Intentionally going after old people because they’re more susceptible to AI and declaring as much on record is fuckin wild.
Does SV now optimize for evilness?
georgefrowny · 2026-08-24 08:05:18 UTC
They call it "goal orientation".
I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.
kotaKat · 2026-08-24 08:08:25 UTC
They’ve been grooming the elderly for years to fall for right wing propaganda to keep securing the ignorant elderly vote so this is just the natural progression to keep grooming them to fall for whatever narrative Horowitz wants to peddle for his GOP overlords to get one final dickover on the country as it keeps running into the ground.
LandR · 2026-08-24 08:12:53 UTC
> Does SV now optimize for evilness?
Since when has it not ?
walrus01 · 2026-08-24 09:33:43 UTC
I think the existence of the internet as a mass-market entertainment platform used by billions of non-tech users is part of it. SV from like the 1970s/1980s seemed a much more innocent place.
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
butlike · 2026-08-24 14:12:22 UTC
> But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
What if what happens today seems quaint in the future?
If you think this is morally acceptable, in which case, what you're doing is essentially trying to trick the algorithm to uprank your content. But people at Facebook/X/Youtube can just update a table row and accomplish 1000x as much as you're trying to do. Their business model is selling a less powerful version of that.
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
alex1138 · 2026-08-24 08:18:18 UTC
I remember reading about Andreessen coaching Zuckerberg, having to spoon feed him answers at trial, and apparently he was one of the masterminds behind the dual class shares/proposed third class of share
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
zipy124 · 2026-08-24 08:25:22 UTC
I mean a lot of successful new tech companies were about side-stepping legislation. Some that are missing here are airbnb which effectively side-stepped fairly strict hotel legislation (Though there is a case to be made that it simply improved short-term lodging), and uber which side-stepped strong taxi/private-hire legislation.
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
consensus1 · 2026-08-24 12:37:07 UTC
And thank god they did. I'm old enough to remember the hell of the taxi cartel.
bugglebeetle · 2026-08-24 12:59:50 UTC
I’m old enough to remember the heavenly times before people repeated phrases like “the taxi cartel” as if they were original thoughts vs. cooked up by Uber’s comms team.
sznio · 2026-08-24 14:32:29 UTC
have you actually used a pre-uber taxi?
you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit.
nevermind all the crime, slashed tires and arson
Y-bar · 2026-08-24 14:55:58 UTC
Years before Uber arrived here local taxi companies already had an iPhone app with geo-location, up-front digital payment, and receipts I could directly import into the company ledger app. Taxis were regulated and forced to give cost up-front in the app and in the window of the vehicle. That is what taking a taxi was here before Uber arrived. That company changed nothing other than to dilute the meaning of worker versus contractor and Uber made it easier for registered sex offenders to become drivers because that company had less stringent requirements.
triceratops · 2026-08-24 15:56:09 UTC
> have you actually used a pre-uber taxi?
I actually did, though not frequently (mostly just getting to and from the airport). They were fine. Car always showed up, I never got ripped off.
I accept that Uber and Lyft made getting taxis easier for more than just those use cases.
Anamon · 2026-08-27 19:30:12 UTC
This is heavily dependent on where we are talking about.
I live in a fairly rich place and here, taxis were fine, too. When Uber came, they mostly just eroded salaries and protections for taxi drivers, while lowering the quality of service for customers (though also, for a short while, the price). The best I can say about it is that it accelerated the digital transformation of the industry a bit.
On the other hand, I heard from several people from other places in the world that the arrival of Uber meant that they could finally get a safe and reliable ride.
chermi · 2026-08-25 17:57:32 UTC
It was a literal cartel. It could not more clearly be a cartel.
reasonableklout · 2026-08-25 08:23:25 UTC
Sure, abstractly tech startups in the past have been successful while side-stepping legislation. Do you think they were all good for the world?
