Here in tech bro world we have so many innovations for you! Why not try our:
- Imaginary scam money (in 17,382 flavors, including eyeballs)!
- Expensive unregulated taxi!
- Expensive unregulated hotel!
- Picture of monkey (formerly valuable)!
- Imaginary restaurant that serves bad food!
- Expensive unregulated television!
- Another picture of monkey (never valuable)!
- Twitter but it sucks now!
- The news but it also sucks and steals your personal information!
Plus, try our greatest achievement yet:
- Expensive unregulated scam concert tickets!
EDIT: the real trend with Silly-Con Valley is that every major venture is an adventure in removing regulations that We (collectively) bought with 10's of thousands of lives. And these VCs come through, and seek to destroy regulation for a pound of profit, and some scraps to others.
These services always start cheap since they are subsidized by VCs to buy growth and scale. It soon will change, and get worse and cost more, if not outright re-regulated out of existence.... For the same reasons why the regulation was there in the first place.
There's a few companies working on true innovations. But most SV is just remixes on "deregulation and illegality as a service"
People forget how terrible the experience was prior to these companies, and when the industry changes, they point to incumbents forced to innovate as a way to say the tech companies were unnecessary.
Taxis is the low hanging fruit, non-hotellike rentals is another, cable TV/DVD rentals is a third.
Simple. A multi-level-marketing scheme build on the free money/web3/crypto trend, successfully taking the existing art market speculative practices into the digital realm.
I feel like the people who complain about Uber/Lyft from a service perspective never used taxis extensively. Living in Chicago (Lakeview) for years while traveling for work made me absolutely hate taxis. When scheduling, they would no-show at 5 in the morning causing missed flights. Rides from the airport would require standing in line many times over an hour, especially on a Thursday night. They all absolutely reeked of body odor. The drivers would consistently scam “card machine broken, cash only” or “I forgot to turn on the meter” and unless you threatened to report them, they would take advantage of passengers. Drivers were sketchy and rarely matched the credentials on the taxi medallion.
I’ve also lived in areas where taxi service was essentially nonexistent. I wonder how many DUIs and related accidents have been prevented by ride share apps.
Traveling abroad in Europe the apps work simply regardless of my command of the local language to explain my destination and keeps the drivers honest so they aren’t taking “the long way”.
How is anyone supporting taxis as superior to this? There was absolutely no accountability.
From an business model perspective, I would wager that eventually you could get this to a point of sustainability that doesn’t require armies of engineers and various support staff, a la Twitter.
Given that Uber's only quarter in the black was the most recent, AND most of it was from capitalized assets, well, it's just a failing business, but scaled big!
It's a common trope for VC's to fund, fund, fund for that sweet hockey stick growth. And they know that it takes money to make money.
So yeah, the fact that these businesses have been better is because they were subsidized by VC'e to get you as a customer. Enshittification process is already well full in effect, and will get more expensive and worse
But hey, Uber cashed out for the early Ponzi investors. Probably won't pan out past this point.
Anecdotally, amongst my peer group AirBnBing is waaaay down. Pricing is out of control (even more than hotels), and there's usually a long chore list AND expensive cleaning fee on top.
That's not a great argument. They may be different in some ways, but that doesn't mean better.
I recently looked for airbnb in Cardiff for pycon UK. Many of them are more expensive than a hotel, with fewer facilities and less guarantee of service.
Uber has never been better than cabs where I live.
YT may offer more choice than the TV, but there's an awful lot of race to the bottom junk and VPN shilling on there.
They may have been better at one point, but at least in my social circle pretty much everybody has given up on AirBnB due to numerous bad experiences and constantly complains about content now being spread across a dozen streaming services.
Uber is fantastic, much better than some street taxi you have to find and hail. AirBnB is the only way I can realistically find multi room houses to stay in on vacations, hotels don’t offer that and there aren’t resorts everywhere. Not sure what you’re referring to with the imaginary restaurant and unregulated television.
