You can tell because some of the failed bombings (like the shoe bomber) failed because their plans were stupid to get around security, and if security wasn't there they would probably have used a normal bomb and succeeded
I have no idea if it has worked or not but you got to count deterrence too. If you have a lock and alarm in your house it might deter someone from even trying to break in. Of course you could never know if the deterrence worked (only attempts would be noticeable)
If your comment is referring to the bending spoons business model, it's worth pointing out they are not VC, they are private equity.
If your comment is referring to the software company's exiting to provide a return to shareholders, that happens all the time whether it's venture-backed or privately owned. The owners of privately held bootstrapped companies still want an exit one day too.
As an open source software engineer who is now a venture capital investor, respectfully, I think your beef is with capitalism, not with the institutional investors.
Not in the startup world beyond what I pick up on HN, but this distinction was helpful. My mental model going forward:
- If a company is still validating the business model and optimizing for rapid growth, it’s typically a Venture Capitalist (VC) fit.
- If a company is already established and the play is to improve operations, scale, or restructure (often involving a change of control), it’s typically a Private Equity (PE) fit.
Reminder that restructure often means a company working just fine, but whose assets outstrip what PE can buy it for, so they strip it to the bones. Or they leverage it with debt against assets then pay that money to themselves for consulting, account/hr services that they force the company to outsource to other PE companies. Nothing is 'created' through this process, no value created/added, nor it is healthy capitalism as the company could have continued fine without this added leveraged debt that was purely used to profit PE.
The Bending Spoons business model is right out of the private equity playbook. Buy a business with good revenue, cut cost to turn this into a consistent revenue stream, generate annual returns.
This is not like making a small 20 person self funded company.
Comments like the above one refer to community vibes, the types of comments that will get you lots of praise/upvotes.
So while individuals have different beliefs, the "average expected top comment" for communities like HN is usually pretty predictable, and hence the cognitive dissonance of the community on the whole can be called out.
There are now more private equity funds in the USA than McDonalds. The maximum wealth extraction of every single thing in people's lives is not viable for a continuing healthy society.
“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.
It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.
I don't even know the last time I pirated music. Gotta be at least 10 years.
Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.
I've used spotify for a decade. But the other day I opened one of my playlists and noticed that almost all the songs were greyed out as "unavailable" despite a quick search showing those songs still existed.
Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.
And Netflix’s profits have been on the rise for over a decade. I retired my plex server over six years ago. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of finding decent quality torrents. Everything ends up on streaming anyway.
I understand that sentiment but I think its arbitrary. People buy lots of products that don't have a useful life exceeding two years. For example, every pet toy ever sold. Some will have higher impact for manufacturing and disposal than this ring.
1. Arbitrary it may be. You have to start somewhere. In that sense, anything we do is “arbitrary“. Straw man. (see also: ban of plastic straws)
2. I would expect pet toys to be regulated as well and to contain less environmental toxins and hard to recycle elements than batteries, so I doubt the claim about impact per item sold.
As long as their batteries are replaceable, that’s fine, and if not, they will not be legally allowed to be sold in Europe. What point is it that you’re trying to make?
> So people should make their own choices about the products they buy?
A little, yeah. Buy and don't use: your problem. Buy and can't use because I can't change the battery: subject to regulation. We can't stop anyone from making dumb monetary decisions, but we can stop products not being repairable.
And an endless stream of devices in the form of toys running full software stacks which never receive updates. Great, some products are as shitty. Perhaps we oppose those as well?
Good idea, and actually partly implemented as well in the EU. Security updates must be provided for a certain period of time for a certain class of devices, which is the reason why mobiles now receive updates for many years.
Reminds me of "Miracle Flights", in which dozens of people require wheelchairs to board but only a few require them to deboard. Of course, if you are in a wheelchair, you get to board first.
In fairness, no company’s mission statement says “maximize shareholder value” because it doesn’t need to be said - it’s implicit. But I agree that AGI is at the forefront of OpenAI’s mission in a way it isn’t for Google - the nonprofit roots are not gone.
