Watching the tech community waltz into DC and pretend that they know how all the levers of government work is pathetic. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. Are there places to improve? Of course. But pretending that they can understand the intricacies of literally decades of institutional knowledge and deep connections across the globe in the course of a single weekend is asinine.
We need to do better. The US government isn't Twitter. Breaking things simply because you have the power is the opposite of leadership, it's nihilism.
Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.
When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath of my coworkers I encountered.
The folks who are doing this are a subset of the tech community, who do not represent the larger community.
There is a real schism in the SV elite community between the "tech right" and Google. You could argue that OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk to deny Google exclusive access to the GenAI.
"Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first."
"OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance."
Google has always been the company that looms over whatever next-gen hyped things the VC crowd can invest in (or whatever field Elon can pretend to be far ahead in). I even think it being perceived as so liberal has moved these people to the right instead of "libertarian" as they used to claim so they can hit it politically
> Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.
I'm not convinced. In the past half decade or so this industry has veered hard toward outright fraud and grift. I see this trend all over--adtech, cryptocoins, "AI", security... These days I assume technologists are frauds until they prove otherwise. It's a blunt instrument, but it often works well.
I'm sorry, but your defense for the "not all techies" argument is that you flew to NIH and told them how to stop investing in their own infrastructure and funnel tax dollars to private hosting rentals instead? I cannot wrap my head around this as a defense of anything. Seems like the current crew is just cutting out the middleman.
Yeah it's a more involved discussion than we could really have in a form like this but I truly believe that the cloud is a better solution than self-investment and infrastructure when it comes to universities. I spent plenty of time working with closet clusters and grad students is admins when I was at the University and I just don't think it's a good investment of time or money.
When I advise the NIH to do was to do a large bulk group buy on behalf of many thousands of scientists that use the scale of the NIH to negotiate in extremely large concession. My experience with Amazon is that you can basically get them down about 50% just by asking.
I work for a well-funded company now and we use the cloud and we have on-prem infrastructure. The on-prem infrastructure is extremely hard to change sometimes just asking for a GPU will take 6 months or more. Storage is always highly limited and slow. Let the cloud hyperscalers do what they're good at and focus on doing the science
Stop playing along with this farce. Their goal is not to improve anything or reduce waste, it's to destroy the apparatus of governance entirely, privatize everything, and rule over a destitute, terrified populace as unto gilded age kings lording over fiefdoms.
It may be a bad assumption to think HN comments reflect the broader tech community's opinion on what is happening in the US government right now. That being said, there are far too many commenters that seem to be okay with what's happening, especially when it comes to DoE and Musk taking over the treasury.
There just seems to be an overall lack of respect for how government works, the broader machine and bureaucracy that is supposed to protect from unilateral decisions made by a single entity. Government is not, and should not, be run like a tech startup. Going fast and breaking things isn't a recipe for stability or reliability in both government and software. History has tried kings and dictators and, well, they never turn out great for the general population. Democracy is slow and sucks sometimes, but it also has a ton of perks that we seem all too quick to dismiss and throw away.
In that respect it is astonishingly successful by every measure. Musk got his global political shift and becoming co-president of the US for a causal $40 billion.
But was the complete annihilation of all safety measures on twitter and chasing away most advertisers necessary to accomplish that? Couldn’t he have bought twitter, truly kept it an open place to discuss topics with less misinformation, kept his advertisers, and still shit post and donate his way into the White House?
He undoubtedly slashed spending, but didn’t he also tank revenue? The question I have is was any of that really necessary for him to get to where he is right now?
What's the name for that principle/rule where someone blithely removes rules or regulations without any context for them being there in the first place? It's on the tip of my tounge. I feel like we're seeing that a lot in the US Federal govt at the moment.
Technologists and engineers can be so damn arrogant. Learn some humility. You probably aren't that smart or valuable and people like you aren't the only people adding value to society.
Turncoat Zuck's Meta had posters on the wall in every building: a picture of a rocking horse with the caption: "Not all motion is progress."
The fourth estates' and the masses' blind faith in and compliance to self-righteous, egotistical billionaires, one of whom may be a Nazi, is what is both disappointing and frightening.
Small nit, but these folks 100% can not be described as the "tech community". They're owners of big tech monopolies, their VC backers, and our new oligarchs. Tech community, however, they are not.
> In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
DOGE is staffed precisely by the tech elite. Like 20 year old grads who are elite programmers winning competitions, that type.
Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.
That feels like a No True Scotsman argument after decades of chasing VC approval, prestigious jobs at those huge companies, and adopting their practices and software. I don’t like the oligarchy either but it’s a huge part of the tech world under any definition I can come up with. We’re having this conversation on a board run by one of the VC firms with partners who are openly supportive of what’s going on, after all - is this not part of the tech community?
Honestly fair enough. Pay package over principles does pretty well describe the policy of far too many of the colleagues I've worked with over the years.
Sure, but there’s a lot of shared culture even though they have distinct subgroups. I don’t think the guys in the news wouldn’t be welcomed at most startups.
