Because if you get involved with most VCs, you will then have to watch your back until the end of time.
None of those "worst experiences" seem all that unusual to me (though nobody will say #1 out loud anymore until after they've invested), and #3 is completely in character for Vinod.
I stand by the statement. Waymo is not being meaningfully harmed here.
Waymo's jaguars are well insured -- this does not harm Alphabet in any meaningful way (and certainly not in the "Your neighbor's small business" context that was the context of the post). They shouldn't have been in the area (the taxis weren't), and they absolutely shouldn't be helping law enforcement quite so voluntarily with their video surveillance.
If you want LA to go back to "normal", get ICE, USMC and the federalized guard out of there. They are the problem. Your tax dollars are paying for this charade, and if nothing else, you should be pissed about that.
Your neighbor's car and business are 100% safe from protesters, unless your neighbor is a fed.
You realize that this is all happening in a very small part of LA, which is an absolutely enormous metropolitan area with more than 10 million residents. The cars being torched are Waymos (which have been happily recording video that is turned over to authorities at request, instead of by warrant -- this action will keep them out of the protest zones) and no businesses are being harmed. The ones being violent are in uniform (even LAPD is saying that protesters are peaceful and those who are violent are people who are frequently violent and showed up for the fight, which is telling on themselves more than a bit).
For 99% of Angelenos, this weekend could have been business as usual if they chose to ignore the federal threats to their neighbors. Millions went to farmers markets, kids birthday parties, church, and all of the other regular weekend activities. The city has not been invaded by anyone other than feds, it is not a war zone, it's not even close to a riot. You are being lied to and manipulated if you believe any of that.
And this week, many residents who have the privilege of doing so are standing in line to barricade the entrance to schools that are hosting graduation ceremonies, so abuelas can celebrate the end of elementary school without being terrified of being kidnapped by men in masks. This is how the community protects its own, and a lot of other places could learn from that if they gave a shit.
In LA, the guys standing outside of Home Depot are the kind of guys that a woman would feel safe telling that they're carrying cash, invite them into their car, and bring them to their house... alone. These are not dangers to anyone.
LAPD and especially LASD, on the other hand, aren't the kind of guys who are safe alone with their own wives.
One of the more popular DOS-based BBS software platforms of the early 90s was VBBS. It was interoperable with WWIVnet, which is part of why it was popular.
Its author/developer/maintainer was blind. You can imagine how well it worked with screen readers and other accessible technology (which was primitive at the time, and yet somehow better than it is today).
Text on a terminal is much better suited to accessibility technologies, whether readers or braille terminals. BBSes were all about text on terminals, and it was a place where folks who used accessibility tools could choose whether to identify themselves as someone who needed it... and most of the time if they chose not to make it known, none of the other users had any idea.
"You are your own words" is a BBS-ism. For people who are in the deaf community or who used tools because of their sight, being able to be known primarily by their words and not by the way that they used them was absolutely incredible.
Sort of. Global Entry also includes PreCheck -- your global entry ID number is also your PreCheck ID. PreCheck does help (quite a bit) with the TSA security lines/etc., so in a way, GE does help you more than just at border crossings.
A friend of mine had one of these in the 80s in suburban DC, very briefly before the whole project failed. You need to not think of this cable modem as a network adapter, because there basically wasn't anything (except the cable company) that it was connected to. The network basically operated as a shared storage area -- to the end user, that cable modem functioned more like a disk controller.
What it really did for most users was serve as a catalog of software that you could load and run, at speeds that were not inconsistent with floppy drives of the era. So, if you wanted to play Zork I or Miner 2049er, you could do it without "buying" the game -- you were paying a monthly fee for access to a library of software. IIRC, it was a Z80 under the hood, probably running some flavor of CP/M.
As a concept, it wasn't a bad one. In practice, the BBS and piracy scenes of both the Apple ][ and C-64 communities made "a shared library of software" less of an exclusive commodity than Nabu's backers planned for.
