I've got a different take. If they're in the VC phase, that means they are not self sufficient. The amount of funding that they've raised is no indication what-so-ever of a) how much of that funding has actually been realized / received b) what their overhead is and c) what their overall financial picture looks like.
I do wish that more companies would take privacy and security seriously. And bug bounty programs are great. But they're not always within the budget of companies and the fact that they decided to award this security researcher regardless of having no such program is a massive win in my opinion and shows how much they value this particular contribution.
Thanks for the reply! I think I disagree with you, mostly because it seems like this particular bug could have been company-destroying because of the potential reputation hit if it was exploited on a wide scale.
But regardless, I appreciate your perspective and it gives me some stuff to consider I hadn't previously.
I think we all know that tech debt often lives forever, so if you're going to start a browser company, you simply must be thinking about security/privacy from day one. If the VC model doesn't make that possible, then the only reasonable conclusion is that browsers shouldn't be a thing that VC funded startups work on.
I appreciate your response, and largely agree with you. But you can take security seriously without having a program in place to pay non employees for work they did without you asking them to.
Also, while I love companies that have bug bounty programs... I don't think any company without such a program is under any obligation to pay someone just because they volunteered their time without the company knowing about it or soliciting the work in any way.
So the fact that they did in this case, despite having no program, is what I'm choosing to focus on.
I want to share a personal anecdote to put my opinion into more perspective. I owned a small business operating a for-profit website for 18 years, for 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I had no employees other than myself. It was just me on my own working from home. I earned enough to pay the bills, but I'm currently earning 2x what my business earned at its peak traffic by being an employee. So it's not like I had money to be paying people... it was pretty much an average software engineer's salary in terms of what I brought in.
Anyway, over those 18 years I had a few dealings with some white-hats who were very nice and clued me in to some issues. I thanked them and when they politely asked if "we" (because they didn't know any better) had a program it was a non-issue when I explained that I'm too broke as a one-person shop trying to feed a family to be paying out anything substantial but I could PayPal a cup of coffee or something for their trouble. But then I had a few dealings with complete shady assholes who tried to extort money out of me by threatening to exploit what they had found and go public and basically drag my reputation through the mud.
Experiences with the latter group make me sympathize a lot more with companies that decide to have a policy of just blanket not dealing with outside security researchers, to take the information and then deal with the fixes internally and quietly.
Even the USSR tolerated small business like mom & pop shops. Historically what we've seen in communist countries is that major production is under extremely heavy government control. Things like raw materials, shipping, energy, banking, agriculture and manufacturing are what the dictators care about.
This is echoed by contemporary left-wing thinking in "the West." Small business is often championed while "big pharma", "big tech", "banking" and other industry giants are derided and viewed as shady at best, criminal at worst (note I'm not calling all left-wingers communists! I'm just saying that this dichotomy in left-wing thought is very common... heck, it's even common among many right-wingers).
I'm not defending communism by saying that, while "black markets" undoubtedly exist, small trade is not typically looked at as "black market capitalism." As I understand it the idea isn't to prohibit trade itself but to "control the means of production" in an attempt to achieve prosperity by removing the profit motive from industry.
I haven't watched this particular channel so maybe it's obviously shady, but I'm curious: why is this conceptually a crappy thing to do?
I mean, if you take the IP of others and redistribute it verbatim then I definitely see the ethical issue. So if the claim is that he's reading peoples' comments or posts verbatim without credit then yeah that's crappy. Don't get me wrong.
But if all we're talking about is "mining" websites like HN for topics and then creating original content that covers those topics in a different format for a different audience... where's the issue?
A few years ago I was feeling pretty burned out in the tech industry and created a tongue in cheek "luddite" channel called TechPhobe where I took an overly pessimistic view of the industry. At the time Elizabeth Holmes was on trial and a lot my videos involved me reading ArsTechnica articles on the subject (credited) while offering my personal opinions on the matter. While not successful, those videos got more views than anything else I ever created. Was that a crappy thing to do? I didn't think so at the time and I don't think so now.
I didn't stick with the channel because I realized pretty quickly that if I'm dealing with burnout the last thing I should be doing in my spare time is focusing on tech content lol
> But if all we're talking about is "mining" websites like HN for topics and then creating original content that covers those topics in a different format for a different audience... where's the issue?
