I apologise if I've been too harsh on Soylent. I have, previously, been strongly against Soylent. I'm against some of the techniques they're using to sell it now.
But I'm trying to be more a "critical friend" rather than just "negative". I realise that I don't yet have the right balance.
Soylent is being sold as a complete food. We've seen a couple of mistakes during the testing process. The ingredients list is not easy to find, and the sources of those ingredients are not available, so we cannot check if it is a complete food or not.
Soylent is being sold as something that you can eat for every meal. You can argue that most people aren't going to do that, but that's how Soylent are selling it.
Soylent claim, unambiguously, that it is safe for everyone. People with Crohn's disease sometimes need to eat a liquid feed. Is Soylent safe for them? Because Soylent claim that it is safe for them, and that it'll provide them with optimum nutrition and bring them to good health.
It's a shame that they (and many of their prospective customers) appear to be unaware of the existing liquid feed products.
Eventually they claim they'll tailor the product for each individual. That'll be interesting. Maybe combine it with life planning for exercise and healthier eating? People could wean their selves off junk foods (subbing Soylent for those) and tapering in better food.
So you don't know? Yet you're happy for them to sell it as safe for everyone, as providing optimal nutrition, as bring people to perfect health, as being tested, when we don't know if any of that is true? (And we know the tested part is a lie).
> Why does everyone seem to think that Soylent is "for every meal, everyday"?
Because they're selling it as that. Perhaps Soylent could consider reading these threads and improving their website information?
>Also, it doesn't have a single ingredient list. It's been stated several times that the measurements would be modified according to each individual that would use Soylent.
This version of the product comes, I think, in just two forms, Male and Female. Ingredients are crucial. (Perhaps a legal requirement? I don't know about the US market.) Certainly a list of ingredients for the base product is possible.
It'll be interesting to see how Soylent do the tailoring to each individual. It'll be interesting to see what information they use to do that modification.
To disrupt the industry Soylent need to know what that industry is.
So far I haven't seen any sign that they have any idea about what going on in that domain.
There's a bunch of stuff about "Hey! What if food was a simple easy liquid?" - well, fine, except that's been in existence for many years. There's some stuff about "optimal health" - which is a bit scary when you have a bunch of people with (as far as we can see) zero medical knowledge, zero dietary knowledge, and zero nutritional knowledge. Apart from what they've got from Wikipedia. And then there's the "Soylent will feed the world" - except we've been trying to feed the world with similar products for years and there's still a problem.
For the world hunger stuff: Who are they selling to? Charities and NGOs? The WFP and UNICEF? Will they just sell the raw product, or will they sell distribution too? What makes them better than whoever the WFP / UNICFEC are buying from?
This is why it doesn't feel disruptive. Most disruptive companies see what other people are doing, and target the inefficiencies or target what people want done differently.
Soylent claims to be different, but is the same as existing products (but with much bolder claims and much less quality control).
Everything I've seen with Soylent so far feels very rushed, and not thought-through. MVPs are fine for most things, but I'm pretty cautious about what I live on.
Most YC startups are not going to cause you direct physical harm. Soylent might. And I'd be fine with that if they had stuck to the original self-experimental approach. But they're not. They saying, clearly, unambiguously, that the product is tested and is safe and is safe for everyone.
> assuming it's not missing any major dietary component
It has some fibre, but it's missing solids. Who knows if that's important or not?
They claim it has a long shelf life. I'm not sure what they're doing to maintain shelf life. Vitamin C, for example, has a short shelf life. Soylent aren't saying how long the shelf life is, or which nutrients might degrade sooner.
That's the kind of thing they'll need help with. Sealed containers, maybe with weekly supplies per container, dark light-proof containers will help.
(While I'm strongly anti-Soylent, I'm trying to be more constructive.)
These are big companies. They have dieticians and nutritionists working for them. They have established manufacturing channels sorted out. They supply a known, quality product to a variety of sources. They have existing contracts with big customers. They have expertise in selling to healthcare markets.
Note also the caution they use when describing their products - they don't claim that these are suitable for anyone. They certainly don't suggest that you stay on a liquid diet if you don't need it. They strongly suggest doctor's supervision.
It's your body, and what you do with it is up to you. But Soylent are being irresponsible by selling this product as "safe", for everyone, as "tested", when it hasn't had any testing, and we don't know that it is safe, and we do know that it is not safe for everyone.
Well, no. Now we know what we don't know, rather than assuming we do know something. And when we specify one font over another we can say honestly "Because I like it" rather than dishonestly "Because science tells us it's best".
He crashed significant parts of the Internet, causing considerable alarm amongst sysadmins. His father was working for NSA at the time. I seem to remember he went to his father and was persuaded to own up, but maybe I misremember.
> However. at a recent meeting, Professor Rick Rashid of Carnegie-Mellon
University was heard to claim that Robert T. Morris, the alleged author of the Wann, had
revealed the jingerd bug to system administmtivc staff at eMU well over a year ago.
> These notes describe how the design of TCP/IP and the 4.2BSD implementation allow users on untrusted and possibly very distant hosts to masquerade as users on trusted hosts. [Robert T. Morris, "A Weakness in the 4.2BSD Unix TCP/IP Software"]
Passwords are lousy. Really lousy. As you point out the problem isn't with the security of them (when properly applied) but because it's all just so klunky and annoying and different websites have different implementations.
I know at least two websites that ask for a username, a password, and they also give a capcha. I have some websites that won't let Chrome save my password.
Really, I want a hardware thing with a long secure passphrase, that has all my other usernames and passwords (12 character alpha numeric with upper and lower case) in it, that confirms my identity to all these different websites. (Can I do this with Yubikey? or anything else?)
Plea bargains are weird when used as a weapon to intimidate someone.
There's something vaguely similar with people (at least in the UK) wrongly convicted and sent to prison. To qualify for early release they have to atone for their crime, which means accepting guilt and feeling remorse. But you cannot feel guilt nor remorse for a crime which you did not commit, and so they don't get early release. "Say you did it; do the time; you'll be out soon enough."
See also Japanese police and courts - suspects are held for much longer than in the UK; they're bullied and intimidated; and once things go to trial there's a > 90% conviction rate.
Here's a 24 minute BBC radio documentary about forced confession in Japan:
(http://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyw...)