• 3 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The more I have read about this, the more disgusted I am. This company generally, and the CEO personally, took all sorts of shortcuts to build this thing.

    The CEO stated that he didn’t want to have any ex military submarine experts as part of the team, because they were “uninspiring” and “50 year old white guys”, and he’d rather have young college grads who are inspiring. The real reason: the college grads were simply cheaper. He didn’t want to pay the ex military experts. That’s it.

    The CEO lied to CBS news in their CBS Sunday morning report and told them that Boeing and University of Washington consulted with them on the design of the submersible. Both organizations told the NY Post today that they had no involvement with it. So that was a fucking lie. All he did was use the UW lab after hours.

    The use of a Logitech PS3 style controller to navigate the vehicle…what the actual fuck.

    Because this was a submersible in international waters, there are virtually no regulations. That needs to change. If the UN needs to draft a treaty for countries to ratify to regulate these things in international waters, then that’s what needs to happen.

















  • I don’t think people actually would, if push came to shove. They’re just expressing nostalgia for a simpler time, which is pretty easy to understand, given all the dystopian effects of social media and smartphones.

    I think smartphones have done a lot of harm, but they’ve still done far more good, which is why we use them. Especially in poorer countries where smartphones are often people’s only access to the internet.

    That said, there’s nothing stopping any of these people in the article from being the change they want to see in the world. Not to send anybody to Reddit, but r/dumbphones is a fast growing subreddit for people that want to try that. A lot of the users are Gen Z who never got to try them and want to give it a whirl.




  • I really owe Steve one for opening my eyes to Lemmy. I’ll certainly never go back to Reddit, other than perhaps the occasional Google search for an IT question somebody solved 10 years ago.

    But as far as actively contributing? Having a Reddit account? Nope, I’m done. I was very active on Reddit, and I haven’t posted since the announcement.

    But despite me and many others leaving, I really feel for Christian and the other developers. They really got fucked. The 30 day turnaround was an absurd notice to give someone, and Steve didn’t have any defense to give for that, according to this article. He seems like a really ruthless, uncaring person.


  • He definitely has a choice. As a founder of Reddit, if he really believed that this was the wrong move, he could refuse to do something he disagreed with and make the board essentially have to fire him.

    I walked away from a well paying job myself several years ago because I disagreed morally with choices being made by the company. It is absolutely something that people can do, especially someone of his means.

    Unfortunately we live in a society where it’s easy to separate responsibility for actions taken at work with actions taken personally; indeed, that is the whole premise of a limited liability company. But I still hold Steve personally responsible for his choices, and I think he is selling out the values of Reddit, and his own values if he ever had any, for money.