The lack of genuine desire to understand each other is what is astonishing.
I don’t know where “the politician” went with that comment, but for me the more pressing conversation is whether we want a society where many are struggling and some make a billion dollars.
You benefited from society, clearly, which is not to say you didn’t work hard. But it seems entirely reasonable to me to ask you at that point to give back. We can knock plenty of people back to mere “hundred millionaire” status, they’ll be fine, and we can do a whole lot with that money.
> Founded by alums of Tesla and the autonomous vehicle company Cruise, the San Francisco startup has received hundreds of millions in venture capital funding and is valued at $2 billion
Stop outsourcing the cost of your vision to the rest of society. Especially when it’s peanuts to you and meaningful to, in this case, the host of what they call an apartment and you seem to think is a test course.
Nobody in this startup landscape gives a shit about anybody or anything that isn’t, at that very moment, contributing to their product development, market share, or raising capital. Even then, they only give a shit if they can’t avoid it and still get what they want. The second they are no longer useful, they’re thrown out like a bag of moldy tangerines. Morally bankrupt “leaders” employing people too inexperienced to know better or too disempowered to change anything.
To be frank, nowadays nobody even cares about product fit, if it really works. What matters is creating a narrative compelling enough first to raise capital, then use this capital to create a narrative for a profitable exit. The product itself is secondary.
This is the product of "rugged individualism" so prized of Reagan/Thatcher politics. Thatcher meant exactly this when she said "there's no such thing as society".
I've got mine, you can all go f*ck yourselves.
We need to get back to a place where other people matter, where the implicit social contract is honoured by everyone, and there are consequences for breaking it.
No, that wasn't the meaning. In context, the lead-up to the quote was:
> people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!
In subsequent years she often invoked society in phrases like "civil society", "free society", and "responsible society". The quote means that government won't help you very much, and indeed that you should be self-reliant. But it would be a distortion to extrapolate that into "be bad and inconsiderate and uncooperative". Individualism doesn't require the individuals to be unpleasant to one another. It just means they aren't an organized collective or hive.
I was watching some midcentury American Prelinger (sp?) archive video where some dapper and devastatingly square professor extolled the virtues of capitalism. Nearly point-for-point, his rationale for capitalism being fair and egalitarian was dismantled starting in the 80s.
I mean, it's good that they're testing things in different places. Environments vary.
But hundreds of millions sounds like enough money to get some industrial or dead commercial space (even in/around SF) and outfit it to be like an apartment. Or six different ones, and six others two weeks from now, and two weeks after that. The cost of the space and the carpenters/painters/drywallers/handymen/managers/whatevers would seem to be something of such relative insignificance that it doesn't even show up on the budgetary radar.
They want realistic randomness in the apartment layouts. This is a quick, effective way to get that. If they were honest with the hosts, it wouldn’t even be a bad idea.
You don't need that until the very end. They should be modeling many houses first, and they can get that by having employees measure their own house. They should also know something about the edge cases and have a lot of very unrealistic houses modeled.
Then they should have a lab with real furniture and movable walls so they can do controlled real world tests. Once the above tests are done you add confidence with random real world tests.
The types of problems seen here are things that your lab tests should fail and keep you out of real world tests. Particularly when the test subjects don't have some sort of test agreement
I assure you that if randomness is the order of the day, then involving handymen to arrange things is a sure-fire method of getting there.
The cheaper the handymen come, the better the randomness is.
One doesn't even have to tell them to be random; that part happens all on its own in the ways that real apartments ebb and flow.
And the handymen themselves can be rotated out every couple of weeks, as well. The cost of rotation is low. The handymen are plentiful, and they are happy to get hired for a day here or there for literal odd jobs.
(If anyone wants even more practical solutions for robot testing facilities that don't make headlines by pissing people off, please put your contact information in the space provided by pushing the "Reply" button. Thanks!)
I don't think GP disagrees with you. They said it wouldn't be a good idea if they had been honest. Elsewhere they call for the employees to face charges.