Our industry rewards grifters and/or rent seekers much more than it does true innovation.
The worthwhile innovation that does happen skirts all the rules and guns for illegal monopoly, wearing it as a badge of honor. Too twisted for my taste.
They sell a subscription to shows, and then remove or enshittify their service. It's the equivalent of shrinkflation, where you buy 10$ of something, and it's 80% the size of last week.
The law is not for tech bros, they just see it as a signpost that you can pretend not to have read or be aware of. It invariably ends badly in the long run and in the short term everybody else suffers. Highly annoying.
I'm very happy that Uber broke the law that protected the cab cartel. Now I can conveniently get a ride wherever I want and never have to deal with a sleazy incompetent cab company ever again. When I travel to other countries I never have to deal with their shitty taxi scams.
Unfortunately. Uber has made it normal for people to work for poverty wages to make their asset depreciate even faster, all because they managed to pump a shitload of money into a money losing proposition. Getting a personalized driver right now should be a luxury expense - Uber dumping money that they will never make back into it doesn't change that. Uber drivers should be paid fairly, like employees, and not as independent contractors.
The law is not for entrepreneurs, they just see it as a signpost that you have to be aware of. It invariably ends ok in the long run and in the short term everybody calls them tech bros.
Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb. Yes, there’s a negative externality aspect — if your neighbors are suddenly renting out their place to random people, that can get painfully annoying for you. But I bet if you did a methodical poll, most people would choose not to un-invent Airbnb.
Self driving cars, ditto. Cruise’s fleet is finally deployed all around SF, according to pg. It’s about to become as ubiquitous as electricity. And in the beginning, so many people argued that it’s against the law and therefore shouldn’t be developed. Then it quietly shifted to well, maybe the law should change.
It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril. You’re outsourcing your thinking to the lowest common denominator: it’s what people in positions of power feel is justice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, do you really want to be the kind of person that believes it should be obeyed no matter the tradeoffs?
This isn’t a hypothetical for me. People have asked many times if I was worried that someone will try to come after me for making books3 available. Till one week ago, I wasn’t. But if the world really wants to say that I’m causing suffering by making books available to machine learning researchers, I have very little leverage to argue that I am not in fact doing that… except ethics. Because without books3, only OpenAI is able to train powerful large models, because they’re the only ones that can get away with it. Is that justice?
You’re an inspiration to me in many ways. I still remember you showing me your workshop, and how friggin cool it was. I’ve tried to channel your maker spirit over the years to be even half as talented. But I just don’t understand where this bitterness comes from against “tech bros”; it’s a fairly common theme in your writing. Sweeping generalizations are such dangerous territory, in terms of history proving that you were mistaken.
Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible. I think it’s pretty dystopian. But that’s a separate question: evaluate each startup on its merits, and crucify the Theranos frauds. This can be done on an individual basis.
That's pretty simple: I can't stand it that people with such an opportunity for improving the world around them would squander it and wreck it. That makes me bitter.
As for whether if you invert it it becomes true: there are exceptions but for the most part the lawbreakers sooner or later end up running into the limits, be they SBF, Thiel, Musk or any other of the ethically challenged individuals that the tech world puts on a pedestal. Money seems to have structurally perverted our world and the rule of law is just about the last barrier that helps keep society functioning.
Tear that down and you lose a lot more than just some 'minor inconveniences'. The law is the ultimate representation of the rules by which we play. Starting off by throwing out the rulebook in a way that will result in net negatives is a clear example of externalization: profits for the owners and investors and the damage for everybody else.
That is not how we're going to get to a nicer and more sustainable future. There is a lot of fuss about the kleptocrats in Russia and how they rape their country and their fellow men. Rightly so. But the tech bros aren't that much better, they just sell it better.
As for AirBnB disappearing: yes, please.
> Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible.
Maybe?
No, seriously: it is terrible, there is absolutely no way in hell that this is justifiable, it is with distance the worst thing Sam Altman has ever done and that plus OpenAi's blatant attempts at regulatory capture are enough to make me regret ever defending him on HN before because I thought that he was different.