And concretely, for the startups listed in the article - such as Doublespeed, which sells access to “phone farms” with thousands of fake social media accounts and ultimately aims to replace human content creators - do you think they will improve society by succeeding?
tedggh · 2026-08-24 08:31:58 UTC
How come Flock is not listed? That’s the most troubling company a16z has heavily invested on and supported.
moogly · 2026-08-24 11:12:21 UTC
Hard to say Flock is the worst... There's a lot of competition. I'll throw Toka into the ring.
Wow, that's an insane pairing. For those who don't click, Toka is a software company that specializes in hacking and altering security camera footage.
y-curious · 2026-08-24 12:50:11 UTC
Edot, we have footage of you stealing a car at gunpoint, then you getting out and breakdancing while turning into an elephant. Any explanation or straight to jail?
kristjansson · 2026-08-24 15:46:17 UTC
It seems impossible for this to be a true statement. and yet.
What’s next? $20m series B in ByBy, a horizontally integrated trash disposal, concrete shoe manufacture, lye bath, and pig farm operation?
hackable_sand · 2026-08-24 18:07:42 UTC
"I work in tech"
saturn8601 · 2026-08-24 21:30:53 UTC
Quick google shows that they are based In Tel Aviv and Co-founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. No surprises there. Seems like every sketchy company comes out of there.
causal · 2026-08-24 14:14:05 UTC
Yeah strange how this article is almost entirely focused on consumer apps. These examples might be unhealthy for society, but mostly represent (poor) choices for consumers. Digital cigarettes.
Surveillance tech is the opposite: It represents freedom taken away. That is the more bleak future IMO.
walrus01 · 2026-08-24 08:38:45 UTC
Well this is all pretty fucking horrifying.
rbanffy · 2026-08-24 08:43:59 UTC
And you know that when someone bets so much money in a dystopian future, they’ll actively work towards that outcome.
walrus01 · 2026-08-24 08:45:54 UTC
You know how sometimes you're exploring a location in a post-apocalyptic video game and find a message on a 'datapad' or scrawled on the wall in blood or something, as a world building fiction exercise to inform the player how screwed up the dystopia became in its last days before everything went totally to shit? Well, now I have some new material for you...
Hikikomori · 2026-08-24 08:47:55 UTC
They're also part of the same group of christian tech feudalists as Thiel and supports trump/project 2025. Seems like they all went insane because the government can still say no to them.
radarsat1 · 2026-08-24 08:50:18 UTC
I know this is a very minor point in the article, but reading the message next to the Doublespeed phone farm:
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
stephantul · 2026-08-24 09:04:47 UTC
Tragedy of the commons. The person that ruins a commons first takes all the supply.
This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.
lelanthran · 2026-08-24 11:26:53 UTC
Jokes on them - they poison the commons enough, and soon no one is going to trust anything they read on the internet.
Which is how it should have been from the get-go.
skinfaxi · 2026-08-24 13:49:23 UTC
What makes you think that is not the intention?
poncho_romero · 2026-08-24 16:51:48 UTC
Exactly. It will be great for the rich and powerful when common people are drowning in so much mis- and disinformation that the only way to get through a day is to disbelieve everything. There will be even less accountability then.
automatic6131 · 2026-08-24 09:22:54 UTC
>Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
Spooky23 · 2026-08-24 12:24:01 UTC
You gotta remember that people with money have money. Money doesn’t make you smart, gives you the ability to hire the smartest people.
But, to paraphrase the Prussian general 2 x 2, the most dangerous person in power is a man who is both stupid and diligent. When people spend a lot of time smelling their own farts, they start believing that it’s perfume.
Macha · 2026-08-24 11:06:22 UTC
It is bad for this guys business to admit it’s unethical and probably has a time limit, so he doesn’t. There’s no big mystery there. If he’s unethical to his victims/spam targets, why would you think his marketing of all things would be honest about the tradeoffs? Even “respectable” companies feel very little qualms about lying by omission in marketing.
radarsat1 · 2026-08-25 10:25:26 UTC
I think that's a fair take, but it also just moves it up one layer. Why are the investors falling for this, then? Can they not see the holes in this immediately?
throwaway13337 · 2026-08-24 12:41:02 UTC
Marketers have a term for this - "breaking through the noise".