Ah, I see. Pardon me making him a scapegoat. My rant in between bouts of wrestling with mobile sandbox subscription testing weirdness should have been directed at a vague cohort of less considerate SV folks, so instead I wish to thank him for trying to make the world a better place, and I wouldn't mind if he invited me skiing or flying sometime so we can discuss how I can help him make the world a better place. :)
Or, just throwing this out there, secretly list their own places and have robots clean up after the guests to evaluate -real places- that have -actually been used-. The key here though is that the places need to be theirs (or at least be a clear contract with the actual owner with full consent and understanding).
A robotics startup at this phase is unlikely to successfully clean an apartment. Usually it’s a lot more about data collection and training. Cleaning an apartment is very hard. The humanoid startup Figure showed their robot moving a few dishes from a nearly empty dishwasher to empty cabinets, and they’re an established company. Actually cleaning is very very hard and the systems are just not very capable yet.
& “move fast & be antisocial” Bot Co. too. Photograph/video walkthrough the rental beforehand, safeguard antiques/uniques, professionally restore to 100%, nobody ever has to know. Or call host, drop cash.
Make people whole - this is so much easier than your robots, guys.
Wait… railway runs on GCP? Didn’t they make a whole thing about not “building a cloud on top of another cloud?”
Or did they just mean that they’re not renting VPSs but only metal from the cloud provider?
In my mind I was so excited that there was another provider not just paying one of the hyperscalars but at a minimum colocating and owning more of their stack.
https://blog.railway.com/p/heroku-walked-railway-run
from the blog linked via Wayback Machine.
"From Day 1, we had this notion at the forefront.
The other notion that we have intuited is that you can’t build a cloud on another cloud. We have devoted years of practice running our own metal (and playing well with other clouds) to make sure that Railway’s business, which invariably becomes your customer’s business, is as rock solid as possible."
I'm not familiar with Railway, so this might not make any sense, but it's possible they were using their own hardware but managing it with Google accounts. It's not uncommon for a company's offsite human-to-human communications to fail when there's a Google outage or ban, so it's not unexpected to have the same interference with human-to-machine or machine-to-machine communications.
Yep, and this is why I'm pissed. They lied. They're completely dependent on GCP. So, I gotta do some research, i need something a little more stable (and less dependent on one company's whims) than this. This is bad for them, because it really strikes at the heart of their 'big claim,' peacefull software deployments. This is chaos.
Yea, I mean, that's the whole MO of our platform and we failed at that. So yea, that's disappointing and more so for our customers.
I can provide an explanation about the GCP dependency. Yes, we have host workloads off GCP, and we have been able to build a good business by performing a cloud exit. However, we were worried that we would have a circular dependency on our own cloud. I don't think we expected to get auto-modded out of our own account, hence we left our DB on CloudSQL.
It was never our intent to deceive people that we didn't own our own destiny with our business. The last GCP issue, we were assured that this scenario wouldn't happen (when we got auto-ratelimited, which was bad, but survivable) - but it seems like we have further work to do. Apologies.
I’m very sympathetic and understand that decisions are easy to criticize in hindsight but leaving your database in GCP while moving everything else to your own data centres seems so backwards I can’t even begin to imagine how that could happen. Was this really an intentional design decision?
I have exactly the same architecture. You can easily administer a postgres/mysql on your own infrastructure, but it's also the one thing where backups and availability are super strict. I can easily support multi-region in Google Cloud or AWS and that's way harder to do on-prem, and it's also hard to handle the replication story as safely as with Google Cloud. The hope is that GCP et al. give you safety and availability for the control plane stuff and you can run your data plane on-prem.
At $2m/mo spend, this kind of thing is insane. GCP has never been the most reliable of clouds but this is pretty awful. I would never have expected this.
I have kind of the same architecture. I host multiple dedicated servers and vps instances in the Hetzner "cloud", but all of these connect to a few hosted databases by Hetzners web hosting packages for like 20 bucks a month. It sounds insane, but the one thing that absolutely needs to stay online, is the database, so not hosting this myself makes sense. And since Hetzner is apparently tuned their dirt cheap databases pretty well, we can hammer them pretty hard without any problems.
