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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Having seen and done this transition I can tell you that companies do very little for innovation compared to university researchers. Companies are exclusively focused on profit, they don’t do the five to ten year moonshot project unless they are already a massive corporation, not a startup, and even then the massive companies want the easiest thing to translate to a product and begin making money. At best they have engineers that make scaling up more practical, and while that is a fun and interesting thing, it is also very straightforward and is something a company has to avoid screwing up, not investing in massively to make it right.

    I’ve seen several companies that did literally nothing except swap a couple things on their production line and call it a day. The only transition from research to industry was an IP agreement and a few meetings.

    Large companies are not looking for innovation by buying startups, they are usually looking to secure monopolies. Sometimes they want the product and to work it into their own product offerings. This is often a way to vertically integrate more, not innovate. They bring in-house because they see a competitor emerging and want to hedge their bets or because they see a way to take over a market by just doing the same thing. Sometimes it is just a way to hire some employees that seem pretty competent and thereby deprive your competitors. Large companies operate with a monopoly mindset. This is also why Google kills every project that they declare won’t scale into a huge money-maker (they really mean take over a market).

    Small companies are often started with the plan of actually making and selling their product long-term but run headfirst into the fact that their industry is dominated by just 3 companies that will gladly do the one-two punch of threatening to bleed you legally with nonsense lawsuits while offering to buy you up. Or, on the flipside, just copying your work and changing it just enough that they know they could bleed you legally even though they have broken IP law. Usually, they would rather just buy you out at less than you are worth but enough to make the VCs happy.





  • The metrics here are those most relevant to finance, which is not synonymous with innovation. Startups are notorious money sinks that are only invested in due to a promise of monopoly profits later, basically a gamble. They usually fail, and dramatically. Finance is necessary for private capital investment and liquidity but when it grows too large it becomes parasitic and also tries to dictate policy. The real estate bubble that China is now dealing with is a direct result of financialization and an expectation that it would be “too big to fail” and that real estare finance would get bailed out by government.

    China is tackling this issue by limiting the impact of finance on its economy, changing its lending terms and what it guarantees, including not bailing out real estate finance. This has the direct effect of making startups and venture capital less common as they simply can’t make as much money from pure speculation. They don’t have a state-funded safety net for their worst gambles and interest rates are higher.

    Overall, this is a good development. China’s finance sector absolutely needed to be limited and it is good for the state to take on a greater role in running companies.


  • Being “ready” means nothing, it is just a thought in your head. Praxis requires that you act. You aren’t ready for an uprising if you aren’t actually organizing towards one yourself. And I have yet to meet a successful revolutionary organizer that tries to sheepdog for literally genocidal Democrats.

    I haven’t advocated for “doing nothing”, I have advocated against supporting genocide from both a moralizing and electorally strategic angle. I choose these angles because it is the language most people will understand and because the propaganda that I oppose in the process teaches people to give up leverage and cheerlead, which is literally disempowering.

    If people want recommendations on something positive to do, I would recommend joining the Uncommitted Movement if you prefer electoralism. If you are interested in politics that also extends beyond electoralism, I would be happy to provide advice on any local groups and reading materials.


  • They will not exist so long as you vote for “lesser evil” genociders. Why would there be? You still vote for them! They don’t need to listen to you at all and will gladly continue the project that is in their overall material interest in supporting Israel. You show up in their databases as, “Likely Democratic voter” and so they send some volunteers to try to get you to vote and they ask you for money. That is how you are thought of, and I mean this literally. That is how they curate and use their information. The rest is PR for how to ensure you don’t take these looney anti-genociders too seriously.

    There is no “push from there” without leverage. If they don’t do what you want, what are you going to do? With what power? If you mske a threat, why is it credible? We are kept docile and ineffective through electoral illogic that serves the interests of the existing political class and cannot imagine gaining or wielding power in any practical way.





  • If you own the copyright then yes this is 100% legal.

    There are already apps that are like this. They usually add a couple features to the paid release so that people feel like they are getting something extra for the money. The good ones will eventually move those features to the open release eventually. However, this incentivizes keeping part of the app closed source so that nobody can just rename and re-release the paid version.

    It is 100% up to you for how to handle these tradeoffs. Personally, I think so long as you are principled and ready for some criticism - and can handle it gracefully - getting paid for work that builds your open source app is a very good idea. We don’t all have the luxury of maintaining high quality unpaid side projects!


  • I would recommend using this as an opportunity to build out and use a backups system. Whenever I get a new laptop, for example, I just make a(nother) backup on the old laptop and restore whatever I want to the new one. If there are any files I want that are normally excluded from backups, I either tweak my rules to include those files/put them in a different directory and repeat the process or just make a new manual external backup copy temporarily.

    If you have good backups then your new drive can be populated from them after creating new partitions. Optionally, you can also take this opportunity to reinstall the OS, which I personally prefer to do because it tends to clean up cruft.

    Also, if you go this route, your data on your old drive is 100% intact throughout the process. You can verify and re-verify that all the files you want are backed up + restored properly before finally formatting the old drive for use in the NAS.