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.
But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.
Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.
butlike · 2026-08-24 13:59:44 UTC
You just nailed something for me, so I wanted to say "thank you." It's the _PAID_ advertising that's the issue. I've been struggling with hating advertising, yet having difficulties reconciling how I would know about anything I like if it wasn't advertised. But it's the PAID advertising that spurs the creation of advertisements with spectacle and cheap shit that ends up in landfills and the oceans.
bamboozled · 2026-08-24 15:50:47 UTC
You just realised people pay for advertising ?
poncho_romero · 2026-08-24 16:49:59 UTC
I think they've realized there is a meaningful distinction between Google's search ads and someone recommending a product with no ulterior motives.
xboxnolifes · 2026-08-24 16:51:28 UTC
No, he's saying that unpaid advertising is fine. Thats basically what words of mouth is.
zby · 2026-08-24 14:13:07 UTC
Advertising has a positive function - currently we don't have better (market based) was to make it working other than via paid advertising. The first step is to find the new business models.
suzuki_yuya · 2026-08-24 16:28:08 UTC
It depends on how well the messages are built, but 15 conversions out of 130 is not a number cold outbound produces. I run outbound in Japan and our reply rate sits around 1% - a hundred messages to get one person to write back at all, before anything converts. To land 15 you'd be sending thousands, not 130.
Melonai · 2026-08-24 21:20:14 UTC
That's exactly what parent post is saying I believe, the conversion rate is huge, clearly, but it can't be sustainable. The point is, that even a small fraction of advertising will be moved over to this cold-DM strategy, the funnel will collapse to the usual rates as soon as people catch on, same as every other "trick". Now, whether there's enough time between today and that hypothetical point in the future to extract profit using it, that's the real question here. I fathom there is, at least for someone, until trust is thoroughly destroyed. Repeat ad nauseum as trust moves and gets expended over and over, until possibly when no one trusts anything on the internet (or really any other theoretical platform with cheap global reach) ever again.
I also wanted to point out, the big 10% rate they're seeing is not for actual conversions, but replies, which are likely correlated, but a reply does not a conversion make. The real rate is presumably lower.
He also organized/hosted a reading club for discussing Evola, the fascist/nazi occultist.
wseqyrku · 2026-08-24 09:09:49 UTC
All investors do this, they don't really have an idea of "the future" they want to build. They just "find something they can throw money at". Their words, not mine.
tgv · 2026-08-24 09:12:56 UTC
Not true. There are banks and funds that have environmental policies. Where you invest speaks about your character.
mathieuh · 2026-08-24 09:46:38 UTC
As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
vintermann · 2026-08-24 10:26:14 UTC
Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.
Supermancho · 2026-08-24 14:42:05 UTC
> As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.) ... they aren't hypocrites.
I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".
Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
vintermann · 2026-08-24 19:49:40 UTC
People who are anti-whaling generally think whaling is morally wrong, that no one should be doing whaling, ever.
People who are environmentalists don't think having an impact on the environment is morally wrong. We have to have some impact on the environment in order to live, and nature can take quite a lot of impact, just not all of it from all of us.
All environmentalists believe there's an acceptable human footprint. How big, varies.
A wealthy environmentalist merely believes they're entitled to a bigger share of the acceptable total human footprint because they can pay for it - and my point, the logic of that is not at all controversial in our society.
tgv · 2026-08-24 10:40:21 UTC
Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.
vintermann · 2026-08-24 09:53:30 UTC
One way to cope with the world going to shit is that to pretend that you want it, and thus you're somehow "winning" when the world goes to shit.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
icantevenhold · 2026-08-24 09:59:25 UTC
Liminal places like 4chan are upstream to mainstream culture/sentiment.