So, that leaves pc and his brother for now, the rest of the tech bro billionaires can go jump in a lake.
Though we can appreciate the intense faith of Silicon Valley lore, this interpretation of the law is bizarrely narrow. The somewhat religious belief in progress is non-representative of the human experience. The function of the human race isn't to secure commercial services of convenience at any cost. It is possible that your beliefs don't correspond to the goals of local or global communities. For instance all you have to do is actually use a self-driving, slow/jerky/annoying Cruise car to know it'll be about as ubiquitous as a Segway, uses way more resources than is justifiable and that more public transit would do a better, and more environmental friendly job of getting people places. In summary, we have laws because other people exist and we live in a modern economy. Syria/Iraq/Russia operate more in line with your thinking and bend the laws for the rich (you know, for "progress").
> Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb
Step outside of the software bubble we’re in and I’d guess 80% or more people would prefer a world without Airbnb. A significant part of the population does not use Airbnb and is also experiencing negative impacts of a housing shortage and affordability problems.
> Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb.
I'm here, raising my hand!
Zoning requirements exist for a reason. In this AirBNB hellscape, we now have entirely unregulated hotels in my nominally residential neighborhood. I live in a tourist town and it gets the worst kind of tourists, there to drink and play loud music to all hours of the morning.
These companies can fuck right off. Sometimes they accidentally improve things on one axis by ignoring regulations that are no longer relevant or overly burdensome, only to make something much worse on another. They're blunt instruments of criminality - they indiscriminately tear through both the useless red tape as well as the proper regulations that exist for entirely good reasons.
> It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril. You’re outsourcing your thinking to the lowest common denominator: it’s what people in positions of power feel is justice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, do you really want to be the kind of person that believes it should be obeyed no matter the tradeoffs?
Nice, so we should be allowed to break the law if we feel that something is not right?
Yes, laws may be unethical or immoral. There is a system in place to change them, though, at least in a democratic government. Self-driving cars are allowed to be in the streets because laws have changed. AirBnB is allowed to operate because the laws have changed. And I would rather have that, a slow process of adaptation, than a random guy letting their crazy inventions roam free just because he feels like he's "right".
That question is so loaded because it begs for a loss of knowledge about Airbnb, and that’s not something I would not want to lose. However, do I think Airbnb is a net gain for humans? No. But I wouldn’t “uninvent it”, in the literal sense.
Disrupting the law as an ideal is not the same as "It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril"
Idealizing being indifferent to the law is pulling the rug under the whole idea of democracy and rule of law. It has dire consequences. Much dire than a less than perfect taxi cab experience.
Well, if the law would deal with people the way they do with companies, you would never be convicted of any crime. It would be the shirt you wore at the day of the crime that would be sent to the cleaners, and you could choose to pay the bill for getting it back or not.
Yes. People also voluntarily give up their civil rights and are duped into unreasonable debts. How often do you read the ToS for most of the services you consume? Consumer protections operate in the understanding that people cannot be expected to know the intricacies of all the various laws and agreements that may negatively impact them should they agree to terms when consuming a good or service.
If WeChat required iris scans to work, would the Chinese "voluntarily" be doing it?
I'm specifically making this example about WeChat because it's basically impossible to exist in China without it and has the power imbalances inherent in dealing with the CCP that make it "voluntary" the same way donating money to someone with a gun pointed at your chest is "voluntary", since libertarians have a deliberately extremely warped view of that word.
I’m having a hard time not being snarky and sarcastic about this. Worldcoin is a solution to no particular problem, designed to replace government functions with their own profit-driven replacements. I’m not the slightest surprised they’re ignoring those same governments telling them not to do something.
I deeply disagree. While Worldcoin's execution seems questionable at best, the idea seems like a solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem. Worldcoin or something like it, if properly implemented, makes it possible to distinguish between real people and bots. This is a real problem that we have today, is getting rapidly worse, and till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments.
