billylindeman (u/billylindeman)

billylindeman commented on TikTok goes dark in the US techcrunch.com/2025/01/18... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

scarab92 · a year ago

It's hard for China to claim that they are being treated unfairly, when US companies are generally only permitted to hold a minority 49% interest of the Chinese operations.

The US is just reciprocating.

billylindeman · a year ago

Chinese investors own ~20% of ByteDance. Mostly own by large funds (State Street BlackRock, Sequoia, etc)

billylindeman commented on TikTok goes dark in the US techcrunch.com/2025/01/18... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

wilg · a year ago

None of those arguments are the salient one, which is that a geopolitical adversary has control over a major influence vector on US public opinion. They could simply have divested.

billylindeman · a year ago

"They could simply have divested"

What an odd thing to say. Why should a company that started the biggest social media app in a decade "divest" it to US oligarchic interests when it's a global application? It makes no sense.

This is the largest affront to American freedom since the patriot act, and the fact that people are celebrating it on some red-scare bullshit is terrifying.

I am personally disgusted that my government thinks it should be in the business of telling me what apps I can have on my phone. I am a grown adult, and a taxpayer, and the US Government has no fucking business telling me where I can watch and/or post videos.

Maybe it's time to build a decentralized alternative so this never happens again.

billylindeman commented on GM is investing almost $1B in new V8 engines jalopnik.com/gm-is-invest... · Posted by u/bluedino

kjksf · 3 years ago

Combustion and hybrids will be banned in most markets by 2035-40. Until then, it'll market of declining sales year after year.

Investing in anything in them is a huge mistake. It's like investing in improving black and white tv at a time when color tv have 10% market share and growing 50% a year.

Car companies have no choice but to sell ICE for a while. The demand is still there and they can't convert to EV production overnight.

Yet, the winner of tomorrow will be companies that convert to EV quickly and without going bankrupt. Spending $1B on non-EV technology is not going to help GM do that.

billylindeman · 3 years ago

When the electrical grid begins to collapse under the weight of "migrating to EV," people will be quite happy these legacy companies didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There are massive needs that ICE is still servicing, and will continue to service for many decades to come.

billylindeman commented on Apple blocks Coinbase Wallet twitter.com/coinbasewalle... · Posted by u/stale2002

vdjao · 3 years ago

iCloud backups of photos is possible without using iCloud. I use a photo syncing app on my phone that is paired with a SMB server in my home. It just dumps new photos whenever I’m on my home network. But I don’t get iCloud syncing photos to my Mac instantly.

iCloud backups of device backups requires a Mac, then setting to sync via Wi-Fi.

billylindeman · 3 years ago

does this work in the background or do you need to run the backup task? I'm setting up a home server atm and curious about this for iCloud

billylindeman commented on Show HN: Cozo – new Graph DB with Datalog, embedded like SQLite github.com/cozodb/cozo... · Posted by u/zh217

billylindeman · 3 years ago

This is amazing. I can't wait to play with it

billylindeman commented on More than half of Silicon Valley residents want to leave: The mood is darkening nypost.com/2022/10/05/mor... · Posted by u/rmason

yazzku · 3 years ago

I'm not even going any further than HN comments on this one.

NYPost (and also SFChronicle) were constantly talking about this 'exodus' during COVID. How everyone was leaving; how the U-Hauls were cheaper in the egress direction. Seemed like complete and utter BS. I'm sure they made a lot of revenue from ads though.

billylindeman · 3 years ago

To be fair, I did leave during COVID and it was actually impossible to get a Uhaul (September 2020).

Moving back to SF in the next month for a new gig (after the startup I was working for ran out of cash and laid everyone off).

billylindeman commented on Musk, Tesla, SpaceX Are Sued for Alleged Dogecoin Pyramid Scheme bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/jc_811

Salgat · 4 years ago

Length doesn't mean much, it's size that matters, and that comes down to total transactions across all blocks, as transactions per block is not some fixed number.

billylindeman · 4 years ago

So it's the girth that matters?

billylindeman commented on Show HN: WebRTC Nuts and Bolts, A holistic way of understanding how WebRTC runs github.com/adalkiran/webr... · Posted by u/adalkiran

sibit · 4 years ago

Is anyone on HN using WebRTC in production? I recall watching a conference talk by Martin Kleppmann a few years ago where he was discussing CRDTs and Automerge. He mentioned how they attempted to use WebRTC but it wasn't reliable so they had to use Web Sockets with a custom message relay server instead.

billylindeman · 4 years ago

We use it at https://tandem.chat. I work on the AV stack. WebRTC is pretty awesome.

billylindeman commented on Bolt announces layoffs bolt.com/blog/message-fro... · Posted by u/Lapz

clpm4j · 4 years ago

More broadly I've gotta believe that raising $335 million (after many more hundreds of millions previously), and still expecting to need to raise more down the road is just a seriously flawed approach to running a business.

billylindeman · 4 years ago

I also believe that it is flawed, but it is the model that most of valley is built on. It's frustrating. I wish more companies would just focus on building value and becoming profitable. VC funding for growth makes sense, but it shouldn't be in lieu of a profitable business model. If we keep funding unprofitable companies with unproven business models capitalism breaks, efficiency is lost, and someone ends up holding a bag - usually the mom and pop investor in the public markets.

billylindeman commented on California’s economy may seem healthy. Just wait for the next recession latimes.com/opinion/story... · Posted by u/NoRagrets

subsubzero · 4 years ago

I am extremely bearish on the future of CA, so much so that this is my last week in the state(moving out for good). The state has really shot itself in the foot by driving out stable tradional businesses in the past few years with insane policies that really only favor hollywood and tech. With tech in full meltdown and as long as interest rates keep increasing(and tech stocks falling) the state will face a reckoning unlike any its ever seen.

As social/govt. services dry up, professionals will leave in droves as who wants to pay 10-13% state taxes when alot of other states offer way better tax rates with better quality of life. Think the homeless situation is bad now with tent cities everywhere, wait until the yearly $15B that CA spends on homeless disappears.

I predict a hyper exodus as the state suffers an economic collapse that will take most likely a decade or two to recover from. Lets also not forget that the 20th century was the wettest in the past 2000 years in CA and the 21st century will be very dry(which is normal for this state), so CA's agro economy will rapidly shrink, and water loss will force population out.

Oh and by the way I am a 4th gen. CA resident so its tough for me to acknowledge these facts.

billylindeman · 4 years ago

I'm also incredibly bearish on CA and left for good last year. The quality of life per dollar is just so incredibly skewed, and the monoparty culture perpetuates terrible policies that will continue to strangle the state.

I left the city for the mountains (tahoe) in 2020, and it felt much more reasonable, but with the forest fires getting worse every year living in nature there feels even more hopeless.

I'm back in the midwest, and my plan is to buy a huge plot of land and build a house that is off grid w/ it's own water supply. The system is in a slow state of collapse, and every year people just paper over what's right in front of us. I think CA right now is a leading indicator.

Shit is gonna get weird over the next decade.