Most of the incel, anime, doomed, and bro culture that was prevalent / nascent there 15-20 years ago is now super mainstream.
vintermann · 2026-08-25 12:54:34 UTC
Sure, but that's tangential, isn't it? 4chan didn't invent "accelerationism"/siding with the face-eating leopards as a means to feel in control over your life. It was just one of many places where that attitude lived (though, maybe one of the rather few where it was openly discussed).
Nor did every thing 4chan invent catch on.
wseqyrku · 2026-08-24 10:02:32 UTC
You think you "cope" and are being resilient, but enough people doing that actually leads to the said bleak future, at which point it doesn't matter who's to blame.
JSR_FDED · 2026-08-24 09:13:10 UTC
Don’t forget a16z’s breathless boosterism of NFTs and Crypto.
They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
dabeeeenster · 2026-08-24 09:56:40 UTC
They really are the grift that keeps on giving.
vintermann · 2026-08-24 10:16:32 UTC
The grift that keeps on griefing.
abc123abc123 · 2026-08-24 11:43:09 UTC
The grift that keeps on grifting.
vintermann · 2026-08-24 09:49:58 UTC
> Lee's stated goal was to “desensitize everyone to the phrase ‘cheating.’” If you say it enough, he argues, “cheat begins to lose its meaning.” A16z praised Lee's approach as “rooted in deliberate strategy and intentionality.”
Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
sscaryterry · 2026-08-24 10:44:21 UTC
I'm tired of cheats.
MattGaiser · 2026-08-24 11:07:30 UTC
Do they care? Just cheat the people in the next round!
codemog · 2026-08-24 11:08:28 UTC
Lee is a product of his environment. Tech interviews are bullshit and he exposed it. School work is mostly bullshit and he exposed it.
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
pibaker · 2026-08-24 11:23:59 UTC
If you see a pile of trash by the side of the road and tell yourself it is ok to dump your trash there, well, you just explained why there is a pile of trash there in the first place.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
Arodex · 2026-08-24 11:50:43 UTC
Millions decided to reward a liar and cheater with the highest office in the country. Twice! At one point, socially attuned people are going to go that way. And even if you try to educate your children well, they see in their formative years what society rewards.
iso1631 · 2026-08-24 12:32:42 UTC
Compare Nixon to Trump and you see the problem with America,
estearum · 2026-08-24 13:47:45 UTC
Yes, but they should be criticized all the while... obviously.
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
e40 · 2026-08-24 14:18:47 UTC
Isn’t that how we got here? Making fun and ridiculing the low status, dumb people said “fuck you” with their vote for him, twice.
estearum · 2026-08-24 14:23:32 UTC
No, actually. It's a cute story but there's no evidence of it.
We got here by putting two of the most hated people in the country on the ballot against him, twice.
One was actively hated for decades by the ultra-powerful evangelical voting bloc and hardly loved even by her own party, then another who couldn't be more closely affiliated with the incumbent during a period of high inflation (globally) that ousted incumbents in virtually every election (globally) that year.
These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine that's willing to say, in private, that the candidate is "a demonic force", while in public doing everything they can to get him to power (see: Tucker Carlson). Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
And lastly, Roy Lee, Marc Andreessen and their ilk are nothing like the people who you're referring to. Being a low-status, cheating, amoral loser like Roy Lee is completely distinct from being a lower- or middle-income American worker.
jkubicek · 2026-08-24 15:06:47 UTC
> We got here by putting two of the most hated people in the country on the ballot against him, twice.
I hate this victim-blaming. Democrats deserve heaps of criticism for how they handled the last few elections, but Clinton was the most qualified presidential candidate we've had since maybe McCain in 2008? (I didn't vote for McCain, but it would be hard to argue he wasn't qualified).
You said yourself where the blame should lie:
> These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine... Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
estearum · 2026-08-24 15:36:46 UTC
There's more to winning elections than being qualified, unfortunately.
Blame can be shared among many actors, and generally should be.