Worldcoin is just a centralized / privately owned database of iris scans and issued user IDs that integrates with the blockchain.
> solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem
> till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments
The solution Worldcoin provides is "trust us for knowing who is real-people". I fail to see how that's better than the way governments solve the problem.
Eh, we could kinda resolve the problem by having a government auth system, and you can get some OpenID like response from it. Then private companies could just use that for identification (like in Sweden, a lot of apps have that BankID or whatever its called). We have something similar in Canada in a couple of provinces, but they’re exposed to government portals only.
However bringing that theme into US is a no-brainer because of the distrust in the government or some other issues.
I am very far from convinced that this is a problem that needs to be solved so badly that we should sacrifice any amount of privacy for it. Especially to a corporation.
And despite WC's claims, their scheme does involve sacrificing some privacy.
I read a paper that looked at Sybil attacks in the age of modern generative AI. In short, the internet is unviable without a clear human-or-bot signal. Until now that signal was inherent: most things a human can easily do a bot cannot; captchas, targeted cyberhacks, interactive realistic phone calls.
There is zero chance Worldcoin will not be shut down in any country the second they reach significant volume above what they get now with the PR hype and free money customer attraction scheme with a touch of anachronistic crypto hype.
It's so terribly out of touch with the real world in a way not even the most die hard crypto bro's could dream up a dystopian scenario where this would fly.
And what's with that terribly photoshopped picture of the 2; as if to double down on how fake the motives behind this scheme are.
No, the average crypto bro doesn't care about crypto, privacy or anything like that. The average crypto bro only cares about the opportunity to profit, and will gladly let the devil himself scan their iris as long as they get some digital tokens they can dump to someone else.
Truly unfortunate, because what Worldcoin is doing is completely opposite of the original cryptocurrency ideal.
for every 1 dreamy utopian hacker crypto bro you have 99 running a get rich quick scheme, if they can pump and dump the worldcoin, they will, even if it would include ripping the eyeballs off the customers
At this point, why do we even bother pretending to be dismayed that techbros and their vanity projects have no respect for anything? If you just assume that they're doing something harmful that enriches themselves (and I mean literally enriches) and we just haven't had a news cycle about it yet, we could save so much time giving them the benefit of the doubt and just go straight to handing out fines in the nine-digit range to make them cut their shit out.
It's not clear to me from this article whether ignoring a demand from Kenya's ODPC was a crime. The article says nothing about it. Is it? It's conceivable that it's the equivalent of a cease and desist letter, if the ODPC has no specific authority. That would explain why a company with a lot of lawyers would just ignore it, and why it was escalated to another group as a response.
Readit News
- Imaginary scam money (in 17,382 flavors, including eyeballs)!
- Expensive unregulated taxi!
- Expensive unregulated hotel!
- Picture of monkey (formerly valuable)!
- Imaginary restaurant that serves bad food!
- Expensive unregulated television!
- Another picture of monkey (never valuable)!
- Twitter but it sucks now!
- The news but it also sucks and steals your personal information!
Plus, try our greatest achievement yet:
- Expensive unregulated scam concert tickets!
EDIT: the real trend with Silly-Con Valley is that every major venture is an adventure in removing regulations that We (collectively) bought with 10's of thousands of lives. And these VCs come through, and seek to destroy regulation for a pound of profit, and some scraps to others.
These services always start cheap since they are subsidized by VCs to buy growth and scale. It soon will change, and get worse and cost more, if not outright re-regulated out of existence.... For the same reasons why the regulation was there in the first place.
There's a few companies working on true innovations. But most SV is just remixes on "deregulation and illegality as a service"
Taxis is the low hanging fruit, non-hotellike rentals is another, cable TV/DVD rentals is a third.
However, I have no explanation for NFTs.
Simple. A multi-level-marketing scheme build on the free money/web3/crypto trend, successfully taking the existing art market speculative practices into the digital realm.
> - Expensive unregulated hotel!
> - Expensive unregulated television!
