I don’t know who they see as competitors in market positioning (ie, who is selling against them on their target buyer’s calendar). But the space is called hyperconverged computing and there are a few other players like Scale Computing building “racks you buy that run your VMs.”
From the podcasts they talk a little about their clients. It's people who want something like AWS Outpost but fully disconnected and independent from any cloud and running 100% local.
More like Nutanix, Xen, IBM, Kubernetes... private cloud, colo, on-premise... etc. There's a ton of stuff (I'd bet the majority) of compute workload in business that is local/colo and not cloud.
I don't think that is the 'main' competitor. But its certaintly 'a' competitor for companies that already have put a lot of their eggs into the AWS basket.
You buy 1 BTC at $60k in 2024. In 2025 it’s valued at $100k, so you pay taxes on $40k gain.
Now it’s 2026 and you finally decide to sell the BTC for the original price of $60k.
Except you’ve paid taxes on $40k in paper gains that disappeared before you sold the asset.
How do we solve that?
(Replace “bitcoin” with “startup stock option” if you really want to illustrate the problem - imagine having to pay taxes on stock options you decide to never exercise)
That's capital gains, which we currently recognize on realization events (selling the asset or trading it). With current capital gains, if you sold in 2025 you'd pay the taxes on 40k at ~15% (depending) so 6k. If you repurchased it at $100k and then sold at $60k, you can claim the losses.
People advocating for a wealth tax aren't pushing for a tax on gains and losses but rather the total asset value. I've seen 1% and 2% bandied about.
So in 2024, you'd pay $1.2k in taxes (at 2%). In 2025, you'd pay $2k. And in 2026 you'd pay $1.2k
Though, usually, there's also a minimum wealth paired with the tax. Again, I usually only see it for things like individuals with over $100M in assets.
For options, it'd still be the same thing. If the strike price is $1 and the actual price is $60 and the option is vested then you'd be taxed on the $59 per option you hold.
This only gets difficult if you are talking about options in a privately held company. But, again, that's not really the case for a lot of the most wealthy who the wealth tax is targeting.
You hold Enron stock. You’ve been taxed 5% annually on the holdings for the past 5 years. To pay the tax, you decided to take out a loan instead of selling shares to pay the tax (you want to stay invested).
Someone discovers Enron is a fraud, the stock goes to $0 and you go bankrupt because you can’t repay the loans you took out to pay the tax on a (now worthless) asset.
Were you smart, you'd have used your enron stock as the collateral in which case both you and the bank get screwed if the value goes to 0. You default on the loan, you don't have to go bankrupt in this case. Your credit takes a hit for 7 years.
But yeah, if you take out a loan against your home and the housing market collapses and you lose your job (ala 2008) you can end up destitute. The stock market is always a gamble and this doesn't make that better or worse.
The situation you're describing is equivalent to paying your 5% in asset tax the normal way (by giving up 5% of the asset) and then saying "I love enron, let me take out a loan to buy stock with!" Buying stock with a loan is an obviously stupid move, and wanting to "stay invested" is nothing more than a rationalization. Keeping the same percentage of your wealth in the stock is already staying invested. Increasing the percentage for the sole purpose of keeping the same number of shares is a bad idea.
And this hypothetical me, having to pay a wealth tax, is way way over the line of needing a financial advisor, so that advisor will be telling me it's a bad idea to take out loans to buy stock.
>You buy 1 BTC at $60k in 2024. In 2025 it’s valued at $100k, so you pay taxes on $40k gain.
Right, and at this point in the argument it’s also worth asking ”pay taxes with what?” which also quickly makes the idea of taxing valuations obviously absurd.
It would force any value creator to sell his creation, which basically destroys the mechanism from which all welfare for anyone in our societies currently originates.
Yikes. So even if I store my wealth in cash, you want it to deflate by 5% annually?
How do you handle your neighbor who discovers he has a $2m Pokémon card in his closet? Is he forced to sell it to pay the 5% if he doesn’t have the cash on hand to pay the tax?
It’s a messy proposition. I’ve yet to hear a clear proposal that doesn’t have sticky edge cases.
> So even if I store my wealth in cash, you want it to deflate by 5% annually?
Generally speaking, that's the point. The wealth tax is trying to combat wealth inequality and the only way for such a policy to be effective is if those with considerable assets wealth decreases with time.
> How do you handle your neighbor who discovers he has a $2m Pokémon card in his closet?
Usually that's handled by having a minimum asset requirement before the wealth tax kicks in. 100M is what I've seen. It'd be a pretty easy tax to make progressive.
> It’s a messy proposition. I’ve yet to hear a clear proposal that doesn’t have sticky edge cases.
I've given the proposal I've seen in a different comment. Perhaps you didn't see it? But in any case, taxes are always messy. It's not as if you can't refine them with more and more amendments to address different scenarios as they come up. I don't think the "messiness" should be what keeps us from adopting such a tax system. There will almost certainly be a game of cat and mouse between the regulators and the wealthy regardless the proposal.
Switzerland has a wealth tax while people like you wring their hands and the wealthiest see their wealth increase far beyond anyone elses.
In From 1965 to 1995 the richest man in the world had about $30-40b in today's money. This was more than the 1945-1965 era, but way less than the mess pre-war thanks to aggressive action to limit wealth.
Today the richest man in the world has $300b, Rockefeller levels before the 1929 crash.
I was a daily drinker for many years. A "1 or 2 cocktails in the evening" type of person. (And of course, 1 cocktail often meant 2 shots, so 2 cocktails = 4 shots a night.. looking back... yikes)
I started a GLP-1 in February of 2025. Lost a bunch of weight, etc.
What I wasn't expecting was that I'd have such an easy time dropping the daily drinking habit. I'm not convinced GLP's will help if you're truly addicted to alcohol to the point where you need AA and structured programs to break free. But I do think GLP's have the potential to give you the initial "kick" you need to drop the habit if you're otherwise motivated to.
In the first few months of starting the GLP-1, I remember losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking) a lot of things, especially unhealthy stuff (unhealthy foods/drinks tend to not combine well with GLP's). The taste of a cocktail wasn't as appetizing or appealing as it used to be, hard to explain.
Similar experience. Went through a phase of drinking once or twice a week. Started GLP-1, completely dropped the drinking habit to the point where there is zero desire of drinking.
Now, I wish it could do this for late night sugary snacks as well since that's my crux.
This was also my experience. I was a daily drinker, but once I started on tirzepatide I lost all interest. Even after I stopped taking the medicine, I still wasn't interested. I'll occasionally have a cocktail or glass of wine, but it's now a once-a-month sort of thing.
There is a point you made here "losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking)" that I think is The Key, but also not what people think when they hear it without experiencing it. Someone hearing that line might think it makes food "unenjoyable," as in "bad." That is not the case. It is "unenjoyable" as in "lacking in a joyful experience."
After talking with friends of mine who are similarly aged to me but have not had the major weight struggles I've had, I realized one of the biggest differences between us is not our drive or discipline (they envy me in many of these areas), it's in the sheer level of enjoyment that I get out of food and drink that they do not.