Plagiarism, generally. I really enjoyed the semi-recent hbomberguy video on why it matters, and a later response (from another channel) on "The Somerset Scale of Plagiarism" for a more rigorous explanation of what the different kinds of "content reuse" can be. Those are generally where my current model of plagiarism comes from.
A specific concern would be the inaccurate telling of information that isn't understood. A video saying, "Here I will summarize this HN thread," is perfectly ok, and a good thing. A video saying, "Here I will tell you how $thing works," should be well researched and cited. Doesn't matter if the content's entirely from an HN thread for from 40 different SEO farms, it's low-quality content and it's wasting everyone's time at best, and probably actively misinforming people. (Because how true and complete is information gleaned from HN comments anyway?)
I've tried to "get" Twitter since the early days. I've created a couple of Twitter accounts over the years to support various creative endeavours but I've never found myself getting much value out of it as a user.
I heard that it's original use-case was that back 2008 there were no good ways to do group messaging over SMS on a cell phone. That's a problem and solution that I can understand.
But as a broader social network? I don't get it.
Things that bother me to the point that they are deal breakers:
- The character limits (there is nothing worse in life than reading through a x/N self-reply to read something long ... I'd rather file a tax return)
- Showing me posts from pages I don't follow in the feed (in 99% of the cases I'm aware of that page/profile already and have chosen not to follow it because I don't like them)
- Ads in the news feed
Some have said that they like Twitter for getting news. I have way better options for that.
I know that I'm not representative of the typical person, generally speaking, but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular. And it's not that I'm hating on something I don't know anything about ... I've honestly tried to use it and get value out of it, but I've never found anything of value on offer.
> but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular.
I think it's a carryover of general nostalgia for how the Internet "used to be", i.e. before every site with a few million users decided to start experimenting with algorithms to max out user engagement and ad impressions, leading to the hell we see everywhere, from IG to Tiktok.
Yes, there was a time when Twitter wasn't a toxic mess. It's the last social network that was popular before smartphones took off.
Interesting. That might explain why I dislike it so much. As a middle aged person who grew up with an early iteration of the world wide web for a decade to a decade and a half before Twitter even existed, both smart phones and social media mark a turning point for me from what the Internet "used to be."
Twitter, in my mind (and maybe this is perception and not reality), ushered in infinite scroll and short bites of information. Twitter is to forums what TikTok is to documentaries. I see Twitter and the "mobile revolution" going hand in hand (something that left me behind because I still dislike using a smart phone, generally, and rarely do compared to most other people).
But I guess if you're a great deal younger than me, and you grew up with an Internet where Twitter just always existed, then it might represent some earlier version of the Internet that is drastically different from what you consider to be "contemporary" (though, putting the TikTok mention aside, I'm still not sure what that view of the contemporary Internet is if Twitter is what we're comparing it to).
I guess I'm just so old that I still see Twitter as a relatively new phenomenon. Very different from the nostalgia that I feel for what the world wide web used to be when I was young.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD for short) is a neurodevelopment disorder. I'm quoting verbatim from Wikipedia:
"characterized by symptoms of deficient reciprocal social communication and the presence of restricted, repetitive, and inflexible patterns of behavior. Autism generally affects a person's ability to understand and connect with others, as well as their adaptability to everyday situations, with its severity and support needs varying widely across the spectrum."
Within this spectrum you have "high functioning" individuals who are capable of living self-sufficient, productive lives on their own (individuals with what we used to describe as having asperger's syndrom) and on the other end of it you have individuals who will always need constant supervision because they can't communicate effectively enough to hold a job, nor can they be trusted around kitchen appliances.
Common characteristics of ASD are:
- Regular difficulties in social interaction or communication (note the word "regular", everyone struggles from time to time. Someone with ASD experiences this permanently)
- Restricted or repetitive behaviours (examples: not using hand gestures when speaking, rocking motions etc.)
- Resistance to disruptions in routine (many people don't like routine disruptions, someone with ASD usually finds this to be crippling)
- Restricted interests (getting obsessive about hobbies but also really not giving a shit about things that most other people care about, like small talk or even major life events in the lives of loved ones ... like I couldn't give the slightest crap that my sisters got married or that I'm an uncle, and I like my sisters and their kids)
- Not enjoying human touch. I don't like being hugged or kissed, even by my wife or children. Even as a 42 year old adult, I hold my breath when I'm in the company of strangers because I find the idea of inhaling the air that they just exhaled to be gross.