All of these are better than the alternative, or people wouldn't use them
I’ve also lived in areas where taxi service was essentially nonexistent. I wonder how many DUIs and related accidents have been prevented by ride share apps.
Traveling abroad in Europe the apps work simply regardless of my command of the local language to explain my destination and keeps the drivers honest so they aren’t taking “the long way”.
How is anyone supporting taxis as superior to this? There was absolutely no accountability.
From an business model perspective, I would wager that eventually you could get this to a point of sustainability that doesn’t require armies of engineers and various support staff, a la Twitter.
Just don’t try to say taxis were better.
It's a common trope for VC's to fund, fund, fund for that sweet hockey stick growth. And they know that it takes money to make money.
So yeah, the fact that these businesses have been better is because they were subsidized by VC'e to get you as a customer. Enshittification process is already well full in effect, and will get more expensive and worse
But hey, Uber cashed out for the early Ponzi investors. Probably won't pan out past this point.
I recently looked for airbnb in Cardiff for pycon UK. Many of them are more expensive than a hotel, with fewer facilities and less guarantee of service.
Uber has never been better than cabs where I live.
YT may offer more choice than the TV, but there's an awful lot of race to the bottom junk and VPN shilling on there.
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The worthwhile innovation that does happen skirts all the rules and guns for illegal monopoly, wearing it as a badge of honor. Too twisted for my taste.
There, I extended the list with the most recent addition to the pile.
I was looking for a place to invest my savings
Sounds promising
> - Expensive unregulated scam concert tickets!
What are these two?
They sell a subscription to shows, and then remove or enshittify their service. It's the equivalent of shrinkflation, where you buy 10$ of something, and it's 80% the size of last week.
Ticketmaster, and their new bot storefront.
Dead Comment
Not invariably, sadly. Uber, for example, didn't seem to be overly hurt by their lawbreaking.
The law is not for entrepreneurs, they just see it as a signpost that you have to be aware of. It invariably ends ok in the long run and in the short term everybody calls them tech bros.
Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb. Yes, there’s a negative externality aspect — if your neighbors are suddenly renting out their place to random people, that can get painfully annoying for you. But I bet if you did a methodical poll, most people would choose not to un-invent Airbnb.
Self driving cars, ditto. Cruise’s fleet is finally deployed all around SF, according to pg. It’s about to become as ubiquitous as electricity. And in the beginning, so many people argued that it’s against the law and therefore shouldn’t be developed. Then it quietly shifted to well, maybe the law should change.
It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril. You’re outsourcing your thinking to the lowest common denominator: it’s what people in positions of power feel is justice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, do you really want to be the kind of person that believes it should be obeyed no matter the tradeoffs?
This isn’t a hypothetical for me. People have asked many times if I was worried that someone will try to come after me for making books3 available. Till one week ago, I wasn’t. But if the world really wants to say that I’m causing suffering by making books available to machine learning researchers, I have very little leverage to argue that I am not in fact doing that… except ethics. Because without books3, only OpenAI is able to train powerful large models, because they’re the only ones that can get away with it. Is that justice?
You’re an inspiration to me in many ways. I still remember you showing me your workshop, and how friggin cool it was. I’ve tried to channel your maker spirit over the years to be even half as talented. But I just don’t understand where this bitterness comes from against “tech bros”; it’s a fairly common theme in your writing. Sweeping generalizations are such dangerous territory, in terms of history proving that you were mistaken.
Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible. I think it’s pretty dystopian. But that’s a separate question: evaluate each startup on its merits, and crucify the Theranos frauds. This can be done on an individual basis.
As for whether if you invert it it becomes true: there are exceptions but for the most part the lawbreakers sooner or later end up running into the limits, be they SBF, Thiel, Musk or any other of the ethically challenged individuals that the tech world puts on a pedestal. Money seems to have structurally perverted our world and the rule of law is just about the last barrier that helps keep society functioning.
