So US intelligence propped up a kid on the spectrum to take money from huge venture capital firms while playing video games during the pitch meetings and running this billion-dollar company on quickbooks, in such a successful way as to remove any trace that they were involved at all? All to launder money? If the goal was to launder money, why not just operate clandestine wallets like every other organized criminal and why wouldn’t they put some sort of guardrails in place to not let the firm blow up? If it’s a government front, wouldn’t someone on the inside be like “maybe let’s not put our name on an NBA arena and pay these huge celebrity endorsements and Super Bowl ads”? How would they be smart to pull this off without detection but dumb enough to let it all blow up?
There’s just no part of this theory that adds up to me.
Maybe. But I don't believe SBF is not on the spectrum no matter what he tells you. He strikes me as the prototypical insecure nerd, impressionable and easy to take advantage of.
Yeah, tbh I’m more interested in that parent looked around and didn’t see any signal in their normal internet hangout spots or found it weird that they hadn’t heard of SBF and immediately came to the conclusion that it’s a government conspiracy. Maybe the average victim doesn’t hang out on Reddit? That seems just a little less out there than the alternative theory posted.
Echo chambers are very, very real and it’s easy to get caught up when everyone around you is drinking the kool-aid.
I moved to a new city a couple years ago and met up with some other devs as a way to make new friends. There were 4 or 5 of us going out for beers and the discussion inevitably turned to crypto. I’ve been a skeptic for many years and when asked about my crypto holdings, I politely said that I wasn’t invested or interested.
One guy in particular kept telling me that I was going to get left behind and that I really needed to buy in before it was too late. I told him that I didn’t trust the market and he went on about how corrupt the Fed is. He was really awkward, and at times, emotional about it.
Needless to say, friends were not made that night and I’m glad that the peer pressure aspect doesn’t bother me because a lot of people would cave in that situation.
“Free” is never, ever free and it blows my mind that people still don’t get this.
Like, it’s understandable that you get a little burned the first time it happens, but then you’ve learned that this is how it all works. “Free” in a SAAS context has always and will always mean “no need to pay us until we decide otherwise, end of negotiation.”
Every time I look at a free account for some product now, I ask myself if I’m willing to pay for it at some point. If the answer is “no”, then sometimes I just don’t even do it.
People can’t even be bothered to think critically about the product situations they put themselves, and I’m sure these people are intelligent in many other aspects of their lives, but this is such a simple concept that I don’t understand how people, especially tech professionals, struggle with.
I’m from very far outside the tech bubble, far enough outside it that people don’t even personally know anybody that writes software and there are almost no local software companies. People in that group - the vast majority of people in the world but by definition not really possible for an engineer to have much contact with - do not understand what work is involved in creating and running software. How well do you know the amount of work involved in getting your medication into your body or your computer chip produced?
I think with software it’s even harder for some people to appreciate the costs because they don’t have an intuitive understanding of what’s required to make it - even though most people don’t know how a lot of their goods and services are made, they know eg a guy in a factory made it and some other guys transported it, and they can kind of put a face to a name. They might know that someone had to design the page they’re looking at, but they have no idea a backend even exists (why do you think we have the term “cloud”?) and no way to estimate what it costs to run, so of course they don’t also know about CVEs and web standards and wipeout/takeout/data residency and multitenancy and releases. They just see a web page that used to work and now doesn’t.
It doesn’t help that so much of the software they use is free, because it’s being used as a funnel/delivery mechanism for paid stuff like hardware or monetized through ads, or paid for by their employer, or because it’s just cheap to maintain. It’s kind of reasonable to assume that all that software stuff you use is free because it’s easy to make. Even though replit is software-for-software, it seems like the type of thing that’s used mostly by beginners who still probably don’t understand what it takes to maintain and operate paid software to a reasonable degree of quality, so the same situation applies.
Imo the worst part about this noreplit thing is that everyone who uses their product does, or at least should, know how difficult creating something like it is. These aren't the outside the tech bubble people, they're just confoundingly entitled.
That’s the impression I got looking at the dev behind this site. They clearly have development experience, they’re just mad and trying to make as much noise about it as they can.
I got the impression that they're very young and that can understandably come with a bit less self-awareness.
If that is the case, imo they'd be better served looking into the immense amount of resources available to students: I know when I was a kid I had $0 to spend on software and hardware, just sending an email from a .edu account got people willing to give
I remember an operations incident where we had to quickly pay a previously "free" service that had recently switched their model breaking the scale up of nodes in our system. Did the developer screw up by:
1) not creating a local system for hosting docker images (would detail the project timeline);
2) not well documenting this dependency for operations team before their departure?
3) his/her Manager did not catch this dependency on docker hosting docker images or otherwise catch their change in free tier policy ?
There is some liability on the host some free things your put out there for example "free cdn hosted" JavaScript libraries. If your not at a significant scale that has a business model that lets you commit to continuing to host things you should perhaps not set up free hosting for things.
Not saying it applies in Replit case; they are I imagine a company trying to show revenue growth so they can continue to exist and does not sound like they are breaking production with these changes that are announced ahead of time. Users can migrate to another thing as the article is outlining.