There are more. But someone who is "on the spectrum" will exhibit many of these characteristics and exhibit them permanently throughout their lives. Whereas for "neurotypical" people, these may be fleeting or they may experience one or two in isolation... whereas ASD is a prolongued pattern of many of these characteristics together.
serious question: anybody knows if ASD has been linked to abstract neurobiological basis of sexuality (not the biomechanical processes behind intercourse, i'm trying to describe the kind of deep emotional communication that lies preempting the physicalness).
I don't expect to get a reply given how popular this article and discussion was and given how late I am but ...
What are the ethical considerations here?
The opening reply that kickstarted this particular thread was:
> You could say that about literally any shady business
But that user never bothered to qualify what exactly they consider to be "shady" about Mr. Beast's business.
Other than the fact that he has a hugely successful YouTube channel, I know next to nothing about him. I don't watch his content. From what I gather it is mass appeal entertainment.
I've read in some of the replies that he does philanthropic content and there are some un-cited claims that he "pockets" donations (that would be shady if true, but again - those claims were void of any links that would give them credibility).
Others seem to package-deal him in with all of YouTube creators, and they will cite shitty things that other content creators have done for clout as if Mr. Beast himself (or his company) did those things.
Most of the postings here seem to hate him for being successful at creating YouTube content that they personally don't like.
If you want to convince me that a YouTube channel is unethical, then point me towards the victims. Show me who he is hurting and make a clear case for how he is directly responsible for hurting them.
The irony is that the proposition that "someone wrote a book that proposed waterfall as the best software method" is itself a strawman argument.
To my knowledge, that has never been claimed.
Waterfall is what many of us old fogies in the industry experienced as the "defacto" methodology for a long time. It made intuitive sense that in order to design a build a project that you would first, you know, DESIGN it. Then you'd kick over that design to software developers that were expected to implement it.
Iteration in the design and development process, the idea of "people before process" and getting designers and engineers to collaborate early on etc. was not obvious. That's where all of Agile's "waterfall" talk came from. The fact that for a long time what companies were doing, while never exactly the same process as each other, was always waterfall-like because that's what made the most sense in an industry that was very new and in which no one knew wtf they were doing... so they took knowledge from other domains and tried to make it fit. That's a large part of what Fred Brook's The Mythical Man Month talks about.
It's only now that a new generation of developers has come up in a world where all they've ever known was "Agile" and "Scrum", that the world they know is so far removed from the "non-Agile" world that these books describe.
A colleague of mine the other day was talking about experimenting with something using the browser's `postMessage` API 8 years ago. My initial reaction was "did postMessage exist 8 years ago?" And then I remembered that 8 years ago was 2016 and it's already 2024. Many "experienced" people coding today have 5 years experience... and then they talk about concepts that were a reaction to how things were being done in the 80s and 90s as if those decades never happened ... because if they had even been born yet they were still children, so they weren't there to live that reality and the pain that what came later was a reaction to.
Which, given that that's a military spec, also speaks to a motivation for such a tightly controlled approach: the cost of design changes is truly immense. When you have a large government project with MANY different contractors working on different pieces of the system, a lot of Agile principles need to go out the window. The spec needs to be fairly well nailed down up front because a late change that affects adjacent systems gets really expensive when those adjacent systems are being managed by a completely different company. That requirements tweak may now be a full on contract renegotiation. And, as Boeing's recent woes illustrate, communication among all the subcontractors may be so poor that even identifying the potential impact of a specification change may be difficult to do reliably.
Not such a big deal in a lot of tech projects where it's relatively inexpensive to solve problems as you find them. But Mars rovers don't get to have canary deployments.
Also, even then, it's still not really "textbook" waterfall.
"Waterfall" is just a pejorative term used against the kind of project management that uses a Gantt chart, which kinda looks like a waterfall. This kind of project planning is necessary when you've got engineering steps that are time sensitive and take months to years. Like if you're building a large bridge you need to schedule the resources to do individual steps a long time in advance.
Writing software was initially run like this and there was a big pushback because most of those old school engineering methodologies just aren't justified because when you're writing software all of the steps look pretty similar and the design/build/test cycle can go through a full cycle in minutes instead of years and you get to do it millions of times instead of, like for a bridge, only once.