Tear that down and you lose a lot more than just some 'minor inconveniences'. The law is the ultimate representation of the rules by which we play. Starting off by throwing out the rulebook in a way that will result in net negatives is a clear example of externalization: profits for the owners and investors and the damage for everybody else.
That is not how we're going to get to a nicer and more sustainable future. There is a lot of fuss about the kleptocrats in Russia and how they rape their country and their fellow men. Rightly so. But the tech bros aren't that much better, they just sell it better.
As for AirBnB disappearing: yes, please.
> Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible.
Maybe?
No, seriously: it is terrible, there is absolutely no way in hell that this is justifiable, it is with distance the worst thing Sam Altman has ever done and that plus OpenAi's blatant attempts at regulatory capture are enough to make me regret ever defending him on HN before because I thought that he was different.
So, that leaves pc and his brother for now, the rest of the tech bro billionaires can go jump in a lake.
Step outside of the software bubble we’re in and I’d guess 80% or more people would prefer a world without Airbnb. A significant part of the population does not use Airbnb and is also experiencing negative impacts of a housing shortage and affordability problems.
I'm here, raising my hand!
Zoning requirements exist for a reason. In this AirBNB hellscape, we now have entirely unregulated hotels in my nominally residential neighborhood. I live in a tourist town and it gets the worst kind of tourists, there to drink and play loud music to all hours of the morning.
These companies can fuck right off. Sometimes they accidentally improve things on one axis by ignoring regulations that are no longer relevant or overly burdensome, only to make something much worse on another. They're blunt instruments of criminality - they indiscriminately tear through both the useless red tape as well as the proper regulations that exist for entirely good reasons.
Nice, so we should be allowed to break the law if we feel that something is not right?
Yes, laws may be unethical or immoral. There is a system in place to change them, though, at least in a democratic government. Self-driving cars are allowed to be in the streets because laws have changed. AirBnB is allowed to operate because the laws have changed. And I would rather have that, a slow process of adaptation, than a random guy letting their crazy inventions roam free just because he feels like he's "right".
Idealizing being indifferent to the law is pulling the rug under the whole idea of democracy and rule of law. It has dire consequences. Much dire than a less than perfect taxi cab experience.
Hand raised.
Two hands raised!
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/what-...
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Dead Comment
I'm specifically making this example about WeChat because it's basically impossible to exist in China without it and has the power imbalances inherent in dealing with the CCP that make it "voluntary" the same way donating money to someone with a gun pointed at your chest is "voluntary", since libertarians have a deliberately extremely warped view of that word.
They should have marketed it to US Republicans.
I deeply disagree. While Worldcoin's execution seems questionable at best, the idea seems like a solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem. Worldcoin or something like it, if properly implemented, makes it possible to distinguish between real people and bots. This is a real problem that we have today, is getting rapidly worse, and till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments.
> solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem
> till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments
The solution Worldcoin provides is "trust us for knowing who is real-people". I fail to see how that's better than the way governments solve the problem.
However bringing that theme into US is a no-brainer because of the distrust in the government or some other issues.
I am very far from convinced that this is a problem that needs to be solved so badly that we should sacrifice any amount of privacy for it. Especially to a corporation.
And despite WC's claims, their scheme does involve sacrificing some privacy.
I read a paper that looked at Sybil attacks in the age of modern generative AI. In short, the internet is unviable without a clear human-or-bot signal. Until now that signal was inherent: most things a human can easily do a bot cannot; captchas, targeted cyberhacks, interactive realistic phone calls.
It's so terribly out of touch with the real world in a way not even the most die hard crypto bro's could dream up a dystopian scenario where this would fly.
And what's with that terribly photoshopped picture of the 2; as if to double down on how fake the motives behind this scheme are.
Truly unfortunate, because what Worldcoin is doing is completely opposite of the original cryptocurrency ideal.
I don't know anything about US and Kenya agreements.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extrad...
What's the justice system like in Kenya these days?
I know nothing of law enforcement in Kenya, but there are a number of countries that would be happy to give someone like him safe harbor.