Debating if I want to respond to this, because there is fistfuls of cash right now in software consulting for this sort of work. Boring CRUDs and API integrations make a lot of the world go round (quietly).