i like the aspect of engineering that's building useful or interesting or fun things for people, and i'll always experiment with new tech that facilitates that
Many successful American tech founders and entrepreneurs have strong religious or spiritual beliefs — I believe it's part of the unique competitive advantage and edge in this industry
Many successful American tech founders and entrepreneurs don't have strong religious or spiritual beliefs. Both are true.
I think finding self-motivation in life is important, particularly for entrepreneurs, but there are many sources.
I've never thought the SV / San Fran scene was particularly religious. I'd have guessed religion was under-represented there compared to the rest of the US.
As an outsider but someone who spent a fair bit of time there in the tech scene, it seems like there's a really interesting piece waiting to be written about the juxtaposition of SF/SV culture (tech hedonism, psychedelics, affluence, utopian thinking, dislike of authority, social justice) and a seeming rise in leaders being openly religious (usually Christian).
Or maybe it was always there and now it's just more obvious since you can scroll a big name VC's IG account and see him posting Bible verses from his SoMa office.
I find it actually kind of nice that these things are mixing.
Maybe the world is poorer if people with different metaphysical beliefs completely self-segregate into closed communities, especially during these times of great change where our understanding of consciousness, physics, AI, and everything else is rapidly undermining a lot traditional positions on both sides of the aisle.
There's often more overlap with plain old Prosperity Gospel Protestantism than many people realise - especially in the sense that the definition of success is likely to be narrow, material, and individual.
There's usually a lot more "I'm entitled to love and money and I will wish them into existence for me personally" than "I think everyone should have good affordable public healthcare, so I will work hard towards making that happen."
I wonder what the correlation / causation is on that versus having a supportive family and community.
That is, if you took someone who's an atheist, would making them religious (left as an exercise to the reader) make them measurably more successful? Or is it that people who already have supportive families tend to come from religious families, and tend to inherit their parents' religion?
An atheist's principles usually have to be deduced at the source, by e.g. talking to the atheist. This isn't hard, but it does take time. It usually doesn't scale to other atheists.
A moderately devout Christian's principles are likely ones you already know in some low resolution through cultural osmosis. This is reason enough to suspect that, ceteris paribus, people will prefer to engage in voluntary trade with the Christian over the atheist. It is less because of the Christianity itself, than because trying to follow a known standard for good conduct reduces transaction costs.
As someone who isn't particularly religious, but grew up in a religious household, and as someone married to a very religious person (different religions), I believe it's all about outlook.
Religion tends to give you several quite positive beliefs about the world that aren't entirely logical. Things like karma, the golden rule, belief in a plan, etc.
Generally speaking I also believe that religious people are more willing to trust and forgive. These are all pretty positive things.
And finally I believe religious people have a higher sense of duty to others, but the better term is probably responsibilism.
> Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.
How do you think the money in 401k, pension funds (government, teachers, etc.), S&P500, and any other financial instruments typically relied on by all sorts of average people grow? Do you think they appear out of thin air by the magic will of the market?
Or maybe there is some mechanism through which efficient price discovery happens in a way that benefits both the average people utilizing common investment vehicles and those who actively manage/administer those?
There is a difference between making staggeringly unhealthy amounts of money in days, than making money slowly over decades.
Traders do next to nothing and are able to acquire this relatively quickly and not give anything of value back.
If your idea of placing your money in a pension fund and locking it up for 40 years and only then you are 60+ years old able to use it a way of giving back to society.
Then you might as well say you’ve been scammed of your time slaving away only to enjoy that money when you have little time left.
Every employee with a pension is praying for their pensions to go up continuously for decades, traders can bet both ways of the market and still end up rich.
One recession and you’ll get a lot of disillusioned employees whose pensions are worth less than they put in years ago.
Of course people believe this, they were raised on the hundreds of movies and netflix series where this is a common plotline. Most of our worldviews are heavily influenced by the fantasies of unchecked elite power systems above law enforcement and an unlimited pool of elite criminals for hire.
IRL companies barely release public statements without consulting lawyers for fear of minor risk and any criminal willing to do murder-for-hire is likely to be unstable, sloppy, have a history of crime and likely to get arrested in the future, and/or blackmail the company the second they fall on hard times.
well that's you. personally, having worked in many billion dollar corporations - i simply don't see who the stakeholder who would be invested + capable of carrying it out. i would also expect to see a tail of failed/botched/uncovered attempts even if the vast majority were executed perfectly.
certainly, if i'm a billionaire owner, i'm not hiring a hitman
It's nice for the guys to have it easy for a couple of years, but it's bad for all of us if an entire generation of women find it almost impossible to date because they want to date men with degrees and those don't exist in large enough numbers.
