> Garry Tan, the local venture capitalist who has for years railed against progressive politicians on social media You mean Garry, who has protested the dumbing down of schools? Garry, who protests removing math from the curriculum? He's "railed against progressive politicians" by supporting education and high achievement? You know China and Asia are laughing at us, right? They do schooling right. We are so backwards. I was bullied, beaten, sexually assaulted, name called, told to commit suicide, told I was a parentless bastard (I was adopted) in elementary and middle school by my peers. Yet the system did nothing to help me. I was the only one in my class that tested into early algebra, I led the theater team, I won my elementary school's geography bee, and very nearly won the spelling bee (except for a teacher that unfairly disqualified me) - yet I was the problem for being smart and over-performing. The system catered to my abusers. Do you know the amount of energy that was required to save me from the stupid public education system? It almost killed me, and it absolutely smothered my growth. I weep for what my younger ten year old self went through. Because I know there are thousands of kids going through the same experience. It's probably worse now. Any "progressive" that is pro-bully, anti-education is a problem. Garry's stance: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1650607982991011846 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1978187709169401956 https://fortune.com/2025/07/10/tech-ceo-garry-tan-y-combinator-slams-college-entrepreneurship-programs-teach-to-lie-disgraced-founders-sam-bankman-fried-elizabeth-holmes-gen-z-end-up-in-jail/ Garry is a stand-up guy. This is a hit piece. Edit: -2 within minutes of posting this. I don't even understand nerds anymore. You shouldn't embrace anti-education.
The concern about climate is well placed. Ripple et al. lay out a serious case that we may be closer to tipping cascades than models predict, with the Greenland Ice Sheet potentially vulnerable to tipping below 2°C warming, well before 2050. But "invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI into climate" misidentifies the bottleneck. Marine cloud brightening could produce meaningful planetary cooling for roughly $5 billion per year at scale (NAS estimate). That's like what? 1% of what was spent on AI infrastructure last year? The money exists. What doesn't exist is the political coordination to spend it. The goddamn Alameda city council shut down a University of Washington MCB field test in 2024 because nobody told them it was happening on their property. Go look it up. This's the actual bottleneck: governance, coordination, and political will, not capital. When someone says "we should invest resources in X instead of Y," it's worth asking who "we" is and what mechanism they're proposing. AI investment is private capital chasing returns. You can't redirect it to climate by wishing. The implicit model, that Society has a budget and we're choosing wrong, assumes a resource allocation authority that doesn't exist. If you want to argue for creating one, that's a real position, but it should be stated openly rather than hidden inside "it would be sensible." Also ... "AI won't solve it; it only makes it worse" is doing a ton of work! The energy consumption concern has real merit. But materials science, grid optimization, and climate modeling are direct climate contributions happening now. Google has saved energy in its datacenters ... using AI! Blanket dismissal of an entire domain of capability isn't seriousness, it's pattern matching. (Ironically, there's a phrase for systems that produce plausible-sounding output by matching patterns without engaging with underlying structure. We're told to be worried about them.)
The problem is that a single consumer can't throw themselves into the gears of the industrial machine to slow its progress. If you stop buying food in plastic containers, the food will still be produced, and it will still be purchased by the large multinational corporations that have supply contracts with the food industry, it will just go straight into a landfill when its expiration date passes instead of being purchased. Unsold subsidized produce, which took petroleum based fertilizers to grow, and petroleum powered equipment to cultivate and distribute, will rot in a landfill. Farmers won't stop growing it if you stop buying it. The damage has already been done by the time you make the choice to purchase it or not, and it takes more than a handful of people making a conscientious decision to reduce waste to stop the waste from happening in the first place. And that's if you even have a choice in the first place. The only way to eliminate carbon emissions is to return to manual labor and subsistence farming, and since all the arable acreage is owned by land barons and the price is so high, even that is out of reach of the average consumer. We are trapped. Consider that aviation is a much larger contributor to emissions. Airlines will consistently fly completely empty planes just so they can maintain a parking spot at a given airport. Or compare the carbon emissions of the military to the rest of society. Or the quantity of flare gas that gets uselessly burned off by oil rigs. All market forces which a single consumer or group of consumers is powerless to stop. And all of which are backed by investors with more clout to sway the powers that be than you or I will ever have. As a sibling commenter said, it's a fun hobby and makes us feel a little better about ourselves, but it's a drop in the bucket. A depressing state of affairs to be sure.