I mean, the pain we have caused our customer ultimately proves you correct. That said, we made our decisions with the information and constraints that we knew in that moment in time. Railway has hosts in AWS/GCP/and co-los, so coordinating those workloads in a fully distributed manner would be ideal but end of the day, we didn't forsee that would just have our project get deleted just like that.
(Even if we did get assurances from them in 2024, that it wouldn't happen again, although we just got auto-rate limited the last time.)
Thanks for getting things back up (genuinely mean that, btw). Upon logging back in I was prompted to promise I'm not deploying naughty things (I'm not). Was this in response to GCP detecting illegal (prohibited) behavior from something deployed via railway?
could you clarify, did an automated process by Google delete a GCP project/account/resource(s)? like, what exactly were you seeing when trying to get access or see what happened?
Maybe it's because I'm idealistic in addition to being old, but I think a lot of this functionality was in fact added for explicit purposes.
A client sends the language header or the list of supported fonts not so that the server can "do whatever they want with this data." There is (or was) a real reason for it when we came up with these standards.
The fact that website providers, or more specifically ad-networks, have chosen to use these for other purposes is breaking that implicit agreement.
(edit) but you're probably right that i'm expecting too much.
I don’t understand why that would be an implicit agreement, though? Why would I expect that the website would not try to figure out who I am?
They are free to remember whatever they want about my request… but I am also free to modify the request however I want, if I choose to randomize the list of fonts or choose to not send it or whatever.
> Why would I expect that the website would not try to figure out who I am?
For the same reason I expect my neighbor not to kill me or steal my shit. We live in a society, with societal expectations around behaviour. I, personally, would prefer not to live in an uncivilized jungle where the only rule is "do whatever you can get away with".
This is more like, I am not offended if my neighbor notices that I leave my house around the same time everyday and come home around the same time. I don’t expect my neighbor to look away when I step outside. If I put something in my yard visible from their house, I won’t get offended if they look at it.
Killing and stealing are completely different things than “paying attention to what I do when I am doing things they can see”
If we want to make the metaphor a little more faithful: the neighbor tracking what time everyone is home is selling it to door-to-door salesmen who use that information to harass you. Meanwhile, both the guy tracking it and the door-to-door salesmen are leaving copies of the information in the open. They aren't directly selling it to burglars[1], but they are making it extremely accessible to burglars, who then use that information to rob you. There is a data breach every other day, with companies and people routinely getting extorted and in some cases victims have killed themselves. This is a direct result of the unethical behaviour of hoovering up a permanent record of everyone's every last little action, far beyond what is necessary to provide any service.
[1] Although some data brokers do sell it directly to burglars too. All the burglar has to do is say "I'm a door-to-door salesman, will you sell me the information?". Your neighbor can't be bothered to do any kind of real verification of whether they're a salesman or a burglar.
Sure, but I think some of the stuff it sends isn't necessary. A website doesn't need to know the list of fonts on my machine, for example.
Some of them are questionable: most websites do not need to know my time zone, but when a website can use that in a useful way related to its functionality, it would be annoying if the browser were to popup an allow/deny dialog, and even more annoying if I had to manually set it in the website's bespoke settings panel.
> we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension
If what you’re positing were true wouldn’t they have outperformed their peers before ascension as well
Both GitHub and Cursor’s response seems a bit lazy.
Technically they may be correct in their assertion that it’s the user’s responsibility. But practically isn’t part of their product offering a safe coding environment? Invisible Unicode instruction doesn’t seem like a reasonable feature to support, it seems like a security vulnerability that should be addressed.
It's funny because those companies both provide web browsers loaded to the gills with tools to fight malicious sites. Users can't or won't protect themselves. Unless they're an LLM user, apparently.
I think you're wrong. I think it's embarrassing. Though I might be wrong.