The folks who make up "human capital" have been reducing the value that they place on Google the employer, too.
I mean that in several ways: Google doesn't have nearly as good a record of successfully recruiting (or retaining) top-tier talent as they did just 5-10 years ago. It is no longer seen as a dream position, or even a strong candidate's first choice. Similarly, hiring managers who see Google on a resume don't treat it as highly as they did 5-10 years ago.
Google is rapidly on its way to becoming just another big boring technology company, like SAP or Salesforce or Oracle. Now the culture of those around it has finally started to catch up.
Anecdata: Spouse was let go from Salesforce in the January round of layoffs, after 2 years there. She received 6 months salary, was allowed to keep RSUs that would have vested within 90 days (which amounted to another ~2 months salary), and the company paid for COBRA for her and family for 6 months.
That was very generous, but it's not at all unheard of. There are people who were on her team who got more than 12 months. They had been there quite a bit longer.
Because GamePass outside of the US does (in addition to the on-demand and condensed games and "all 22" stuff that the US GamePass gets). It's kind of like NFL Sunday Ticket but delivered by akamai instead of satellite.
The apple magic mouse also works just fine with nix and windows machines. It's just a fancy bluetooth mouse. Basically any bluetooth mouse will work, assuming your nix machine has bluetooth hardware that it can connect to.
So, it's an ad for a service where email goes through your servers before reaching mine, for the purpose of removing tracking and hiding my address. This isn't onboarding, this is cross-promotion of another service and it's really F'ing gross.
Messing with the integrity of a web page's content without your users' consent is a gross violation of trust. Doing it inside of a browser extension is adware. Doing it as a privacy-focused company is... a fast way to destroy your image as a privacy-focused company.
If you're manipulating the display of a page that I'm visiting, without an opt-in, and you're being shady about calling it advertising, why should I expect that you're going to treat email with the level of integrity required/expected?
This is a hard red line that you've crossed, especially as a privacy-focused company, and instead of backing down, you're blaming your UI design? Stop. There is no amount of UI work that makes it OK to silently insert your ad into someone else's content.
If you want to cross-promote (please don't, but if you must), you need to do it in a way that makes it clear it's coming from the extension, and not manipulating third-party content without user consent. The second you start inserting your message into a page that I'm reading, is the second that I uninstall your extension and never use it again.
Which is a shame. I like your search product, and I thought that I liked your company's philosophy and goals. Oh well.
And her work in the librarian community.
And the warrant canary.
And IIRC, a trickle-charging story-telling bear that almost was.
As amazing as her work at metafilter is, it's only a small portion of why she's well-respected. In a sense, this is quite appropriate, and is why she's been so perfect as the heart and soul of AskMe, if not much of MetaFilter for the last decade.
I am incredibly curious as to what she does next, because I'm quite sure it will be both revolutionary and personable in a way that is rare and getting more so.
Lurking on Metafilter doesn't require an account; you need one only if you want to post or comment. The $5 threshold (and the wall of text "guidelines" page where it's mentioned a couple of times) serves as an incredible gatekeeper. That is probably the single most effective thing that is responsible for the high quality of Metafilter's posts and comments. The exceptionally well-done moderation is a very close second.
Most mefites actually did read the guidelines page, because by the time they've decided to become a member, they know that text on that page is probably important, and (much like the rest of Metafilter) is probably worth reading in full.
Because what usually happens is a user will read Metafilter for days or weeks, slowly realizing how special it is, and then finally hit a topic that they're passionate about -- the kind of thing where they just have to post, because they know they can contribute to the community... so they spend the $5 and sign up.
The catch is, they've been a member of the community for a bit already, albeit a mute one, and they've probably picked up on some of those guidelines already. That's the point. Optimizing the site so a first-time-visitor is more likely to become a (paid) user would inherently be deprioritizing community quality.
It's that community that makes MetaFilter what it is.
None of those "worst experiences" seem all that unusual to me (though nobody will say #1 out loud anymore until after they've invested), and #3 is completely in character for Vinod.