There are certain foods that, if I have them, they make me more hungry. I can't physically fit enough spaghetti or chocolate pudding into my mouth to satisfy my craving for it. My favorite beer feels glorious all the way down my throat and into my stomach; I can go from depressed to happy in 10 seconds just from that first gulp. And it's just those specific things. I'm not going to scarf down hard on lasagna or chocolate ice cream. While I enjoy whiskey, wine, cocktails, and other beers, I can have one in a night and be done.
There are also foods that are the opposite. I physically cannot stomach muscles or cuccumber. Putting cauliflower--in any form--on my plate is likely to start an argument. All leafy greens feel like a punishment; I can choke them down, unlike muscles, but I'm not going to like the person who made me do it.
But my friends without weight issues have never had these experiences with any foods. Food is just a way to avoid hunger. Booze is just a way to get drunk. There's no strong emotional connection to any of it.
And GLP-1 agonists completely remove that. I've heard it called "The Food Noise." It's basically a re-baselining of my relationship to food back to what should be "normal." Nothing has a feedback loop of pushing me to consume more anymore. Nothing gives me such strong revulsion that I can't eat it anymore. It's just food, on my plate. I don't even feel hungry, the only reason I'm eating it is because I understand at an intellectual level that I have to in order to not pass out in the middle of the day.
It just makes me eat less. I enjoy food every bit as much as I did before, just less often and in lower amounts. I still get hungry eventually and still want to eat and food tastes the same and if anything has a stronger emotional appeal than it did before because I eat so little.
I still enjoy drinking an IPA just as much, and really I enjoy it much more since I have one every few months instead of 5 every night. I could enjoy one every night, but I don't really need to have it, even though it would be delicious and the buzz is enjoyable, I just don't feel compelled to get it and I know it's not good for me. I knew before it wasn't good for me, believe me as the child of an alcoholic I knew it wasn't good to drink every night, but I did anyway because I had something inside pushing me to do it.
So maybe that is what you are describing, that thing that pushes you to do things you know are bad for you, and which you will regret immediately, but yet you feel like you have to do anyway. It's not enjoying something more, it's more like feeding withdrawal.
Overall I feel like there is someone in control now. I can just decide that drinking a beer every night is bad for me and not aligned with my goals and then I don't do it, and when I rarely think about it I'm just not a person who drinks alone anymore and my thoughts quickly move on to figuring out how to make croissant dough or looking for a scene to post to instagram or some work problem that has been bugging me.
Why don't you eat 5 entire pizzas instead of 5 slices? It's like that. One pizza seems like a LOT of food now. Three slices seems like too much. Before I could eat a whole pizza without even thinking twice. I look forward to it just as much, if not more. The first bite is just as good, but honestly seems better since I didn't just have a snack an hour ago. I ate like 5 Takis for a snack the other day and they were delicious and I really enjoyed it, but before I would have eaten the entire bag and not really even taken the time to taste them.
I would say it takes longer to get hungry even though I eat maybe 1/3 to 1/2 as many calories as I did before (that is to say 2/3 less than before). If I ate this little before GLP-1 I would have felt like I was dying and would have been thinking about food and hunger all day and night.
Yes you do fill up faster, and your stomach empties slower, so there is actually a physical 'being full' that happens with less food than previously.
I have heard a few very different experiences with GLP-1s, for some an almost magical relief from addictive behaviors, for others they didn't notice much on that front at all.
So much is about what is causing the behavior I would expect. GLP-1s don't change the way you think so much as breaking some of the trigger mechanisms.
Are you doing the action because you want to do it, or because your body is responding to that mild trigger that occurs, but your pavlonian response is so strong you can't differentiate.
The thing is, those trigger mechanisms break after weeks without doing them, whereas it is very hard to break them normally without some more extreme measure.
Without getting into individual physical differences that occur, expectation is a huge part of addiction and overcoming addiction. Rituals are very often a part of substance abuse for similar reasons. It sounds silly, but consciously placebo-ing yourself can be very effective for people trying to quit. "This medicine will cure my addiction" can be a very powerful mantra for people with a strong imagination.
I've heard very addictive personalities describe it as a light switch being turned off, people who have been on a whole host of different things across time.
Individual differences in medication response isn't just placebo.
Why make medicine at all if essentially you think you just have to convince people of fairy stories well enough for literally anything to work?
I'm in the latter group. I've had little to no weight loss from Ozempic because my issue is having a sweet tooth, not eating too much regular food. Yeah I fill up faster, but by the time I would fill up on cookies or something that's still a crazy amount of calories. So it hasn't really helped me to curb my weight. It has helped my A1c though, which is the main thing.
This is a metric I never really understood. how often are people booting? The only time I ever reboot a machine is if I have to. For instance the laptop I'm on right now has an uptime of just under 100 days.
My Mac - couldn’t tell you, I just close the lid. My work laptop? Probably every day, as it makes its own mind up what it does when you close the lid. Even the “shut down” button in the start menu often restarts the machine in win 11.
My work desktop? Every day, and it takes > 30 seconds to go from off to desktop, and probably another minute or two for things like Docker to decide that they’ve actually started up.
Back in the bad old days of Intel Macs, I had a full system crash just as I was about to get up to give a presentation in class.
It rebooted and got to desktop, restoring all my open windows and app state, before I got to the podium (it was a very small room).
The Mac OS itself seems to be relatively fast to boot, the desktop environment does a good job recovering from failures, and now the underlying hardware is screaming fast.
I should never have to reboot, but in the rare instances when it happens, being fast can be a difference maker.
Windows can boot pretty fast these days, I'm always surprised by it. I run LTSC on mine though, so zero bloat. Both my Macs and Windows LTSC have quick boots nowadays, I'm not sure I could say which is faster, but it might be the Windows.
It can boot and show a desktop fast after logging in. However, after that it seems still to be doing a lot in the background. If I try to open up Firefox, or any other app, immediately after I see the desktop it will take forever to load. When I let the desktop sit for a minute and then open Firefox it opens instantly.
Presumably a whole bunch of services are still being (lazy?) loaded.
On the other hand, my cachyos install takes a bit longer to boot, but after it jumps to the desktop all apps that are autostart just jump into view instantly.
Most time on boot seems to be spent on initializing drives and finding the right boot drive and load it.
What hardware? Up until a recent BIOS update my X870 board 9950X3D spent 3 minutes of a cold boot training the RAM… then booting up the OS in 4-8 seconds, so my Mac would always win these comparisons. Now it still takes a while at first boot, but subsequent reboots are snappy.
Something else to consider: chromebook on arm boots significantly faster than dito intel. Yes, nowadays Mediateks latest cpus wipe the floor with intel N-whatever, but it has been like this since the early days when the Arm version was relatively underpowered.
My guess would be that ARM Chromebooks might run substantially more cut-down firmware? While intel might need a more full-fat EFI stack? But I haven't used either and am just speculating.
The regulation is pretty clear? We just don't choose to blackhole shady foreign (in this case, Chinese) companies from the American internet as a matter of policy. And cannot effectively screen all imports.
Hard to regulate. A lot of the retatrutide sold today is marketed on Discord & Telegram groups and paid for with crypto. It is infeasible for customs to open every last package entering the US, so this avenue will continue to work. The only gov't that could realistically stop it (for a while at least) is the Chinese. And they do, occasionally, shut down a manufacturer for a while. Though not because they are shipping GLP1s to the states.