There's also special value in finding blame in yourself and your own actions where possible, not as a self-flagellation exercise, but because it will reveal if you had levers available you failed to pull for some reason.
soraminazuki · 2026-08-29 05:46:25 UTC
This narrative sounds almost like an alternate universe where Bernie Sanders didn't run for president and wasn't pushed to the sidelines by the party he ran under.
triceratops · 2026-08-24 15:45:51 UTC
> hardly loved even by her own party
But why tho? And what does that say about voters who apparently "loved" Trump, a guy who mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign rally, more than her?
estearum · 2026-08-24 16:15:48 UTC
Sexism, anti-establishmentism, anti-plutocratism, racism, anti-elitism, etc. Not sure it matters too much in the sense that it's much easier to change the candidate than the electorate.
Yeah, Trump's election says very awful things about all of us, and especially his voters.
Arainach · 2026-08-24 14:25:09 UTC
No. Fearmongering and lying is how we got here.
The narrative of "oh if normal people weren't so mean calling out the awful things these voters say and do, they would have behaved otherwise" is simply not true. For them it's a matter of "winning" and "losing" and damn the consequences. Treating them nice doesn't change anything.
triceratops · 2026-08-24 15:47:11 UTC
> Making fun and ridiculing the low status
You mean like how Trump mocked a disabled reporter at one of his early campaign rallies?
estearum · 2026-08-24 16:17:11 UTC
No, I don't mean that. Being a cheat is low-status. Being disabled is not.
Americans actually agree on this, by and large.
triceratops · 2026-08-24 16:39:56 UTC
Being disabled is a disadvantage in life, just as being low-status is. Whether being disadvantaged is "low status" or not is semantics.
estearum · 2026-08-24 16:46:18 UTC
I didn't say to make fun of people who are disadvantaged. I said to make fun of liars and cheaters and ensure that everyone is reaffirmed that lying and cheating is low status.
Arodex · 2026-08-24 15:59:13 UTC
"Look at what you made me do."
Has it ever occurred to these low status people that their low status is due to their bad choices in life? No, it's all the fault of others: the black people, the brown people, the weird people...
stillpointlab · 2026-08-24 18:34:04 UTC
Morality advances when those who see they could, decide that they should not. In fact, one might see true morality as requiring a decline of reward.
If one abandons their principles as soon as a sufficient reward is offered, then they have no integrity.
So let your children see and learn what society rewards AND teach them integrity.
pibaker · 2026-08-24 21:07:38 UTC
I don't understand why you think one single president is responsible for a class of behavior that is likely as old as human civilization. Should we blame Elizabeth Holmes on him too? What about Enron?
Arodex · 2026-08-25 08:17:09 UTC
Did Enron had access to nuclear codes? Did Holmes have complete immunity due to her function given by the Supreme Court? Did they try to overthrow the presidential election results ? Were they elected by millions after trying to putsch the government?
It is incredible that you think that Trump being president is normal. I didn't say he was responsible for this behavior; I am saying that him and his supporters are responsible for normalizing immoral, unethical, unacceptable behavior.
akoboldfrying · 2026-08-24 11:26:15 UTC
I disagree that tech interviews are bullshit. The biggest tech companies (MS, Google) have invested many dollars, and changed course at least once (remember MS's lateral thinking questions? How many screws in an airplane?) in looking for the most effective ways to quickly gauge whether someone is likely to be a productive SWE. They have done this because they correctly believe that there is a wide range of candidate abilities out there and it is critical to hire as few "lemons" as possible; in particular, not hiring lemons is much more important than neglecting to hire someone who would have been really good. Thinking about it from their POV makes this immediately clear.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
Hizonner · 2026-08-24 14:59:54 UTC
> How many screws in an airplane?
So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system?
It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.
Comments
Does SV now optimize for evilness?
I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.
Since when has it not ?
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
What if what happens today seems quaint in the future?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41056765
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit.
nevermind all the crime, slashed tires and arson
I actually did, though not frequently (mostly just getting to and from the airport). They were fine. Car always showed up, I never got ripped off.
I accept that Uber and Lyft made getting taxis easier for more than just those use cases.
