I am not a lifer, but I know many people who are lifers. I switched job too many times, my stress is more than my lifer friends. Being a lifer is not too bad, if you want peace and stability.

This opinion is offensive. India is a functioning democracy. Your claim is that the people who vote are lower caste and upper caste won’t vote hence democracy is invalid. Are you suggesting democracy is only valid if upper caste people vote?

What I am saying is that upper caste don't need to vote because they have complete control of the country. Democracy confers power to the people because you would assume people who vote can affect policies to their favor but this is not the case for the people who vote in India. They are totally disenfranchised and marginalized.

the accurate statement is that a small slice of India’s upper castes have control. They dominate many sectors but you seem to assume that caste and economic class are interchangeable. they are not although there is a strong correlation due to generational wealth.

He’s claiming the votes are valid, but the votes do not translate to outcomes like they do in a democracy like the US because governmental power is still controlled by upper castes.

He seems to be suggesting that upper caste people don't need or care about democracy, which is true of all democracies.

There is another possibility, he doesn’t actually own those properties. He invested in an LLC that owns those properties. Many passive real estate investors claim they own the property.

I have a few friends who are into passive real estate investing, they claim they own an apartment complex. What they did is they gave money to a group of guys who pooled money got a loan and then bought an apartment complex under an LLC. My friends owns 0.001 percent of the LLC with no operational control of the apartment complex. My understanding they are called real-estate syndicates. It is a scam if you ask me. I don’t think most investors will get good returns on their investment.

Elon Musk wants to set the bird free. But is the bird going to be free? Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs, the pressure on Elon Musk to widen the definition of hate speech will be significant. The pressure from advertisers will force him to cave.

There will be pressure from platform owners like Apple and Google as well. If the moderation is weak Apple could decide to remove the Twitter app like they did to Parler.

Elon buying Twitter isn’t going to set the bird free, for sure it made the cage a little bigger.

> Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs

Indeed. The fastest I've ever been banned anywhere on the Internet was forums that were ostensibly focused on "free speech." The term seems to be used ironically.

> Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs

This is like saying people that like apple pie don't like apple pie. Yes, there are liars and hypocrites out there but those aren't the true believers.

That said, despite the challenges out there, that doesn't mean you just give up the fight for free speech. There will always be bias but the goal here is to even the playing field so we can return to a time where the rules are applied evenly to all players.

"Pressure from advertisers" implies the advertisers are paying more than the marginal utility of the ads themselves in some kind of corporate-back-scratching model.

If the ads provide a ROI, then other advertisers will gladly jump on board.

That's not quite how pressure from advertisers work. Ads can't provide ROI if people aren't looking at them, and turning Twitter into a hellscape a la Truth Social/Parler/Gab/etc. is a surefire way to drive away users, which drives away advertisers. They also don't want their ads to be shown next to that kind of content, which will further pressure Musk to bolster content moderation.

100% this. Big advertisers don't stop spending because they have a moral objection to the content, they stop spending when the customers who disagree with the content boycott and make a lot of noise.

And where do the people make noise about these types of things? Twitter. If they just stop promoting that content and turning a few keyboard warriors into news items, then companies will be none the wiser, and will happily spend money.

But even in the case they decide to jump ship, other companies will fill the gap. Do you think all the NFL players are going to leave the platform? All the sports journalists? No amount of internet outrage is going to change them, they're too stuck on the platform.

Also big advertisers can stop spending because the people who make decisions on ad money spend ideologically disagree with Musk moderation policy. The decision makers are not robots, they have biases too.

WSJ is reporting some advertisers are planning to leave if Trump is re-instated.

Groups can force advertisers to leave the platform. YouTube doesn’t monetize content that is not palatable to advertisers. Similarly whole of Twitter can become unpalatable if problematic speech is not moderated.

E.g. Musk said in the past he will draw the line at legal speech. Assume that Ye (Kanye) posts his early morning rant next week, and it is critical of several groups of people based on religion or race. That speech is legal, but highly problematic, is Musk owning Twitter going to make a difference in the way Ye’s problematic speech is handled in the future, I think not.

I thought he was going to keep Parag for a few more months.

Yeah, I thought that same thing as well. Kind of surprising (though I'm not surprised Musk was able to acquire Twitter).

This is awesome ! Thank you for creating it. I have been wanting to read about Stable Diffusion. I added this to my reading list in Safari.

I agree Musk is self-serving. However, this time the acquisition will go through, Techmeme is leading with Musk. I believe it is an important news story, and folks here will have a lot of things to say about it.

It's Musk fatigue. We're all sick and tired of his constant waffling and gameplaying. Just because he now says he'll buy Twitter doesn't actually mean anything, he could easily reverse himself again. Frankly, he's more than a little tiresome.

Important how exactly? Maybe to Twitter shareholders or Musk fanboys. But I don't see how the Twitter buyout qualifies as highly-important technical news. Whatever happens I doubt it will change the hacker landscape.

