I think the concept of "licensing" should not apply to something you own. If they want to rent you a CPU, fine, but then they should also bear the costs for when it breaks.
Right, but is your suggestion to say "business as usual" until we have definite irrefutable proof for each and everything? I have no idea how likely or unlikely it is that having plastic in our bodies has any negative impact whatsoever, but that doesn't mean I can't still try to reduce the risk of accumulating more of it in my body. As with most things in life it's a tradeoff, with convenience mostly.
I don't have pans with teflon anymore. I avoid plastic bottles for beverages, which means I almost never drink any soda. I got rid of almost all my Tupperware and use paper bags or boxes made of steel when possible. And even though I grew up using the microwave a lot as a teen, I somehow ended up never owning one myself after moving out.
If it isn't plastic then what is it? We have been steadily identifying and reducing the number of toxic agents the public is exposed to. Fifty years ago in the 70s the average person would have regular exposure to lead gas, lead paint, tobacco smoke (even if they didn't smoke themselves - indoor smoking was still legal), potent pesticides, and maybe even asbestos. But there were far fewer everyday plastics at the time.
I suspect improvements in communications media. Every day, the average man sees many other men who out-compete him, with no hope of that ever changing. He sees men who are richer, taller, stronger, smarter, etc., in ever increasing realism and "engagement". Beating them is impossible, so the correct strategy in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness would be social submission and hoping they are generous. It seems plausible that there's some biological mechanism that lowers testosterone to aid this process.
> We have been steadily identifying and reducing the number of toxic agents the public is exposed to
In some cases, we have just been uncovering what the businesses selling a toxic product already knew but covered up for a quick buck - even using sophisticated and “scientific” arguments.
In many cases, we just need the right incentive from the regulators. To prioritize long term thinking.
> There's nothing to suggest it's plastics in particular
Sometimes wonder if these arguments are just devil’s advocating.
I mean do you avoid heating food in plastic for you and yours?
Or are you so scientific that you believe it’s fine until proven otherwise?
Said another way, if you were to bet money, which way would you bet - that plastics are benign?
I'm not OP but yeah I assume it's fine until proven otherwise. Why wouldn't I?
Otherwise where does it end? What other things should I assume are dangerous despite no evidence? Or are you saying I should latch on to whatever baseless hysteria is popular at the moment?
I'm not a betting man. I think plastics have been around for a long time and as far as I know we haven't proven that they have a negative effect. If they did have a significant negative effect I'm pretty sure we would have proven it by now. So maybe they have an insignificant negative effect. I'm okay with that risk. If I weren't I wouldn't have time to do anything other than worry about and avoid shit that might have an insignificant negative effect - not to mention things that we know have a significant negative effect such as alcohol.
Honestly if you drink alcohol and you worry about microplastics you're just hypocritical.
> Honestly if you drink alcohol and you worry about microplastics you're just hypocritical
That’s correct. Some people feel powerless to address the bigger elephants in the room.
Being obsessively anti-plastic (or anything) shouldn’t be a coping mechanism (but that’s what it is, not hypocrisy).
But I’m suggesting that as a society, we can easily have the collective will to uncover and address issues - more research on plastic, more education on alcohol, etc.
Because we know what short term thinking unregulated actors can do, intentionally or unintentionally.
FWIW I think this is a good remark. It's just correlation until proven otherwise. I was just saying there are changes in society, one of which is the widespread use of plastics, and there are changes in population health roughly starting along the same time. But indeed, we also started to do sitting work massively, and started using wireless communications etc.
Then again, we also reduced coal use in cities, we burn less wood in our houses, etc.
It really, really hard to prove causation beyond doubt. If you have a strong correlation and a reasonable concern that it might be causal relationship, and we are talking about health impacts, at some point it is rational to use the precautionary principle and take action even if you don't have definite proof.
As an extreme example, we actually can't state with 100% confidence that exercise is good for your health, it's just too hard to prove. But nobody with a sane mind will doubt it.
> we actually can't state with 100% confidence that exercise is good for your health
Doubt. It depends what definition you use for "health" but we know for a fact that a sedentary lifestyle has negative effects and that an active lifestyle has positive effects. Those assertions are indisputable.