It’s regulated quite tightly. But if you can’t shut down the illicit street drug market you aren’t going to be able to shut down the illicit make-your-life-better black market either.
I think what’s happening now is about right. FDA approval process for the vast majority of people, and make those who want to play drug astronaut biohacker find it via underground methods. No reason to crack down super hard on such folks since the societal impact is likely net positive - unlike fentanyl or what have you.
Perhaps there could be better enforcement for the folks being totally blatant about it as it risks going “mainstream” and hitting people who don’t have informed consent, but I imagine that’s coming as law enforcement catches up.
Was my glucose under control without glp-1's? Yeah I could manage an a1c of 5.4-5.6 with metformin but I was still hovering near 300 lbs.
With glp-1's I'm down over 50 lbs, my a1c is a much more manageable around 4.0-4.5 and it makes it much easier to exercise and portion control is a huge benefit. Not to mention a buncha other things like triglicerides and blood pressure have come down due to exercise and eating better. it sucks i have to take it forever, but at the same time i feel a ton better physically, and if i loose 50 more lbs, and labs continue to show improvement, i can reduce the cocktail of other meds I'm on my doc says.
Cigna denied me at first until my doc appealed twice. Cigna wouldnt cover because i wasnt a full diabetic so wasnt on insulin. I would've had to pay close to $1k a month to take it otherwise. Thank goodness for a tenacious doctor!
> I would've had to pay close to $1k a month to take it otherwise.
If your frame of reference for GLP-1 prices is in like, 2024 or earlier, check prices again. They've come down a lot. You can get tirzepatide from Lilly without insurance coverage for under $500/mo (a little less for the smaller doses): https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
I've been taking metformin off-label for weight loss, and it's been working well. I'm a little annoyed that I have to resort to off label stuff because I too have Cigna and I have not been successful at getting them to cover it.
I think it's more my employer's fault than anything else; fortunately metformin actually seems to be doing the job. They won't cover that either but even without insurance it's so cheap that it's not worth complaining about.
It was infuriating trying to get Wegovy via insurance. My doctor made three appeals, all denied. Out of pocket it wouldve been $1600/mo. Ive been getting semaglutide from compounding pharmacies for the last year and half for $149-$200. I have lost 97lbs, come back to running 30 miles a week after several major knee injuries made even a mile jog a multiday recovery effort. I absolutely get the regulatory stance but the name brands are absolutely unaffordable.
They’re down to hundreds a month, now, with a coupon.
I can’t say I disagree with insurance not being willing to pay those costs (apart from diabetes patients etc.). I bet a large part of the reason you can get the name brands cheaper now is because they did the math they’d make more that way than they could squeeze out of insurance companies.
Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves. I know many will disagree, of course, and there are other examples (say, lung cancer treatments) that are similar.
> Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves. I know many will disagree, of course, and there are other examples (say, lung cancer treatments) that are similar.
A fairly large portion of lung cancer patients didn't "do it to themselves" (about 20% and rising).
It remains to be seen how vaping impacts lung cancer,
I don't like the idea of finding reasons to penalize people for predicable life decisions that lead to treatment needs. Insurance companies have a lot of resources to make those predictions and if unshackled they aren't afraid of using them. Making construction workers, miners, or truck drivers pay more (or be denied outright) for insurance because their job has negative health effects would be bad for society.
I personally think that overeating is an addiction, not a moral failing, and is often the side effect of other mental illnesses.
I don't do this as much as others, but as someone who has suffered from Major Depressive Disorder [1], it can be really easy to eat your feelings away. When I've had really bad depressive episodes, I don't want to cook, I don't want a fucking salad, I mostly just want to feel bad about myself and I end up getting a huge meal at Taco Bell and sadly eating that. Doing that one day isn't that bad. Even doing that two days isn't that bad, but when you have a long extended depressive episode, it can easily become a pattern of weeks where you're getting unhealthy fast food every day.
I know a lot of people act like depression is a moral failing as well [2], but I personally don't think that, and it feels like obesity can be a symptom of major depression. If you ever watch "My 600lb Life", you'll see that a lot of the people on there are really going through serious mental disorders and/or dealing from PTSD from sexual abuse, and the overeating can come as a result from that.
I guess I just feel like it's reductive to say "they did this to themselves". The human brain and human psychology are complicated and irritating.
[1] Fortunately my current set of meds has really helped...medical science is pretty cool sometimes!
If losing the weight is good for them, isn’t it possible that it’s not just the humanitarian thing (which I know is a useless argument to make to the soulless ghouls who run insurance companies anyway) but also the economically right choice for them, to avoid paying for their worse health problems later?
> Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves.
The usual note for this is your insurance premiums were already going towards that, just indirectly by way of paying for heart disease treatments, diabetes management and other secondary effect of obesity.
But I'd also like to propose that "could just do themselves" is carrying a lot of assumptions that may not hold for any individual. A few years back now I started a medication with the side effect of appetite suppression, and I learned something about myself. To the best of my ability to recall, I had never before starting that medication not been hungry. "Full" to me was a physical sensation of being unable to fit more food physically in my stomach, but even when I was "full" I was hungry. Luckily for myself as a teen and young adult I had an incredibly high metabolism. I could eat 3 meals a day, 3-4 bowls of cereal and milk as an "afternoon snack" after school and some late evening snacks while watching TV and I still was in the "almost underweight" category. It was in this context, a time when I could go to a fast food restaurant and order two meals just for myself and stay well inside a healthy weight range that I learned to eat as an adult. Eventually though, the metabolism slowed down, and I started packing on weight but the hunger never subsided. Oh sure, as I got older the idea of and ability to eat an entire pizza by myself slowly went away, but hungry was always there, so I was still always eating and always eating more than I should have.
And I did manage to lose weight on my own many times. Through extremely strict self control and portion control, multiple times I managed to lose 25, 30 even 50lbs, one painstaking week at a time. Every day was strict tracking and weighing of everything I ate, and many days were hard battles of "I know I'm hungry, but I've already hit my limit for the day, so I can't eat more", and going to bed extremely hungry with the hope that when I woke the next morning that feeling would have subsided a little. And it worked each time, until inevitably something happened to disrupt the routines and habits built over the months. Maybe it was a set of family emergencies that had me eating on the run, unable to properly monitor everything and adding some "stress eating" on top of it. Maybe it was running into "the holidays" where calories are cheap and abundant even if you are still keeping track. And sometimes it was just being unable to sustain the high degree of willpower it required to keep myself on the schedule. And what takes month of carefully losing 1lb a week to do only takes a month or two to almost completely undo.
Hunger is probably the closest thing I've ever experienced to an addiction. I've thankfully never had to battle an addiction for anything else, but when it comes to hunger that eternal gnawing was ever present and the more weight I lost by sheer force of will, ever distracting. If the idea popped into my head after lunch that "I'd like a snack", it was an idea that would not leave my head until either I'd given in and gotten a snack or forced myself to not give in and waited until dinner. But that forcing meant dedicating ever larger parts of my mental energy away from my work and tasks at hand to just convincing myself to not go get the snack. And worse, when the time for dinner finally came, I was already feeling "hungry" on top of my normal hunger state, so often not eating the snack just meant delaying the excess consumption to dinner or having to continue that fight at dinner. If it sounds exhausting, in a lot of ways it was. But of course, like you said I can "just do" this. It's simple CI < CO math. And yet it never stuck, in part because unlike a lot of other unhealthy habits you can pick up in your life, you cant just not eat. Yes you can eat different things, or eat healthier, both of which can help with weight problems, but you can't stop eating. You have to eat, the hunger is always there and the same thing the hunger wants is the same thing you NEED to literally survive.
