the smartphone killer app was that it fit in your pocket and was useable almost everywhere you were

the current generation of vr headsets aren't useable for extended periods. too heavy, too hot and too clunky

losing peripheral vision is a bigger annoyance than i expected also

many table games and all sports betting i know of take a commission (the rake). they are definitely not zero sum

True, but this makes wire transfers a negative sum game and we'd have to ban them.

And all lending at interest too.

There are plenty of ways to criticize gambling as a non-productive activity, so there’s really no need to redefine game theory to do it.

orders of magnitude more expensive than kafka tho. not feasible at scale

i don't think it's as nefarious as that

the issue is that startup founders might have a lot of implied wealth based on the equity they hold and money raised but a "mainstream" bank is going to look at that equity, assess it as non-liquid and highly speculative and reject any loan applications

svb was more likely to extend personal loans to startup founders because -- in theory at least -- they better understood startup finance and they were incentivized to provide good service to prospective customers of their more business focused activities

Yes, that makes sense. Perhaps I was too cynical.

you know what is more stressful than having too much work? not understanding the work you do have

it works fine and there's someone happy to do it for free. why would anyone try to compete with it?

To mitigate the risk of a supply chain attack.

If you care, review and pin. Way easier than building a “competitor” to something there’s clearly no money in.

the nuance you are missing is that individual contributors are responsible for their own work and judged based on that. they are not responsible for the work of others. managers are of course responsible for the work of those they supervise

their entire ad backend is in a state of crisis. i have friends who were on the monetization (read: ads) teams at twitter and every single one of them has been asked/ordered to return to work if they want to collect their severance

I would like to hear more about this. I haven't seen any reputable news about employees who were severed and then asked to come back.

Whoa, is this possible? is this even legal?

When you hear about layoffs these days, you will usually see terms like "2 months of salary" as part of the severance package. What this actually is, is paying the employee throughout the entire "notice" period of the WARN Act. The WARN Act says that any company doing layoffs must give 60 days notice to employees, so to comply companies layoff employees but keep them on payroll for 2 months to meet the obligations of the law.

Technically, if the employee is still on payroll, the company is within it's rights to ask them to continue working, and violating company policy during this time (ie, not even showing up for work) could be grounds for regular termination which would not require any severance payments at all.

IANAL, but this doesn't make any sense. You can't fire someone but actually not really fire them. What if they find another job in the meantime?

You fire them as of a date two months from now. For those two months they are technically still employed, but do not have to come to work unless asked. Just like when you resign with two weeks notice, you tell them you're going to end your employment in two weeks and you're still employed until then.

If the employee finds another job, they should tell them when that job asks "when can you start?" a date after the two month severance period is over. It's not that complicated.

That's really informative, thank you.

By the time they get it in front of a judge, Twitter probably won't exist anymore.

Severance claw back? For real?

That makes the whole layoff thing even more ridiculous. Turns out Twitter really did need that many people.

their entire ad platform is basically unuseable at present