Yes but you still use tap water for cooking I presume. And it's used for agriculture. So you'd still end up ingesting PFAS if the water supply is contaminated, since it does not break down with heat.
lol like there isn't PFAS in the plastic that houses that bottled water. esp. if it sat in the sun for a while, since plastics don't biodegrade they photodegrade.
If you want to share some
more (approximate) numbers, I'm very curious. What equity percentage did you have at the start? And were your shares worth more at an earlier investment round than at the exit?
Starting equity was a little less than 10%. Valuations went up as several rounds were raised up to $30+m and share value went up until at one point it was north of $20m paper dollars. After market re-valuation an additional $60+m was raised and value went down a little but was still substantial. Then the IPO market all but disappeared. Final sale price was around $150m and common shareholders including myself initially received zero. Essentially the VCs converted their preferred to common and then voted to sell to a related party (another company the same VC firm had invested in).
According to a lawyer who setup our initial investments, this was actually illegal so common investors including myself sued, but was this bankrolled by one of the big early investors as it's incredibly expensive to try and do a shareholder lawsuit against a major VC firm and investment bank. It ended up being settled out of court and that's where my $100,000 came from. The CEO came out a little better, but people who sweated years (and I mean frequent all nighters, weekends, true dedication) ended up with even less than me. And the only reason we even received anything at all was because we had a HNWI common investor who also got screwed and backed the lawsuit, they ended up getting their money back and a small return on investment from what I remember of the settlement terms.
Just a word of caution to founders and early employees of startups to know what they are getting in to and the typical case of what happens (a small or non existent exit is the typical case in a tech startup), even when you see those big number raises and a big sale and you just assume that everyone is making bank.
Common getting zero makes sense if pref holders had liquidation multiples ("we get 3x our investment back first"), but not if they converted to common, unless their conversion to common had some weird mechanic attached to it that massively diluted the remaining common down to effectively zero % (which sounds sue-able). I'm really curious about the mechanics of how your common holding netted out to zero if prefs also converted to common?
Yes so what happened is they converted, then had majority common, then voted to recapitalize and sell, after which recapitalization they made out with a profit but common got nothing. The problem with this legally was they didn't have the right to convert without a common vote beforehand, essentially they did it in reverse order. Their leverage was the company was not cash flow positive (in no small part because of the massive management fees the VC loaded on as part of funding), and so needed funding to continue. They also offered the existing board members a $1m bonus as part of post-sale consulting (essentially a legal bribe) as part of agreeing to the sale. It's all not technically legal, but you know the golden rule, he who has the gold makes the rules.
Because of the settlement terms I'm not able to name the VC, but I can tell you this kind of behavior is by no means unique to this VC, in fact it's rather de rigueur for the VC and PE worlds. It's even defensible in a way, they owe fiduciary duty to their limited partners, NOT to the common shareholders of the company they invest in.
I currently advise startups seeking financing to either a) only go the VC route if you think you're in megagrowth into the next dropbox et. all or b) you have enough self/family wealth to take VC investment on favorable terms ala stripe.
That's nuts. I'm thinking about selling my business but we'd probably only get $200k or so. I'm 50% owner, no VCs so I reckon I'd get the full 50% minus taxes but I'm also about 8 years in and haven't taken a penny out so $100k would make me real sad. Sorry dude.
Hard to watch, not only because it rang so true, but also because I've known people personally who gave their all to the company and when it didn't work out in the end, commit suicide. It's a cautionary tale of putting your entire self concept into your startup / employer.
One problem with cooking is that your pans and heat transfer do not scale. So you cannot just arbitrarily scale up/down recipes, even if you take precise measurements. The result may be way too watery or dry, for example.
Indeed, the GDPR defines "personal information" as (Article 4 sub 1)
> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
This is not out of step with reality nor a wrong assumption, it is simply a definition. It is motivated somewhat in the considerations of the GDPR.
> (26) The principles of data protection should apply to any information concerning an identified or identifiable natural person. Personal data which have undergone pseudonymisation, which could be attributed to a natural person by the use of additional information should be considered to be information on an identifiable natural person. To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly. To ascertain whether means are reasonably likely to be used to identify the natural person, account should be taken of all objective factors, such as the costs of and the amount of time required for identification, taking into consideration the available technology at the time of the processing and technological developments. The principles of data protection should therefore not apply to anonymous information, namely information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person or to personal data rendered anonymous in such a manner that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable. This Regulation does not therefore concern the processing of such anonymous information, including for statistical or research purposes.