But that medication with its appetite suppressant effect was a game changer for me. For the first time in over 30 years, I actually felt full. Not physically stuffed, but "done eating". I could eat a small lunch and think to myself "that was good, and I feel satisfied". For the first time, when the idea of an afternoon snack popped into my head, I could remind myself that dinner was in 2 hours and I needed to make sure I had room to eat that so the snack could wait, and that would be the end of it, no fight necessary because the hunger wasn't gnawing at me the whole time. When I first started, I was concerned that the medication was giving me anxiety attacks because about 6PM every day, I'd start getting this feeling of my stomach tying itself in knots, and this sensation of "needing something". And after a week or so it occurred to me that what I was feeling for the first time in my life was the feeling of transitioning from having been full and satiated to being hungry again. I'd never not been hungry before. And I know that sounds insane, because it sounded insane to me then. Before taking the medication if you'd asked me if I know what it felt like to be full or to not be hungry I would tell you that I did. But apparently I didn't, and I didn't know that until I started that medication. And for the first time since the weight started coming on, the weight I've lost is staying lost.
So yes, you can "just" eat better and less and control your portions and not eat so much. But from personal experience, it's a hell of a lot easier to have that will power when your body is giving you the right signals and isn't constantly pushing you over the limits.
At the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, I lost about 60lbs, and it was a basic calorie counting thing. For me, it wasn't too hard; I was able to get used to the hunger and after about a month the feeling of wanting to eat all the time was somewhat tolerable.
In May of 2024, I started taking Pristiq, and one of the side effects is a huge increase in appetite. Like you said, I would feel "full" in the sense that my stomach wouldn't fit anymore matter, but I was always hungry and pretty much perpetually craving sweets. I would get a whole large pizza for lunch, a large meal at Popeyes for dinner, and chase it down with snack cakes, and I would still be "hungry" the entire time.
I managed to undo all the progress I had made with my dieting and a bit extra, and it was kind of weird. It's not really "hard" to know what to do. Obviously everyone knows to eat less processed food, focus more on protein and fiber, etc, but despite me "knowing" this, it was strangely hard to actually do it.
I'm very thankful that I found out about Metformin. I'm not diabetic and never have been, but it's prescribed off-label for weight loss, and according to my doctor it can be useful in the particular case of "canceling out the appetite-increase from medication", and to my surprise it worked shockingly well. I'm still not quite down to my diet weight yet, but I'm down about 30lbs in the four months I've been taking it, and I don't really feel hungry all the time. I still enjoy eating unhealthy food, but food is considerably more transactional now: I eat food because I need energy to survive. I budget about 200 calories lower than what my smartwatch says I burn during the day. It's much easier to treat food as a more utilitarian necessity.
If anyone here is in the unfortunately situation of not having their insurance covering GLP-1 medication, I highly recommend seeing if you can get your doctor to prescribe metformin. It's been out of patent for decades and cost on the order of ~$5 a month [2] and there are very few side effects [2], so it's a relatively low-risk experiment.
I was receiving compounded Semaglutide (Wegovy generic) from Victory Pharmacy, a brick & mortar compounding pharmacy, in Austin for $150/mo, then $200/mo, and finally I stopped when it reached $250/mo. I have SSDI and Medicare but it wasn't covered and it's still not covered for pharmacologically-induced obesity or weight gain. If I developed diabetes, then it would be covered as Ozempic (lower dose). I'm having to go without because of bureaucratic gatekeeping and discrimination and because of opportunists cash grabs by pharmaceutical companies' price gouging.
Why is obesity not considered a necessitating condition? It often carries the comorbidities you just mentioned. Should not exclude people just because they haven’t had these specific health problems (yet) but will eventually have them.
The problem is that if it's just about obesity, you have to prove that cheaper treatments such as diet and exercise didn't work. That's not impossible to do, but it's hard and annoying even for people who really were trying. My doctor told me that you basically have to keep a detailed journal of your weight loss efforts for months on end.
Are GLP-1s so much more effective that we should make an exception to the general principle, maximizing healthcare resources by providing the cheapest effective treatment? I kinda think so, but I have a conflict of interest, and I can understand why others might think that money is better spent elsewhere.
While I tend to agree, insurance companies don't see it that way. They need a doctor to indicate a necessity to treat a condition, as opposed to it being the easiest way to treat it.
For example, I have to take digestive enzymes to digest my food (pancreatic insufficiency). For someone with an unusually high metabolism, they would also give them a leg up on gaining weight, even though there are other approaches to gaining that weight. However in many cases, the insurance company wouldn't cover their prescription when they will mine.
As always it’s insurance nonsense. If incentives were aligned insurance companies would be lining up out the door to give this to obese people because they (the insurance companies) would eventually be on the hook for paying for the care of the conditions you just mentioned. It is very well demonstrated in literature that obese people have a much higher occurrence of these conditions than non obese people.
But the system is not set up with aligned incentives
I think you would be hard-pressed to find any human who has been 100 pounds overweight for any amount of time that doesn't have an obesity-related comorbidity.
Hypertension, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, etc are all common in the general population and exacerbated or even caused by the physical and lifestyle conditions that beget obesity.
I was 347lbs at the time. Wasnt a diabetic (nor pre-diabetic) no heart disease, blood pressure or really anything other than my weight. Prior to then Id had two massive bouts of weight loss at 50-100lbs so I know what it takes. Id tried but this last time without meds was extremely hard. You cant do much in the way of productive exercise when both your shoulders need replacement at 30 and between two knees have an ACL tear and two MCL tears. To top it off I had wildly out of whack hormones.
What I struggle with is developers wanting to leave platforms like Datadog for open source equivalents that need to be self-hosted.
I hear all of the cost savings benefit, but I never see the team factoring in their own time (and others time) needed to set up and maintain these systems reliably long term.
Something IC’s at company often struggle to understand is the reason why companies often prefer to buy managed solutions even when “free” alternatives exist (read: the free alternatives are also expensive, just a different type of cost)
My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.
When you’re in the middle of a production down event and your whole team is diagnosing the issue, and your log server is unresponsive, who do you contact for support?
No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers.
See the problem?
Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this path for our company, but at least on our team we just don’t have enough (redundant) expertise to deploy and manage these systems. We’d have to hire an extra FTE.
If you’re having a correlated outage like that, then it’s likely you fix the prod issue before the cloud engineers at some giant cloud company even respond to an internal escalation much less fixes an issue. More than likely your prod issue is causing the logging problem.
If you mean you are experiencing two totally unrelated issues at the same time, then I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely.
Half of $30k/mo trivially pays for an engineer you hire to only manage such a cluster for you and just works an hour a week unless a pager goes off if you truly need that level of peace of mind. If you’re hiring for such a position I have a few rock star level folks who would love such a job.
The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-prem infrastructure get really strange to me. I could come up with the same sort of scenarios for cloud based SaaS infrastructure just as easily.