Honestly, this is exactly how Silicon Valley operates. Uber broke the laws until they could fix the laws (in their favor). AirBnB did the exact same thing. Meta knew their platform was causing damage to children and teenagers, and they gave zero fucks.
What does the inclusion of the move to Texas actually have to do with the downfall of the company?
I get that it is the original title, but even the article itself points out that the company was in dire straits well before the move.
The move (and forced relocation of employees) was likely a way to force attrition, since it was followed fairly quickly with layoffs elsewhere.
If anything, including mention of the move in the title just muddles the readers' expectations of the article, IMHO, and the article would be better off without it.
Has any SPAC ever actually succeeded in the sense that whatever it purchased didn't die after a year or was atleast profitable? Every one of them always seemed like a huge obvious scam to dump the bags on dumb money.
I think that’s sort of the point of SPAC: a lot less scrutiny than a full on IPO so shakier companies can go public.
If someone is the type who willingly hand over their money knowing what a SPAC is and does, he’s a contrarian who smarter than everyone else, an idiot, or someone who thinks he can make a quick buck by letting the idiot hold the bag at the end — but really the latter two end up being the same.
I maintain a little de-SPAC portfolio to track their progress. Many of them are dead, there's about 50 companies left in my tracking now.
The only companies on this list with stock prices over the original $10 SPAC price are:
- Oklo (mini nuclear reactors)
- DraftKings (gambling)
- Hims & Hers (wellness telehealth)
- Grindr (gay hookup app)
The majority of companies have lost 80-95% of their original value. Many SPACs have done a big reverse split, so their price appears to be over $10 but the original price would have been in the hundreds.
Yep. I think Hims & Hers is the very rare SPAC that was a new company at time of its listing (founded in 2017), and has managed to deliver both profits and shareholder value. Perhaps it's even the only one.
I was going to ask this same question. Literally every SPAC I can think ranged from bad to unmitigated disaster. Probably my favorite example is Getaround, the car sharing company that tanked immediately after the SPAC merger. How did that deal even happen?
Does anyone know of a site that tracks the outcome of SPAC mergers? I found some articles but most of them are pretty old. Curious if there have been any successes.
It feels like so much "financial innovation" of the past 30 years in that it was just a way for rich people to get even richer and, as you say, leave the dumb money as bag holders.
I mean DraftKings is currently successful, and while I think Lucid makes fantastic cars and I want ChargePoint to succeed, they may not be dead but their stock is well below the $10 SPAC price and they're far from profitable.
If Boeing was paying $500K+ TC for engineers in their early/mid career, you'd see a lot more expertise enter the field. Instead you basically have to go into tech or PE/IB to see that type of compensation fresh out of school. Especially when students are taking on hundreds of thousands in debt, the payback period becomes really important when considering career paths.
I completely understand graduates would choose higher TC from tech/finance vs TC from Boeing. What I do not understand is why tech/finance companies would want to hire chemical engineering graduates.....
I know a few people who changed careers from biology to finance - but that was only after going back to school and getting some business degree....
I've heard anecdotal reports that it can accelerate hair loss in males (male pattern baldness). I have no clue if this has been studied but enough people have reported it across the web that it has caused me to avoid creatine personally. Any experts here feel like weighing in?
You're ignoring the time element of healthcare. If you get hit by a bus, you aren't in a position to shop around or negotiate for care. You can even be incapacitated and unable to respond to questions before your treatment starts.
Imagine you get knocked out cold and wake up seated at a restaurant with an empty plate of food. You were fed the food but you have no memory of it. The bill comes and it's $5,999. Would you feel like this is fair?
Waymos do the same thing in SF where the streets are much denser, traffic is weirder, hills are way steeper, and the roads aren't in perfect shape by any means. The amount of impressive navigation I've seen around delivery trucks, weird construction patterns, etc has been pretty wild. They seem way ahead of the other options on the road.
Not from what I've seen - it happens in real-time just like most human drivers. I don't believe that a remote controlled operator is even permitted, but I could be wrong.
Waymos drive fairly fast and aggressively in rush hour traffic too, which is why I enjoy sharing the road with them. I was initially worried they'd drive like a grandma but that hasn't been the case. Also as a cyclist I enjoy riding near them because they know I'm there and they give you enough space in the bike lane.
The issue is that solar is produced when energy is cheapest during the day, and during the night when everyone returns home energy surges.[1] This means that the grid has to include non-solar backup generation that can exceed the peak generation of all the solar on the grid.
The real breakthrough for solar will have to come from energy storage advancements, such as cheap neighborhood-scale batteries. This will allow the energy created during the day by solar to be used at night when demand peaks.
Transmission in space is important too. It is a long haul to the demand center of Southern California and it may make sense to build closer and not have to build new power lines which take about as long as a nuclear power plant.
Energy is cheapest during the day because solar is producing. In my country what happened is that hidro now works as a "battery": it's not used while the sun shines compared to what happened ten years ago, and it enters the grid inbthe afternoon. Despite not being connected like reversible dams, it allows the regular dams to save water and work paired.