I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise.

Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.

This is a false dichotomy. I think most would prefer a third path where Google invests in projects it actually believes in and commits to for longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly.

Projects contantly being half-assed and rug pulled aren't good for users or the developers being bounced around between them.

Yeah, exactly. If you care about keeping people employed, what better way than to keep alive products and services that aren't the top in their field, but rather #3, #4, or #5? Even if the Google offering isn't super popular, as long as it's good enough, it'll have users, and it'll help keep users interested in other Google offerings and the Google ecosystem as a whole.

The way it is now, I have to be very cautious investing my time or money (even just time really) in any Google service because I'm worried it might be canceled at any time if it isn't Search, Gmail, or Maps. Will my Google Photos albums suddenly disappear one day because they decided it's not the #1 in its field? (Luckily, I don't use Photos as my main photo storage, only a way to share with others.)

Stadia was a bad idea, it had very little adoption, and Google was right to kill it.

I know for me I'd be very demoralized and not stay at a company very long if everything I built kept getting shut down.

Yeah, it must be soul destroying to constantly build stuff that gets discarded without even giving it a serious chance.

Stadia wasn’t something that excites engineers in the first place. It only looks genius if you’ve not had prior experiences and assessment of issues with remote gaming.

I literally know someone who went to work on the Stadia team 2 years before it was announced because working on it was essentially his dream job. It doesn't have to be "genius" to be interesting to work on with the scale and backing of Google behind it.

And I know somebody who had been a 15 year Google employee who could choose to work any team decided to make it his new priority. This is somebody who could have worked on any platforms project they wanted. They left Google a couple years after it launched, I imagine probably at seeing their hard work go nowhere.

Not the same sort of scale. The technology part of it scaled fine, probably because Google invested the money and dev hours into making sure it did. The product itself didn't scale for a host of other reasons, but none of them had to do with the reasons it might be interesting to develop around it.

There's certain problem spaces that are just different if you have different amounts of money and dedication behind them. Working for AWS is likely much different than working for Linode, even aside from the culture of each company. Longer runways, better access to cutting-edge tech, a pre-existing global-scale infrastructure pattern... Even working on a failed project can be an interesting experience sometimes.

I wonder if even Google suffers from the premature scaling architecture astronaut problem? Perhaps if they’d spent more of their resources getting to 1000 and 10,000 games, before doing the engineering to support a billion users, they may have actually needed that scalability (and might have become at least a small cash cow alongside the surveillance capitalism asserting golden goose)?

I used it for a little bit, for gaming on my phone. I was genuinely astonished at how responsive it was.

> Never heard of Figma

> Says it’s a niche product not worth $20B

You’re definitely not aware of how Figma changed the game and how essential it is to web design today. Whether you’re a solo designer, a freelancer, a startup, a tech company, a UX team in a major company… Figma just works. And just makes sense. Their velocity is fantastic. They launch features every few months. The performance is incredible. The ease of use is phenomenal. The collaboration capabilities are perfectly integrated. Even developers use it and love it.

They have taken the market by storm. And it’s a huge market.

You don’t seem to be part of that target market, and that’s fine. But saying Figma joining Adobe is a plus just shows how little you know about Figma and the web design world in general.

The thing about Adobe is that their products are used by common people and professionals. I edit 10 of my personal photos a year, still I have an Adobe subscription which includes Photoshop and Lightroom.

Had Figma been part of the Adobe Suite I would have at-least downloaded it and tried it. As great as Figma is, reach of their product is limited, Adobe is giving Figma‘s technology the reach they would have never gotten as a standalone company.

Figma is free to use. It's cross-platform, web-based, and multiple people can edit at the same time.

Limited reach is probably the last way to describe Figma. It's just an awareness thing, which is totally fine.

Tried it for what? If you were a UI designer then you would have been using it already let alone not heard of it.

Tell that to Adobe who disagrees with you to the order of 20 billion dollars.

I said Figma is not worth 20 billion as a standalone company. It might be worth 20 billion to Adobe. Adobe can do to Figma what Facebook did to Instagram, Facebook took a relatively small startup Instagram and made it into a global juggernaut worth hundreds of billions in value.

Similar story with ByteDance and Musically, how many of you have used Musically before Bytedance bought it and re-branded it as TikTok.

Heads up, then, it's the de-facto standard in UX / UI design these days. There are alternatives, but this is the go-to tool people are training on, using at work, etc. It's not some unknown tool that's being saved by Adobe out of obscurity.

> Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption

Hilariously bad take. Figma has very strong adoption. Lacking the same scale as Adobe doesn't mean it has bad adoption.

Hilariously ignorant. I've seen steady adoption into businesses like large banks for UX and design work over the last two years, in domains previously dominated by Adobe. This acquisition looks like a defensive one. They are not saving Figma from death in obscurity, hence the price tag.

He runs the company himself without any interference from Jack, how is he a patsy?

That separation is what we call "plausible deniability."