> I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely.
In my experience the systems/tools needed to debug production issues are often only used when they’re needed.
Which now means you need health and uptime monitoring on your log server since without that, it might break randomly and no one notices until you need it.
> The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-prem infrastructure get really strange to me
It really comes down to the people and whether you have the expertise on the team. And whether the team can realistically manage the system long term. It’s typically safer to spend more money for the managed service.
100% agree. If I am using a cloud log provider I wouldn't expect them to solve my logging issue(s) as fast as I need, more importantly I have no real way to put more resources on that fix.
More importantly, with a third party service I'd be very surprised if both went down at the same time and it wasn't a further upstream issue like AWS. If its my own logging service and it went down during a prod outage, I likely didn't properly isolate my logging service in the first place.
> Half of $30k/mo trivially pays for an engineer you hire to only manage such a cluster for you and just works an hour a week unless a pager goes off if you truly need that level of peace of mind. If you’re hiring for such a position I have a few rock star level folks who would love such a job.
Yep, absolutely. I’ve come up with the term “man on the mountain” for such positions.
It’s when one person is exceedingly talented at exactly one thing - but isn’t exactly a typical employee who is good or interested in doing much else other than keeping that one thing online and reliable.
Their job is to go live on their mountain for weeks or months at a time without so much as doing anything other than keeping their phone on and answering it within the first couple rings regardless of when called. If they are good at their job you likely don’t even need to call - they already know it’s broken before you do.
I’ve employed a few such folks over my career. They tend to be the “alternative” style candidate - exceptional people with exceptional flaws. They love the simple tradeoff.
That said of course this is ignoring bus factor and overly simplifying things. Typically this is one deep subject level matter expert who sits off on the side of a small team, so there is at least one “understudy” hanging around as well.
I still advocate for such positions when they make sense though. I would much rather in-house my own “insurance” vs overpay some giant company for each month only to find out the insurance didn’t exist when I needed to make a claim. It’s certainly more risk to my career - but I have very strong feelings that as a manager or executive my job is NOT to cover my own ass because it’s easier.
The old argument for being locked in to legacy software costing 6-8 figures a year was that you had no choice. Now you have a choice! Clearly that is better, and everyone should evaluate that choice on its merits, and the stock market sees that people are voting with their dollars. If your whole sales pitch is "good luck when it breaks!" you might want to reevaluate your business model.
The stock market is trying to predict that people will vote with their dollars in the future. I’m not quite sure people are really replacing enterprise Saas at large corporations yet. It’s more of a projection.
Fair, however at some point of a companies size/spending the complexity of integrating with a SaaS becomes as large as the one to run your own open source tool.
Beyond that, and Im aware this is very much application/company dependent, theres plenty of SaaS companies that offer horrendous or no support no matter what you pay. We used to use splunk for monitoring and logging. Paid a ton of money because we were handling financial data and needed tracibility and reliability. We constantly had to put out fires that were caused by their unreliable platform. It was not a good experience.
Ultimately, we jumped ship to Prometheus. We pay a fraction of the price and spent less time on it.
The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot. They do go down and don't work and often times there's simply nothing you can do. The worst offenders will seize upon the moment and force you to upgrade a support plan before they will even talk to you, even if the issue is their own making.
Unless you're a huge customer and already paying them tons of money, expect to receive no support. Your only line of defense if something happens and you're not a whale is that some whale is upset and they actually have their people working on the problem. If you're a small company, startup, or even mid-size, good luck on getting them to care. You'll probably be sent a survey when you don't renew and may eventually be a quotient in their risk calculus at some point in the distant future, but only if you represent a meaningful mass of customers they lost.
> The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot.
Tremendous opportunity announcement!
If you are building a dev-focused SaaS, treat your support team exactly as they are: a key part of the product. Just like docs or developer experience, the support experience is critical.
Trouble is, it's hard to quantify the negative experience, though tracking word of mouth referrals or NPS scores can try.
Do they actually not understand that? They might just be fine with a system that makes them more useful.
How do you calculate the time spent on an internal tool like this, actually? (I’ve never been in management). Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime, maybe some internal tool maintenance can be fit in there? I mean it obviously isn’t fully “free” but is also shouldn’t be “billed” at their full salary, right?
> How do you calculate the time spent on an internal tool like this, actually?
In broad strokes there's two ways. You can count it as an operational expense, or you can count it as capital (this takes more work to do but can have some advantages). If you count it as operations, it's just a big red pit you're throwing money into that you hope is offsetting a larger operational cost somewhere (but this can be hard to quantify). If you count it as capital, you're basically storing all of those hours as an "asset" which then loses value over time (it's kind of like the charge in a battery). The problem is you have to be able to show that this internal tool would, in the case of an acquisition or liquidation, be valued by the new owner at the value you're setting it at.
The problem there being that people are even more hesitant to trust somebody else's internal tool than they are to trust their own internal tool, so I've seen multiple managers think "I sunk a million dollars into this so it must be worth something" but in fact they were just running a jobs program for their team.
> Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime
What? My team wouldn't have any downtime even if we had 10x the amount of people.
If you work at a company where you have times where you don't have work to do, you should polish your resume because it means the company will go under.
Doing work is easy, not doing work is hard. It's trivial for any engineer to find stuff to do. The trick is doing the right stuff. Most software is bad and clunky, most requirements are wrong, and most of your customers, at best, tolerate your product.
I think most software companies need to be doing less. Deleting code, refining, and making their product genuinely useful as opposed to "able to technically contort to client needs".
>the free alternatives are also expensive, just a different type of cost
Not if you hire reasonably competent people. These days for vast majority of FOSS services all you need is an ability to spin up a VPS and run a number of simple Docker/Podman Compose commands, it can't be that hard.
Only if your company already is lacking in the domain of competence of your engineers. If that is the case, either you have bigger problems to worry about, or your product probably isn't impressive enough to begin with to warrant an addition of complex, enterprise-grade SaaS tooling.
I'm sorry but the amount of companies that need something like DataDog is quite small compared to their 30,000+ customer count. Maybe 5,000 companies on Earth truly need something like DataDog, 80% of their customers would be perfectly fine with a self hosted instance of grafana.
Using an open source self hosted solution should be the industry standard, encouraged position, by default. Our industry does not gain overall from using DataDog but only from truly open source solutions that utilized AGPL licenses that allows everyone to move forward together + share lessons together + contribute together toward a common goal of better observability.
Why are we acting like it's hard to set up? This isn't the 1990s, it's 2026. Tooling has gotten quite good over the last decade.
Also corporations stupidly spend money all the time, they over spend too. I recently left a company that was paying SalesForce $10mil a year in licenses when only 8 people in the entire 3,000 person company was using it. I doubt that was the only single instance across our industry too. There is a massive amount of waste and graft in enterprise sales.
I honestly doubt it if you replaced grafana for 10,000 DataDog customers they would notice the difference.
Because the current generation of “full stack” engineers are great at spinning up react apps, but struggle with infrastructure and systems management. It’s really not any more complicated than that.
On a typical 8 person engineering team, maybe 1 or 2 people will know how to deploy anything to the cloud if you’re lucky.