I don't know if POSIX has a position on signal order. But I'm pretty sure it allows signals to be coallesced... if a process is sent the same signal several times before the handler is invoked, it's in spec to only invoke it once.
To be fair, Waymo claims to not record or transmit audio without you either manually engaging such (by requesting support), or a very unambiguous announcement (presumably when the car gets into some sort of emergency situation). And lying about that claim would probably run afoul of California's 2 party consent law. So still a step up in privacy versus having someone in the car listening in on your conversation.
That said, even if they were listening to you, there's a lot of things that are completely inconsequential from a perspective of an anonymous call center employee far away listening in on, that I probably wouldn't want to talk about in front of a taxi driver.
I know this is somewhat besides the point of the discussion, but.. many Ubers have recording devices inside the car too. The drivers have gotten savvy and protect themselves from false claims or even harassment.
This is just me, but maybe helps explain it. It's not that the presence of a driver is bothersome, but in the pre-Waymo world your interaction with the outside world starts when you step out the door of your house. Now the interaction with the outside world starts when you get to your destination and step out of the Waymo. I really enjoy the outside world, mind you. But it just feels easier to traverse my local area in solitude and with a consistent and comfortable vehicle, and non-erratic driving style.
I imagine how nice it could (will?) be when you can hop into a self-driving car for a longer ride or even a road trip. I think you'll feel like it's an extension of your living room vs. being in a car.
If you step back do you really think that's indicative of a mental disease? Does it make any difference to you that many times I'm taking a Waymo to go and hang out with friends? Not much of a stretch to say it's allowing me to socialize more because I don't have to worry about my meter running dry, or having one too many drinks to drive myself home, or being able to move around from area to area in comfort. And if you say "you can do that with an Uber too!" it's true! But does it really surprise you that someone would want a car that drives calmly, obeys all traffic laws and gives you a little downtime from the outside world pre or post the activity you'd been doing before stepping in the car? Does that really rise to the level of mental disease?
It seems like a huge catastrophizing stretch to get there based solely on preferring to be in a Waymo rather than a taxi or Uber.
Well on second reading your comment reads like an ad, given advertising isn't natural either, you can understand the confusion
But I was referring to the wanting the outside world to resemble your house and to have little interaction with humans. No, that's not normal, despite any sophistry or ad speak
The problem isn't when they don't talk and just drive, the problem is when it's late at night and the passenger is a woman who is inebriated. Not having a driver entirely makes that much harder.
I think the "lethal trifecta" framing is useful and glad that attempts are being made at this! But there are two big, hard-to-solve problems here:
1. The "lethal trifecta" is also the "productive trifecta" - people want to be able to use LLMs to operate in this space since that's where much of the value is; using private / proprietary data to interact with (do I/O with) the real world.
2. I worry that there will soon be (if not already) a fourth leg to the stool - latent malicious training within the LLMs themselves. I know the AI labs are working on this, but trying to ferret out Manchurian Candidates embedded within LLMs may very well be the greatest security challenge of the next few decades.
Those are really good points and we do have some plans for them, mainly on the first topic. What we're envisioning in terms of UX for our gateway is that when you set it up it's very defensive but whenever it detects a trifecta, you can mark it as a false positive. Over time the gateway will be trained to be exactly as permissive as the user wishes with only the rare false positive. You can already do that with the gateway today (you get a web notification when the gateway detects a trifecta and if you click into it, you get taken to a menu to approve/deny it if it occurs in the future). Granted, this can make the gateway overly-permissive but we do have plans on how to improve the granularity of these rules.
Regarding the second point, that is a very interesting topic that we haven't thought about. It would seem that our approach would work for this usecase too, though. Currently, we're defending against the LLM being gullible but gullible and actively malicious are not properties that are too different. It's definitely a topic on our radar now, thanks for bringing it up!
And presumably they wouldn’t be shy about telling us if they had.