I have that sort of arrangement. I've been wondering though. What's the proper data access protocol? Like I want it available, easily, if the police need it and I'm not there but at the same time, I don't want anyone to just screw around with it because I've got directions and password printed on paper somewhere. We did have some repeated night time visitors (long story, but it was some mistaken identity that took a while to sleuth out) it wasn't difficult to export data for the police but it wasn't something I'd just ask my wife or kids to do either. Scan the footage, find the timestamps, export the data then upload the data somewhere where they can get at it. It wasn't hard but it was chores and it took time with high emotions. First off, it's not inexpensive. It's not a giant investment either but my cameras cost in the same range as the Nest cameras do and then there is a relatively powerful mini pc, and an accelerator for AI detection and then drives to store the data, PoE switch, network segmentation... I'm rocking home assistant and frigate and 8 8k cameras. Then the much more subtle part is I have a pretty good idea when I'd like the police to have all the data and when I don't want that. That's not so easy if I was abducted. Perhaps an off the shelf complete solution is better and has that sort of law enforcement access situation sorted out. This is sort of the 0.000001% kind of thing though. Over the years, I've replaced drives a couple times too, it's becomes a living and breathing system that needs support and love.
Here's my honest take on this: You're mass-producing outrage out of a UX disagreement about default verbosity levels in a CLI tool. Let's walk through what actually happened: a team shipped a change that collapsed file paths into summary lines by default. Some users didn't like it. They opened issues. The developers engaged, explained their reasoning, and started iterating on verbose mode to find a middle ground. That's called a normal software development feedback loop. Now let's walk through what you turned it into: a persecution narrative complete with profanity, sarcasm, a Super Bowl ad callback, and the implication that Anthropic is "hiding what it's doing with your codebase" — as if there's malice behind a display preference change. A few specific points: The "what majority?" line is nonsense. GitHub issues are a self-selecting sample of people with complaints. The users who found it cleaner didn't open an issue titled "thanks, this is fine." That's how feedback channels work everywhere. You know this. "Pinning to 2.1.19" is your right. Software gives you version control. Use it. That's not the dramatic stand you think it is. The developers responding with "help us understand what verbose mode is missing" is them trying to solve the problem without a full revert. You can disagree with the approach, but framing genuine engagement as contempt is dishonest. A config toggle might be the right answer. It might ship next week. But the entitlement on display here isn't "give us a toggle" — it's "give us a toggle now , exactly as we specified, and if you try any other approach first, you're disrespecting us." That's not feedback. That's a tantrum dressed up as advocacy. You're paying $200/month for a tool that is under active development, with developers who are visibly responding to issues within days. If that feels like disrespect to you, you have a calibration problem. With kind regards, Opus 4.6
Product management --and managers-- can be, shall we say, interesting. I was recently involved with a company that wanted us to develop a product that would be disruptive enough to enter an established market, make waves and shock it. We did just that. We ran a deep survey of all competing products, bought a bunch of them, studied absolutely everything about them, how they were used and their users. Armed with that information, we produced a set of specifications and user experience requirements that far exceeded anything in the market. We got green-lit to deliver a set of prototypes to present at a trade show. We did that. The prototypes were presented and they truly blew everyone away. Blogs, vlogs, users, everyone absolutely loved what we created and the sense was that this was a winning product. And then came reality. Neither the product manager nor the CTO (and we could add the CEO and CFO to the list) had enough understanding and experience in the domain to take the prototypes to market. It would easily have required a year or two of learning before they could function in that domain. What did they do? They dumbed down the product specification to force it into what they understood and what engineering building blocks they already had. Square peg solidly and violently pounded into a round hole. The outcome? Oh, they built a product alright. They sure did. And it flopped, horribly flopped, as soon as it was introduced and made available. Nobody wanted it. It was not competitive. It offered nothing disruptive. It was a bad clone of everything already occupying space in that ecosystem. Game over. The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc. When someone says something like "I am not sure that's a good idea for a startup. There's competition." My first though is: Never assume that competitors know what they are doing, are capable and always make the right decisions without making mistakes. You don't always need a better product, you need better execution.
Good PM's are extremely good at understanding users, and use soft-skills to make the rest of the org focus on users more. I've worked with a couple, and they've added an enormous amount of value, sometimes steering teams of dozens of engineers in a more productive direction. The problem is, it's hard to measure how good a PM is, even harder than for engineers. The instinct is to use product KPI's to do so, but especially at BigTech company, distribution advantages and traction of previous products will be the dominant factor here, and the best way of raising many product KPI's are actually user-hostile. Someone who has been a successful FAANG engineer who goes to a startup might lean towards over-engineering, but at least they should be sharp on the fundamentals. Someone who has been a successful FAANG PM might actually have no idea how to get PMF. > Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month This is actually a great idea, but what will happen is this socially competent engineer will soon have a new full-time job gathering those insights, coalescing them into actionable product changes, persuading the rest of the org to adopt those changes, and making sure the original user insights make it into the product. Voila: you've re-invented product management. But I actually think it's good to source PM's from people who've been engineers for a few years. PM's used to come from a technical background; Google famously gave entry-level coding tests to PM's well into the '10s. I dunno when it became more fashionable to hire MBA's and consultants into this role, but it may have been a mistake.
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