Expertise isn't there because people are outsourcing that sort of work to companies. I didn't know how to do much of anything, until I had to do it for work. Then learning everything became way easier.
Surely all the engineers that existed 20 years ago haven’t simply retired? At the time if you told someone you couldn’t set up your own server they’d ask you what kind of engineer you are then?
> Surely all the engineers that existed 20 years ago haven’t simply retired?
20 years ago we had 5 times fewer engineers. And most of those have moved into management, other fields, retired, work calm jobs for the government or boring companies, etc.
How many 40+ year old engineers do you see, especially when compared to 20-30 year old engineers?
My experience matches that of cj. In fact, if you do mention anything outside the walled garden, you'll get weird looks and someone will ask "Why?" like you are going down a dangerous path.
Come to think of it, they are right. Why take all this ownership when it's the company that is going to pay for all of this and you can push these responsibilities to some third-party overseas.
Tangent: what is the appeal of the “no capitalization” writing style? I never know what message the author is intending to convey when I see all lower case.
Normally I can ignore it, but the font on this blog makes it hard to distinguish where sentences start and end (the period is very small and faint).
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
I think it might be adults ignoring established grammar rules to make a statement about how they identify a part of a group of AI evangelists.
Kind of like how teenagers do nonsensical things like where thick heavy clothing regardless of the weather to indicate how much of a badass them and their other badass coat wearing friends are.
To normal humans, they look ridiculous, but they think they're cool and they're not harming anyone so I just leave them to it.
make a statement about how they identify a part of a group
That’s what it is. A shibboleth. They’re broadcasting group affiliation. The fact that it grates on the outgroup is intentional. If it wasn’t costly to adopt it wouldn’t be as honest of a signal.
On a scale from the purest, not lifting a finger anymore than to strike a keyboard, of virtue signaling to putting one's money where their mouth is this shibboleth is about as costly as the tidal zone is dry land.
You convey tone through word choice and sentence structure - trying to convey tone through casing or other means is unnecessary and often just jarring.
Like look at the sentence "it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible." The casing actually conflicts with the tone of the sentence. It's not written like a casual text - if the sentence was "ppl talking about this are crazy" then sure, the casing would match the tone. But the stodgy sentence structure and use of more precise vocabulary like "veered" indicates that more effort has gone into this than the casing suggests.
Fair play if the author just wants to have a style like this. It's his prerogative to do so, just as anyone can choose to communicate exclusively in leetspeak, or use all caps everywhere, or write everything like script dialogue, whatever. Or if it's a tool to signal that he's part of an in-group with certain people who do the same, great. But he is sacrificing readability by ignoring conventions.
That's politicians and media influencers of all ages, not the general public
The new generation of tiktok / podcast "independent journalists" is a serious issue / case of what you describe. They are many doing zero journalism and repeating propaganda, some paid by countries like Russia (i.e. Tim Pool and that whole crew that got caught and never face consequences)
You mention the technical aspect (readability) and others have suggested the aesthetic, but you could also look at it as a form of rhetoric. I'm not sure it's really effective because it sort of grates on the ear for anyone over 35, but maybe there's a point in distinguishing itself from AI sloptext.
Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style but mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes, observations), while for older generations it was almost always associated with a modernist aesthetic and thus appeared primarily in functional or environmental text (restaurant menus, signage, your business card, bloomingdales, etc.). It may be interesting to note that the inverse ALL CAPS style conveyed modernity in the last tech revolution (the evolution of the Microsoft logo, for example).
I was using all lowercase as my default for internet comments (and personal journal entries) for at least a solid decade, starting from some point in the 90s. I saw it as a way to take a step back from being pretentious.
I eventually ran into so much resistance and hate about it that I decided conforming to writing in a way that people aren't actively hostile to was a better approach to communicating my thoughts than getting hung up on an aesthetic choice.
Having started out as a counterculture type, that will always be in my blood, but I've relearned this lesson over and over again in many situations-- it's usually better to focus on clear communication and getting things done unless your non-standard format is a critical part of whatever message you're trying to send at the moment.
I'm a big fan of counter culture and so on, but generally the point of text is to be read and using all lower case just makes it harder for all your readers, which seems like the worst form of arrogance.
> [No-caps text] sort of grates on the ear for anyone over 35 [...] Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style but mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes, observations)
I (a millenial) carried over the no-caps style from IRC (where IME it was and remains nearly universal) to ICQ to $CURRENT_IM_NETWORK, so for me TFA reads like a chat log (except I guess for the period at the end of each paragraph, that shouldn’t be there). Funnily enough, people older than me who started IMing later than me don’t usually follow this style—I suspect automatic capitalization on mobile phones is to blame.
> Additionally, The Chicago Manual of Style, which prescribes favoring non-standard capitalization of names in accordance with the bearer's strongly stated preference, notes "E. E. Cummings can be safely capitalized; it was one of his publishers, not he himself, who lowercased his name."[65]
I used not to capitalize "I" in my own writing, because it seemed a bit silly to do that, even though making it more distinct visually seems okay now, some years later.
At the same time, in my language (Latvian) you/yours should also get capitalized in polite text corespondence, like formal letters and such. Odd.
Someone at some point styled themselves as a new E.E. Cummings, and somehow this became a style. The article features inconsistent capitalization for proper names alongside capitalized initialisms, proving there is some recognition of the utility of capitalization.
Ultimately, the author forces an unnecessary cognitive burden on the reader by removing a simple form of navigation; in that regard, it feels like a form of disrespect.
I’ve seen it a lot in ‘90’s hacker / net adjacent cultures. It always reads as gen-x/elderly tech millennial to me - specifically post 1993 net culture but prior to mass adoption of autocorrect.
It was the norm on irc/icq/aim chats but also, later, as the house style for blogs like hackaday.
Now I read it as one would an hear an accent (such as a New England Maritime accent) that low-key signifies this person has been around the block.
Even more recently is a minor signifier that this text was less likely generated by llm.
the vibe I get is someone who can't put in the effort to make my job reading easier (i.e. hard to find sentence breaks)
It is on a human seeing level, harder to parse. If they don't want to use proper grammar and punctuation, it reflects on their seriousness and how serious I should take their writing (not at all because I'm not going to read difficult to parse text) The same goes for choosing bad fonts or colors that don't contrast enough
I think I like it generally, maybe not in this specific case, but I'm not sure why it appeals to me.
Over the last 5 years or so I've been working on making my writing more direct. Less "five dollar words" and complex sentences. My natural voice is... prolix.
But great prose from great authors can compress a lot of meaning without any of that stuff. They can show restraint.
If I had to guess, no capitalization looks visually unassuming and off-the-cuff. Humble. Maybe it deflects some criticism, maybe it just helps with visual recognition that a piece of writing is more of a text message than an essay, so don't think too hard about it.
No idea, but it's something I've been thinking about ever since my parents dug out an old school journal from when I was younger and they were laughing about the stuff I wrote in there... The first 50 pages or so were full of laughably simple phrases like, "played with sand" or "i like computers".
Later in the journal my writing "improved". Instead I might write, "Today I played in the sandpit with my friends."
I vaguely remember my teacher telling me I needed to write in full sentences, uses the correct punctuation, etc. That was the point of these journals – to learn how to write.
But looking back on it I started to question if I actually learnt how to write? Or did I just learn how to write how I was expected to?