> (30) Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.
> People who use third party apps are outliers. They do not make Reddit any money
I'd wager that > 90% of moderators use third party apps, and they indirectly do make Reddit a lot of money. Without the moderators the entire site goes to shit.
Yes, however once they demod everyone, they will find other mods willing to do the work. There are a lot of people on reddit, something like 500 million monthly active users, at least some of them would be able to mod subreddits.
People end up leaving or not participating subreddits with low-quality moderation. They also tend to get overrun with spam and abuse, and have to be shut down. Finding a bunch of crappy replacement moderators isn't going to work long-term.
A small number of mods moderate the overwhelming amount of subreddits and posts on the platform (some moderate hundreds of subs), and those are doing just fine. At least for the most popular subreddits, nothing will materially change.
What part is contradictory? Those moderators will be replaced by a similar number, ie less than 10, that can moderate the top 100 or so subs. My comment was on the scale of moderation required, at least for subs on /r/all which is what the vast majority of users use, not whether those exact moderators will still stick around. And you never know, mods might say they're going to quit but many mods might still stay. I don't expect to see power mods like GallowBoob going anywhere.
The other part of my prediction is that some of the (real, non-bot) engagement that the giant generic subreddits get are from users that are anchored to Reddit by more specialized subreddits, like those for specific games, hobbies, that sort of thing. If those special interest subreddits die out, I think the large generic subreddits will become more hollowed out than they are already, and not worth much.
Exactly. It's not about the absolute percentage of people using third-party services, it's about the users that matter: power users, moderators, and especially content posters/creators.
Rust was always a corporation/FAANG language when you looked at contributors and sponsors, so it's probably not real reason, I mean it is clear async was rushed out for AWS/Amazon and everyone celebrated it nonetheless.
Human rights are not political unless you're trying to reduce them. Mozilla justifiably did not want to work with someone who opposes certain human rights (including those of other employees), and that shouldn't be controversial or political.
I think they're dredging up Brendan Eich's opposition to gay marriage. But no, the latest kerfuffle isn't trademarks, either. If you're interested, it's all over r/rust.
If it involves people, it will be political. There's absolutely zero way to avoid it short of it being a single-person project (and arguably even _that_ will be Political at the very least).
Ah yes "there is always x, so why shy from this x?", I wonder if there's a named logical fallacy for this, I think the closest might be "Moral Equivalence"
There will always be drama, there will always be politics, but I wonder how entities manage to graze by with broad support in those situations, possibly by being equitable, consistent and transparent? Just guessing.
Python doesn't have so much regarding internal struggles of power, same for Linux (BFDL might have his controversies but nobody is seriously considering forking the Kernel)- and that's one of the largest FOSS projects on the planet. Even when things get super sticky (like nvidia) people still broadly support Linux and the direction?
Why is that? There's politics, but we're not really complaining that there are politics, we're complaining that there's a essence of abuse here. We're complaining that there is a distinct lack of transparency, consistency, and a broad lack of what many would consider to be morally OK.
That's not really politics, but you could just roll it into the same word if you're dismissing a project for troubling elements that are non-technical. Politics being people and all.
> Ah yes "there is always x, so why shy from this x?", I wonder if there's a named logical fallacy for this, I think the closest might be "Moral Equivalence"
I absolutely did not say that, and would not say that. The person I was responding to was making a comment saying that a language shouldn't be political.
My point was that it's impossible to have a language that isn't political, simply by nature of it involving humans. They will disagree. They will need to make decisions. They will change their behaviour to get what they want, either consciously or subconsciously.
> Python doesn't have so much regarding internal struggles of power
What....? Python has all sorts of political crap going on. Take a look through the dev forums and mailing lists. Look at the various groups and subgroups of developers, the way they interact and organise around different perspectives etc.
There was a whole bunch of that leading up to Guido's eventual stepping down as BDFL, after the long fight to get PEP 572 out (walrus operator). He even called it out in his stepping down email.
And '. for line of the most recent change in the current buffer.