I live in a fairly rich place and here, taxis were fine, too. When Uber came, they mostly just eroded salaries and protections for taxi drivers, while lowering the quality of service for customers (though also, for a short while, the price). The best I can say about it is that it accelerated the digital transformation of the industry a bit.
On the other hand, I heard from several people from other places in the world that the arrival of Uber meant that they could finally get a safe and reliable ride.
And concretely, for the startups listed in the article - such as Doublespeed, which sells access to “phone farms” with thousands of fake social media accounts and ultimately aims to replace human content creators - do you think they will improve society by succeeding?
https://www.techspot.com/news/113395-flock-biggest-investor-...
What’s next? $20m series B in ByBy, a horizontally integrated trash disposal, concrete shoe manufacture, lye bath, and pig farm operation?
Surveillance tech is the opposite: It represents freedom taken away. That is the more bleak future IMO.
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions? It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.
Which is how it should have been from the get-go.
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
But, to paraphrase the Prussian general 2 x 2, the most dangerous person in power is a man who is both stupid and diligent. When people spend a lot of time smelling their own farts, they start believing that it’s perfume.
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
Social animals do this too - even vampire bats ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4685829/ )
The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.
But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.
Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.
I also wanted to point out, the big 10% rate they're seeing is not for actual conversions, but replies, which are likely correlated, but a reply does not a conversion make. The real rate is presumably lower.
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".
Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
People who are environmentalists don't think having an impact on the environment is morally wrong. We have to have some impact on the environment in order to live, and nature can take quite a lot of impact, just not all of it from all of us.
All environmentalists believe there's an acceptable human footprint. How big, varies.
A wealthy environmentalist merely believes they're entitled to a bigger share of the acceptable total human footprint because they can pay for it - and my point, the logic of that is not at all controversial in our society.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
Most of the incel, anime, doomed, and bro culture that was prevalent / nascent there 15-20 years ago is now super mainstream.
Nor did every thing 4chan invent catch on.
They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
We got here by putting two of the most hated people in the country on the ballot against him, twice.
One was actively hated for decades by the ultra-powerful evangelical voting bloc and hardly loved even by her own party, then another who couldn't be more closely affiliated with the incumbent during a period of high inflation (globally) that ousted incumbents in virtually every election (globally) that year.
These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine that's willing to say, in private, that the candidate is "a demonic force", while in public doing everything they can to get him to power (see: Tucker Carlson). Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
And lastly, Roy Lee, Marc Andreessen and their ilk are nothing like the people who you're referring to. Being a low-status, cheating, amoral loser like Roy Lee is completely distinct from being a lower- or middle-income American worker.
I hate this victim-blaming. Democrats deserve heaps of criticism for how they handled the last few elections, but Clinton was the most qualified presidential candidate we've had since maybe McCain in 2008? (I didn't vote for McCain, but it would be hard to argue he wasn't qualified).
You said yourself where the blame should lie:
> These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine... Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
Blame can be shared among many actors, and generally should be.
There's also special value in finding blame in yourself and your own actions where possible, not as a self-flagellation exercise, but because it will reveal if you had levers available you failed to pull for some reason.
But why tho? And what does that say about voters who apparently "loved" Trump, a guy who mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign rally, more than her?
Yeah, Trump's election says very awful things about all of us, and especially his voters.
The narrative of "oh if normal people weren't so mean calling out the awful things these voters say and do, they would have behaved otherwise" is simply not true. For them it's a matter of "winning" and "losing" and damn the consequences. Treating them nice doesn't change anything.
You mean like how Trump mocked a disabled reporter at one of his early campaign rallies?
Americans actually agree on this, by and large.
Has it ever occurred to these low status people that their low status is due to their bad choices in life? No, it's all the fault of others: the black people, the brown people, the weird people...
If one abandons their principles as soon as a sufficient reward is offered, then they have no integrity.
So let your children see and learn what society rewards AND teach them integrity.
It is incredible that you think that Trump being president is normal. I didn't say he was responsible for this behavior; I am saying that him and his supporters are responsible for normalizing immoral, unethical, unacceptable behavior.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system? It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.