If I understood what I was saying from the start and I was communicating that message in fewer words and with less complexity, was it wrong? And if so wrong in what sense?
You see this with kids generally when they learn to speak. Kids speak very directly. They first learn how to functionally communicate, then how to communicate in a socially acceptable way, using more more words.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think the fact you can drop capitals and communicate just as effectively is kinda interesting. If it wasn't for how we are taught to write, perhaps the better question to ask here is why there are even two types of every letter?
I've already written an extension that filters these comments intelligently. (E.g., quotes are ignored but if the rest of the body is all lowercase it is collapsed.)
I plan to at some point, it's part of a bigger extension I created for myself to filter out minor annoyances and I'd have to strip out/modify things other people probably wouldn't want (such as filtering of "new age" TLDs like ".pizza" and whatnot).
What’s weird though is that modern OSes often auto-capitalize the first letter of a sentence, so it actually takes more effort to deliberately type in all-lowercase.
my reasoning is that i don’t want identifiable markers for what device im writing from. so all auto-* (capitalization, correct, etc.) features are disabled so that i have raw input
Being part of the minority that disables those things (and then admitting to it in public) provides a lot more analytical signal than you’re aware of. That’s a remarkably poor reason to disrespect your readers.
i don't care about the 'analytical signal'. the purpose is people can't tell if im writing a (discord, slack, etc.) message from my phone or laptop or desktop, and it works for that
You know how people used to wear the black turtleneck to channel Steve Jobs? This is how they channel Sam Altman (who also does this). It's just an affectation saying "I'm with Sam". There's not much more to it.
For "something that is published" (which includes a comment like this) I clearly dislike it too, but for chatting / texting, I realize that I often use it more than my interlocutors, and I'm not sure why. There's a part of lazyness I guess, but also a vague sense of "conveying the impression of a never ending stream of communication", which is closer in my mind to the essence of the chat medium. In French, there is also the additional layer of "using the accents or not".
First time I've seen it. It will be interesting to see if that trends. I can think of at least one previous case where internet writing style overturned centuries of english conventions: we used to put a double space after each period. The web killed that due to double spaces requiring extra work ( , etc), and at this point I think word processors now follow the convention.
It's always useful to check oneself and know that languages are constantly evolving, and that's A Good Thing.
The web had little to do with APA’s decision to adopt one space as the standard. It was desktop fonts in the mid-eighties. Two spaces emerged as a standard when fonts were monospaced - they were a readability hack. When proportional fonts started to be introduced, two spaces began to look visually odd. That oddness was especially apparent in groups of sentences like.
“It’s hard to learn how to spell. It takes practice, patience and a lot of dedication.”
^ In a proportional font the difference in width between ‘ll’ and ‘ ‘ is noticeable. In a monotypes font, two spaces after a period provide a visual cue that that space is different.
I think this is why this all lowercase style of writing pisses me off so much. Readability used to be important enough to create controversy - nobody cares anymore. But, I didn’t care enough to read the whole article so maybe I missed something.
> First time I've seen it. It will be interesting to see if that trends.
It's not a new trend, I'm surprised you never noticed it. It dates back to at least a decade. It's mostly used to signal informal/hipster speak, i.e. you're writing as you would type in a chat window (or Twitter), without care for punctuation or syntax.
It already trends among a certain generation of people.
I hate it, needless to say. Anything that impedes my reading of mid/long form text is unwelcome.
It certainly invokes a innate sense of wrongness to me, but I encourage you (and myself) to accept the natural evolution of language and not become the angry old person on your lawn yelling about dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the kids say today.
> to accept the natural evolution of language and not become the angry old person on your lawn yelling about dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the kids say today.
I think "accept everything new" is as closed-minded as staunchly fighting every change.
The genuinely open-minded thing to do is accept that some changes are for the worse, some for the better, think critically about the "why", and pick your battles.
i don't know this author but ian bremner does this. it's as if he's conveying what he believes are serious and important thoughts in an unserious and casual way, to make it appear as if the thoughts - which again he probably thinks are brilliant - just come quickly and naturally. it comes across as performative though again not making claims against this author. and yes i am not using sentence case here, but this is not an essay.
Ironically, it would take a lot of effort for me to type without capitalization and also undo capitalization auto-correct. It would not come quickly nor naturally.
They may not type it that way, you can select all and lower case all with a few keystrokes in vim. Should this be the case, it lends itself more to the performative nature of the style over clear communication
It's the equivalent of TikTokers who provide hot takes while eating food. It's done to feign being superior and aloof, e.g. "This is so easy to understand and so beneath my intellect, I can tell you about it will I eat these crackers"
George: To cover my nervousness I started eating an apple, because I think if they hear you chewing on the other end of the phone, it makes you sound casual.
IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND THAT ALL CAPS IS SHOUTY, then it is easy to follow that all lower is a whisper, informal, casual way to talk. there are people who dislike all caps, i do too. i feel even capitalizing the first part of nouns and such grammar is shouty. yup. different people have different sensitivities for different things. i always liked all lower, also picked it from python_programming for a decade. so i am happy for this trend.
It mildly amuses and fascinates me, because for the last decade Gladwellians and business gurus have extolled the virtues of modern English as a flat, hierarchy-less language in comparison to Japanese, Korean, etc. which causes plane crashes. And yet here we see an overwhelming desire to create hierarchy in English, so the author can pretend to be more casual and ordinary.
It’s weird being literate enough in a language now without a bicameral script (or spaces). When I was younger, I thought this stuff wasn’t so important, but then when you learn a new language, you are trying to figure out what a “robert” is, to then be told “oh, it’s just a name”—which is obvious if know standard `en-Latn` conventions.
Altman/Brockman did it a lot and it became popular. I don't remember if it is true or "Malcolm Gladwell" true, but in various stories all NBA players started wearing baggy shorts because Michael Jordan did for one reason or another, like wearing his college shorts under them.
My assumption was that it's a way to convey it was written by a human because it would be hard to get an AI to write in all lowercase (which it actually isn't).
I was just this morning reading one of those navel-gazing moltbook posts where the agent describes their "soul.md", and one of its few instructions was all-lowercase (which it was doing).
That early sentence "i’ll be vulnerable here (screenshots or it didn't happen) and share exactly what i've actually set up:" reads pretty clawdbot to me.
as perfect text became an indicator for AI generated content, people intentionally make mistakes (capitalization) to make their text appear more human; and its also faster
I have chatted with someone else, and they pointed me to a blog post (will attach if I can find).
The general idea is deliberately doing something triggering some people and if the person you're interacting with is triggered by what you're doing, they are not worthy of your attention because of their ignorance to see what you're doing beyond the form of the thing you're doing.
While I respect the idea, I find it somewhat flawed, to be honest.
We are not old, there is a reason the generation is said (in stats and polls) to be less professional than prior generations when entering the workforce
It's not about generations, it's about professionalism. This generation, on average, decided that professionalism is not their thing, at least that is the prevailing sentiment.
People who don't adhere to professional standards find fewer job opportunities and lower pay. The market will work things out
I remember hearing that people used it as a way to signal that they were too busy, too on the go, too important to use proper punctuation..it was an obnoxious c suite trend as long as I can remember. Like you're always trying to signal that you were doing all of your comms from your cell phone between meetings/travelling. Given this article's tone and content I would say that what the author is trying to emulate or convey , maybe subconciously.