Maybe. I've gone out with women with advanced degrees and women without undergrad degrees. They've all been smart and I pretty much didn't care about their educational resume. Historically, that simply wasn't an issue in general.
Not for you - I'm saying it's an issue for them: many (most? all?) university-educated women want to date their peers - men with degrees. This is a huge problem for them when the ratio of graduates are two women for each man.
Fair enough. I'd just argue that "peers" is not solely determined by degrees. Of course, it's easy for me to say I don't care; I have too many of them. But I know a lot of people care a lot.
Having attended a school in the 90's with a 7-1 male to female ratio, I concur. A strange culture and negative behaviors are reinforced on both sides in such an unbalanced environment.
Caltech was / is not a school in the middle of nowhere. It's in a big city next to a metropolis. Caltech students who want to find people to date can find people to date.
While I get your point but it's short sighted to not view college as a place where both men and women learn and grow as humans outside of formal study. Learning to navigate relationships, discover your sexuality, and generally learn to work with and collaborate with people of different backgrounds. In an environment where the population is radically unbalanced there is less opportunity especially for the people who need to learn about these things the most.
Yes, a lot of growth and exploration of various kinds happens at college. Diversity in the university is probably good.
But, in the context of a society which historically denied women a place in higher education, and an institution which did not admit women, and then had disproportionately few women, to react to higher numbers of women with "this is good for men looking to date" is a really bad take. It frames more women in corners of higher ed where they were previously underrepresented in terms of how it's good for men, and specifically in framing women students as romantic opportunities for men.
You pretending that yeeetz's comment is part of some broader appreciation of a diverse college environment is kinda bs, b/c yeeetz did not say anything about learning from/working with people of a different background -- just that it makes dating easier for guys.
Similarly if you advocate for more women in STEM jobs so straight men in those jobs can date in their workplace more easily ... maybe HR should keep an eye on you and you shouldn't consider yourself to actually be supporting real equality.
This is unhinged. You think women go to university to date? In this country with the cost of higher ed?
- when women were mostly or entirely excluded for higher ed, they still participated in society and courtship and had "functional social skills"
- men and women today who never go to college still participate in society, date and have functional social skills
So maybe women go to university to learn or to launch their career or to appease their parents just like everyone else? And commenting on their growing numbers in terms of the benefits to straight male students looking to date is fundamentally objectifying people who are just trying to live their lives? And when someone points this out you imply that women who have the attitude that universities are for something other than dating are on some track to be broken non-social loners, that's failing to account for the broad opportunities to (a) date someone outside your school (b) defer dating until later because you're focused on learning and paying a huge amount to be at this institution or (c) being open to the possibility that people who don't date aren't doomed to be lonely cat ladies b/c there are other kinds of valuable human connection and the people that perpetuate this myth are invested in continued oppression?
Pearl clutching and shrieking about objectification is so 8 years ago. Doesn't really work anymore because it doesn't drive an emotional reaction; people just roll their eyes and move on. This appears to be your special interest but you're responding to normal, healthy men as if they just killed your dog.
I'm responding to your direct personal attack on the parent, demonstrating what such assumptions look like.
And for your initial assumption to be true, men would have to be doing the asking. Otherwise, why white knight to save the poor women? Yet if women did the asking, there's no downside for them, yes?
NA and EU have plenty of local artisanal products. It just doesn't have the some appeal as Japan, which tends to occupy a hallowed spot in the minds of educated/nerdy guys on the internet.
Honestly I don't fuck with social media that much besides my private Instagram, but there's more to it than just viral marketing. It's a pretty smooth app that appeals to people like my 18-25-ish age that feels like Twitter has gotten super weird and toxic. The honeymoon effect won't last forever, but it has something that a lot of social media users are looking for.
The real market is for brands, they can't stand the insanity on Twitter.
I think of Musk's idea of turning Twitter into a super app. Well, if I go into a business and somebody asks me to pay with Twitter that business is going to be associated with Musk, Twitter, and all that. If the business is selling anti-woke razor blades it might be a good fit, but an ordinary business just doesn't want to be associated with that. Contrast that to Visa, Mastercard, or American Express, all of which have worked hard to be associated with a positive image.