Those engineering practices are still necessary when you're building things, sometimes a bit less so with electronics hardware these days we have prototyping that can turn around very quickly, but still if you're doing a large physical engineering project, you do lots of "waterfall" because that's the best tool for the job because the job requires it.
> designers and engineers to collaborate early on etc.
The really scary thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when all the trade rags were excitedly talking about how it's a great idea to not just "throw your design over the wall" but work with the software guys to understand what their needs were and accommodate them.
The scarier thing is that they were talking about this in the year 2000.
> Humans are the only animal who have the ability to destroy all other animals,
Even that is only theoretical. Let's say that we were to wipe out a great amount of life on earth with a thermonuclear war or something, a lot of life would remain, even if we are talking about bacteria and other microorganisms. But even deep sea life that exists below a certain depth would likely remain largely unaffected.
I owned an operated a "free" adult website for 18 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income. During those years I always got a kick out of "there is so much free porn online, why would anyone ever pay for it?"
The way that my website worked was that it was very content-rich and content-focused. The content came directly from the affiliate programs that I was advertising for. Despite it being all advertising, I often got compliments that my website was "ad free." That's because I didn't push banner ads or anything intrusive. It was free content plus a text link that you could click on if you wanted more of that content.
The website shut down in 2022, and the bank accounts are all closed. But many of the affiliate accounts are still pulling rebills.
Most of the subscription based websites that were advertised were not websites that promised any sort of interaction with the performers or models. It was very obvious that you were paying for content, not social interaction and if anyone were ever confused as to that, the rebill numbers would have reflected otherwise. The fact that an indivdual subscription rebills is not a conclusive indication of a happy customer. But when so many in the aggregate rebill, it doesn't really paint the picture of a large number of people feeling duped. It's also worth noting that chargeback rates were nearly non-existent. I could count the number of times that happened over 18 years on one hand.
Now, if you've read this far thanks, I will acknowledge that we're talking about OF specifically.
At the risk of TMI, I subscribe personally to one adult content site: suicide girls. I am happily married, I'm not looking for any social interaction. It's purely eye candy. Many of the models on that site promote their personal OF pages, and while I haven't subscribed to any, I will admit that I've been tempted because they produce content that I like and I'm curious about what else they offer. I'm not at all interested in DM'ing them or trying to start some kind of parasocial relationship. I've watched a few live streams on SG, have even had some interaction in the chats in those ... but there's no desire what-so-ever to try and have some kind of "relationship." I've never tipped them or sent them money or gifts. Just the annually recurring subscription to the SG website.
People who are in difficult situations in life, have mental illnesses or physical disabilities may try and use online porn to fill a void in their life, and for some it may be unhealthy. People also stalk celebrities for the same reason. Yet we seem to make more assumptions and talk about it a hell of a lot more when it comes pornography for some reason. I'm not saying that there aren't social issues that are important to look at and talk about. But when it comes to porn there's such a taboo and willingness to shame others and make mass assumptions about their motivations even though we have very little idea of what we're actually talking about.
I appreciate your comment and I find your stories interesting. I'm saying this because I'm going to clarify my point in a way that might otherwise come across as dismissive. I know people pay for porn. I was specifically talking about what differentiates OnlyFans from other paid porn sites, and that's the parasocial aspect. It's not just an unhealthy thing that some people do; it's a huge part of how they distinguish themselves from the decades-established online porn industry.
I miss forums too, and I blame the "mobile revolution" for their demise.
Forums are ideal for long-form discussion in text-format. But they don't really work well on mobile devices where typing is cumbersome and reading a lot of text to catch up on a thread isn't all that enjoyable.
And you remember when forums were trying to be mobile friendly by introducing things like infinite scroll? It just didn't work. Meanwhile "the masses" were flocking to sites like Twitter where content was delivered in short bites and they could doom scroll until they got bored.
Forums still exist they are just niche now and it's harder to attract a user-base when so many people prefer to use social media for their "discussions" because that is better suited to small talk on a smart phone.
I do wish that more companies would take privacy and security seriously. And bug bounty programs are great. But they're not always within the budget of companies and the fact that they decided to award this security researcher regardless of having no such program is a massive win in my opinion and shows how much they value this particular contribution.
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