I felt the same as you - turned down several acquisition offers, the company was my baby, etc.
Year ten, my partner turned around and stuck a knife in my back, and I found myself railroaded out and battered into submission by lawyers. Exited with token equity, and a small cash payment to get me to fuck off so they could gut the company.
Retrospectively, I should have quit while I was ahead, and I should have realised that while I cared about the company, it did not care about me.
Also, cofounders… you never find out who they actually are until one night you hear the click of the hammer of the gun against your head cocking.
This is probably the sound settings on your TV. Turn off Clear Voice or the equivalent, disable Smart Surround, which ignores 2.0 streams and badly downmuxes 5.1 streams, and finally, check your speaker config on the TV - they’re often set to Showroom by default, which kills voice but boosts music and sfx, and there should also be options for wall proximity, which do matter, and will make the sound a muddy mess if set incorrectly.
Someone signed up for a Walmart account with my email address. Once every few weeks they order either sex toys, Dolly Parton paraphernalia, or beef jerky in incredible quantities, or some combination of the above, and I get the email receipt.
I am never, ever requesting that they delete the account.
Poisoning data used by data brokers has been a tactic for at least a decade
If anyone using palantir wants to draw incorrect conclusions based on unverified data, the impact to them is certainly going to worse than it is to any of us normal citizens
If your credit is impacted because someone made a mistake, that still fucks you over. It doesn't matter if it's real or not because the entire point of centralized data collection and analytics is that you don't need to care, the people doing the collecting and analyzing do it for you. So you just trust them with whatever. It's on YOU, the consumer, to catch these mistakes and spend a painstaking amount of time trying to fix them, and ultimately the consumer is the only one who will face any consequences. And when it comes to credit, these consequences are very material. It means maybe you can't get a car, or a home, or even a job these days. I know my job ran a credit check.
If we imbue these new-age data collection and analysis companies like Palantir and Flock in our systems, a lot of people will suffer, and I don't think anyone cares.
A lot of this stuff happens at a level above the legal system - no amount of juries will save you. Thats one of the troubles with putting off essential shit to the private sector. The private sector is almost the wild west. We have EULAs and terms of service, so basically nothing.
My credit example is actually giving the opponents too much credit here. The bureaus are kinda government. Even that is better!
It's also not just about the juries. I recall when the "stingray" fake cell tower thing was first spreading across police departments there were articles about how some decided not to prosecute because the defendant had good lawyers that would require the whole setup being exposed. Now there is a lockdown mode on apple that disables 2G. (maybe also, but not sure about, android)
I saw some of this stuff browsing other peoples' "Christmas wish lists", but I believe it's some kind of marketing attempt to probe your interests. "Hey, other people are buying this. Doesn't it look good/exiting/tasty?"
This is why I always used a clunker on the tube - early 2000s, you’d find me with a mid 90s monochrome Toshiba 386 laptop, cranking out code in vim - one handed, because the other hand supported the laptop - there are rarely seats on the tube.
Anyway. A) it was ancient and worthless and B) if anyone tried anything it was heavy enough it could do serious damage.
Yeah, I likewise thought this was going to be about people being brutally unpleasant - commenting to laugh at the dead, to pour scorn on their families, that sort of thing.
I am jaded. Then again I come from a family where people go to funerals to gloat and start fights.
Zamatyin’s We was prescient politically, socially and technologically - but didn’t fall into the trap of everyone being machine men with antennae.
It’s interesting - Forster wrote like the Huxley of his day, Zamyatin like the Orwell - but both felt they were carrying Wells’ baton - and they were, just from differing perspectives.
That was my first conclusion, too - the absence of something in the fossil record does not mean that it was not there, just that it did not fossilise.
For one, predators in general often have more gracile build, high power to weight ratio - and don’t fossilise well. They’re also much rarer than herbivores, of course. This means the signal in the fossil record is much weaker and any deviation seems much greater, as you have to turn up the gain to get meaningful data.
Perhaps cats during that period were predominantly dry desert hunters - it is a common niche for felidae - and that environment produces checks wristwatch few fossils.
Perhaps there was another critter extant during that period that just found the crunch of cat bones irresistible, and they all got scavenged.
Perhaps they developed culture and cremated their dead.
Dunno. All that said the E-O was a big transition and it likely did result in gigadeaths, and predators would have been harder hit, ultimately and proportionally.
Similar thoughts crossed my mind as well. But then there's the repopulation with a species that can be traced from Asia. The pre-gap felines just aren't part of the post-gap set. If some were descendants of some endemic low-fossilization branch, chances are they'd be connected across the gap through similarities.