I think that relying on a free service in a production environment that could cause an outage is a really, really bad idea because you have no SLA or relationship with the vendor. In that sense, you are very much getting what you paid for.
Oh I’m not saying that paid services are perfect by any means. But relying on a free service in prod is unquestionably more risky than using an established service in a paid context.
True. I think there’s an argument to be made that a market which seeks AI-generated content of specific people isn’t exactly looking for basic entertainment.
If traditional adult content isn’t stimulating enough that you need to seek fake video of $CELEBRITY, then that’s a pretty solid indicator that there’s a problem
Ehhh maybe. I’m very much in favor of a 30-hour workweek situation, but hesitant about the 1-hour-per-day idea.
I sometimes provide feedback as a senior engineer that gets corrected because there was context that I wasn’t given. It’s nobody’s fault but it’s a recognition that we all have a responsibility to understand our systems deeply in order to solve hard problems and I’m not sure that 1 hour per day gets you there.
I disagree with this. My agent basically had to always be on-call to send me listings that we could go see and offer to place calls at odd hours so we get everything scheduled since houses move so fast now.
My agent basically picked up all of that admin for me and I never once questioned his commission. Buying a house is basically a part-time job for the buyer now and being able to respond instantly is so important.
The job has changed, just like all jobs have, but good agents get shit done because the market is so competitive. Real estate is a very high-turnover industry with little long-term stability for those that don’t absolutely kill it.
The issue here is the pricing is consistent, while each transaction is different. You wanted high-touch service in a fast-moving market, great. But another buyer who does not want or need that service still has to pay for it.
An approach used by other service providers is hourly billing. Realtors could even offer distinct service packages like accountants ($XXXX to prepare taxes). A reason they don't is because the line items or hourly rates would be absurdly high to generate the same level of fees they get today.
Ok but you could replace the "Sending notifications about new listings in real time" duty by subscribing to zillow/redfin etc with specific filters... for free. It's hard to make the argument that that's worth 6% of a of half million dollar purchase? I agree it's a part time job to be a buyer in this market, but I don't think the buyer's agent really makes that job much easier in my experience.
"Answers a call at any time of the day" is definitely a great nice to have, but I suspect that puts your particular agent in the top 10% of the field. Most agents I have used will just let all phone calls go to voicemail and then text back or call you back hours or days later. YMMV a lot on this one.
Yeah, but a crucial part of getting those listings from him involved talking through the ways in which the house might have problems that weren’t disclosed, etc. Home listings are ads and it’s great to have someone who knows how to call BS when I don’t. There are so many tricks in home listings that can trip buyers up and that’s not an easily Googleable problem.
As far as agents you’ve worked with, that’s partially on you for choosing to work with bad people. I had several agents and I wasn’t afraid to drop them when I found the one that worked for me. Given that 87% of agents quit in the first 5 years, I definitely suspect my agent was top of his field, which is why he got my business.
I think "bad people" is relative here though. The incentive structure is entirely misaligned. As mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, agents' best strategy for the highest possible payout is trying to close as many deals as possible, not taking the extra time to find each person the ideal perfect fit house (volume over value-add quality). It sounds like you found an agent who went the extra mile to get your business, which is great for you! But I suspect that there are other, less buyer-friendly agents out there out-earning your agent because they just drop the "difficult" customers and work with the easiest-to-close folks to get more overall commission.
Given that, my personal strategy when buying was to just do as much of the legwork as possible myself, rather than risk leaving due diligence to somebody whose financial incentives are not aligned with my own. My agent essentially ended up mostly relegated to docusign-forwarding duties.
I've never spoken to or met the realtor I used to buy the house I live in now. He didn't even come to the closing. He was paid the standard commission for signing some paperwork.
We bought from a builder and they insisted we be represented by a realtor or they wouldn't sell to us.
Well, I am not saying there is no work. I am saying the work load has decreased substantially. Everything you mention is something they had to do during previous markets too.
This just is not true. The amount of admin work per deal has perhaps come down, but agents work with much higher volume because deals fall through so fast now.
We looked at almost 2 dozen houses compared to my parents that looked at 2 houses in 2004.
This is what frustrates me so much about the deepening surveillance state: it just doesn’t work the way that its architects believe it will.
It makes sense that a high-tech barrier is relatively sparsely manned on a given day if the idea is to automate as much of the defense apparatus as possible. And it would be doubly embarrassing if the reports that Israel was warned of a potential attack were true.
> I'll just keep renting, I guess, since it makes no difference.
There’s no way that the tax burden offsets the equity you would build by owning property vs renting.
95% of my mortgage payment goes toward paying down principal on the loan, which is essentially value I get to keep. Not to mention that my housing costs are much more fixed compared to rent.
Paying rent provides zero value retention in the long run, its only real benefit is flexibility.
This stance is predicated on interest rates. Taking out a mortgage is currently not the clear cut “right choice.” It might be the optimal choice, but consider, for a loan issued today at over 6%, twice as much money over the lifetime of the loan will be go towards interest as will go toward principle.
There’s just no part of this theory that adds up to me.