I can just imagine it, “spend $500/month with Twitter Pay and you get a green checkmark, promoting your tweets even above the already promoted blue checkmark tweeters”
Meta isn’t that stupid. Messing with the verification system is one of the blunders that put Twitter in the position where Threads could eat its lunch.
The problem with blue checkmark wasn’t that it was paid for verification. The problem was that there was no verification. You paid to be verified as anybody you’d like.
I’m no twitter owner, but to me the reasonable thing would be to put the name on the credit card on the account along with the checkmark.
That would scale for personal accounts, but not businesses. They could be charged extra and manually verified against national business registries.
The comparables on my mind are the EV (Extended Validation) SSL certificates and the Legal Entity Identifier, both of which involve a lookup against business records for a corporation/LLC and have a sustainable cost of around $100 year.
EV failed in the marketplace. “No LEI, No Trade” made a lot of companies get an LEI but last time I looked it was widespread for companies to keep using their LEI without renewing it.
Instagram offered the same system (pay for blue check) shortly after twitter. But yes, they didn't revoke anyone's existing tick or make it a prerequisite for future "notable" people.
The problem is, it’s made by Meta. I remember when Facebook was a place you went to get in touch with friends. That was a long time ago now - at some point they stopped showing the feed in chronological order and I thought it was the worst change. They just kept making it worse. Now, if I go look, most of my feed is just random “viral” content and ads.
Meta takes a thing you find useful and gradually tweaks it until it no longer does what you originally wanted it for. I don’t trust them to run a service .
This is correct but it's helpful to specify how much more toxic twitter has become than other platforms.
For example anti-LGBT sentiments are common on other platforms just like they are common in society. But on twitter people like Jake Shields literally call for the murder of therapists, doctors, and teachers who are supportive of LGBT teens. How did twitter respond? First they let the tweets get thousands of engagements. Then they removed the tweets without banning Shields. Finally they removed other people's tweets, archive links, and screenshots documenting Shields' hate speech. Jake Shields is still on twitter pushing toxic lies and disinfo.
TL;DR: Elon Musk's twitter protects people who want to murder doctors and teachers.
I think it was a very deliberate ploy by Musk to shift the political Overton window to way to the right.
Unfortunately for him & his backers, the political shenanigans and general incompetence left Twitter vulnerable, with users seemingly choosing to trust Meta over it, of all fucking companies. This will be case study in business school for years.
Threads is polished in a way that Mastodon isn't. I'm part of a few Japanese subcultures and most of them couldn't make heads or tails of the Fediverse despite the existence of Misskey. Threads though? They signed up through Instagram and were posting in minutes. I really want Meta to commit to federation, even if existing Mastodon communities defederate so that techie weirdos like us can live their dreams of running custom clients and interfacing with regular folks (like XMPP federation with GChat back in the day.)
Yeah, Twitter is super big in Japan for mainstream teen and young adult users in the 18-25 city student/young professional demographic. Same with Instagram. Mastodon adjacent stuff like Misskey, Pawoo, and Mstdn got the reputation for being for hosting weird, niche, or pretty much illegal content, and nobody really understands the point of Fediverse.
Also, mastodon just isn't easy like twitter/reddit/insta is. There's hurdles you have to get past. It's to the degree that, despite being the target demo for masto, I still haven't really gotten into it. Too many hoops. Even a flippin' bbs seems to make more sense at this point
A friend of mine tried mastodon on my recommendation. But he couldn't find a "login with facebook" button, which is how he assesses whether a website is trustworthy. Mastodon to him is "like a scam version of threads". You'd be surprised how prevalent this view is with normal non-hn crowd.
A good chunk of them did, and some of them stuck around. I've had an account going back to 2017, and my feed is far more active today than it was before Elon purchased the site.
Honestly its amazing that as many people went with mastodon as they did.
Ideologically motivated (i.e. "federated-first") open source projects never succeed in attracting mainstream users. They have to make too many compromises, and inevitably prioritize their motivation (federation) over what is necessary to attract the mainstream (e.g. excellent UX).
The fact that mastadon is doing as well as it is, is sign number 1 that the market is begging for something like threads to happen.
On Twitter and other centralized social media this is very easy to do. On Mastodon, it is not. I have to copy the URL, paste it into a text field on my instance, and then like it.
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