Interesting. I am a millennial and I never did this, nor did I have any friends that did. But I know m nephews deliberately turn off the auto edit in there iphones.
Occasionally in YC founder circles a new founder will raise a bunch of money and then ask something like "What's the best way to invest all the money our company just raised?"
The responses are always along the lines of "Your startup is already risky. Don't innovate in areas of your business where the status quo is known to work. Innovate your product + technology, don't be innovative with your company's finances, HR, etc"
That advice always stuck with me. It just makes a lot of sense to do things in the most boring way possible, except where it matters (your competitive advantage <-- that's where you innovate, that's where you set yourself apart)
Running a startup is distracting enough. Doing things non-standard just adds to the list of distractions that you don't need as a founder.
YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged their companies to use products and services from other companies in their portfolio.
The simplest explanation is that this is a mostly symbolic move: They want to show that the stable coin and crypto companies they invest in are actually trusted by YC. It starts to look hypocritical if an investor is funding crypto companies and praising them as important breakthroughs, but not actually using them where it’s important.
I think you are confused. I don’t care about the announcement, I’m specifically addressing a point from my parent comment, which I quoted. Again, this time with emphasis:
> YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged (…)
“Encouraging” means advising, advocating for, not “allowing as an option”. I don’t know if YC really does that, but that’s the conversation. It’s about the claim made in a comment, not the submission.
Re-read what I wrote: The "encouraged" was about past use of other products, to provide context. I wasn't claiming they encouraged the use of stablecoins. I was adding historical context to the move.
I mean it’s obvious that successful businesses are only a side effect of what the point is - a successful exit. And if one big success can be strongarmed to help other ventures exit successfully, they’ll do it.
Would you consider it risky for a startup to use its own product?
I would consider that a risk decreaser, because the loop creates a stronger fit signal.
Even more powerful, since across a cohort the encouragement is N-way, or really N^2-way, it actually lowers risk on average the more startups act as each others’ early customers.
And co-adopters benefit from getting unusually responsive suppliers with a strong indirect stake in mutual success.
Encourage isnt a requirement. Adopt only if it makes sense.
From the POV of YC, they don't mind too much if it is a bit risky for any given individual company if it increases the legitimacy and stability of their portfolio as a whole.
Seigniorage accrues to private entities instead of the state, enriching the owners of those private entities rather than everyone in the state that issues the currency.
That’s also a downside: When your funds can be transferred away by anyone who happens to acquire the key without triggering any fraud prevention or additional verification checks, losing your entire bank account at 4AM Sunday morning becomes much easier.
In addition to the security issues, they would have to deal with non-negligible transaction costs every time they wanted to convert it to actual money so that they could purchase something. If they were using it as an investment, they had to deal with the opportunity cost of underperforming $SPY.
It really comes down to the burglar's expectations. If most crypto holders used geographically separated multi-sig, these attacks wouldn't be worth the effort anymore.
It’s the same logic as iPhones bricking themselves after being stolen. Even if your specific phone isn't an iPhone, the fact that most phones are now useless to thieves discourages the crime across the board.
Our knowledge is constantly expanding, allowing us to build things differently than we used to. Modern cryptography, which makes things like multi-sig possible, is only a few decades old; it didn't even exist when the current banking industry was being established.
This isn’t just a problem in the Netherlands or a thing of the past. 2025 actually saw the highest number of attacks ever recorded [0].
There are ways to prevent this. Like using multi-sig with geographical separation (so you can't move funds alone) or setting up forced time-delays. Ultimately, being your own bank is a massive responsibility, and I think too many people take that reality too lightly.
No, there's not. There are rarely good reasons behind what banks do because these are organizations that are run by mediocre people who are not incentivized to not suck. They don't care at all about anything. This "fraud prevention" thing only gets in my way and doesn't prevent the less sophisticated people from sending their money to India.
> If your bank doesn't want to raise the limits, there's probably good reasons behind that.
Why would their having reasons make me feel better when my payments don't go through? We complain when Apple plays nanny and makes their product a walled garden. How is a bank different? They should be doing their job without causing inconvenience for me.
It typically doesn't, it just implements compliance with laws and regulations in your jurisdiction.
Withdrawal and transaction limits are commonly such a thing, politicians get hounded because some people were frauded out of their monies and they feel a need to show that they're doing something about it.
Banking is very international, you can put your money in some other jurisdiction if you'd like to. Many transnational banks are connected to the usual payment providers, you can probably figure something out if you put your mind to it. One way to do it is to start a company, business accounts at banks generally have different limits and then you pay a lawyer or bean counter to clear how to do the books and pay appropriate taxes.
I can only really use Canadian banks because that's what Interac, Canadian system for sending money by email works with. The bank does decide what I can pay for because it limits the amount of money I can spend via Apple Pay (like $500), and in general (like $1000). You need to bring your physical card and call them to temporarily increase the limit to buy anything expensive.
Web searching a bit seems to say that e.g. tourists can use their foreign issued cards and typically carry their issuers' limits with them, unless the merchant has their own limits for some reason.
Putting stricter limits on intermediate devices like pocket computers doesn't seem very tyrannical to me. Interac's web site says the typical default limit would be 2-3000 CAD, i.e. 12-1800 euros or so, unless you have a small business account, then it's more like 25000 CAD.
If you often find yourself spending thousands of CAD on a whim, perhaps it would be a good idea to open accounts with a bank that is tailored to people with a lot of money. I'm sure there are some available in Canada.
Yeah all of that sounds way more convenient than your grandma irrecoverably losing her life savings because somebody kid fished her for her crypto authentication.
You can redeem stablecoins in blocks of a million if you are a registered bank. This is the only way to redeem them. Otherwise you can only trade them.
No, it's not. It's not possible to come to the US soldiers with a bunch of US dollars and some demands and get what's demanded in return for the dollars.
Only trust of the other market participants backs the US dollar.
It's been like 3 years since Silicon Valley Bank got a bailout because a bunch of startups put their money in a bank that wasn't guarded against economist instability.
It does seem ironic that a startup would immediately pivot to devoting some of its precious time and attention to becoming a hedge fund just as they've got the funding for their 'startup idea'. On the other hand, any big whack of cash should have an optimisation plan, lest it be wasted. Does YC provide templates?
Oversimplifying:
X = full amount of raised capital
Y = expected spend over 12 months
Z = $ value of percentage contingency for 12 months
Y+Z goes into use-it-however-and-whenever-you-want account (likely low to no interest)
X - (Y+Z) goes into a 12 month higher interest account, ideally staying untouched until maturity (stake the stablecoins in this context)
I'm skeptical of crpyto holding companies though, explicitly because of the lack of regulation. The likes of BlockFi, Celsius, and FTX gives me the cold sweats. Regulation in the US is notoriously lacking even in well established finance and banking, never mind the crypto 'industry' which was always high-percentage grifters, and now the Epstein files has added 'morally corrupt' tags to more of them.
Recipe for sleepless nights, which is already a problem for a startup founders isn't it?
The point is, treasury accounts are not designed to manage crypto. So that's another layer of money management that startups have to deal with, when they could simply ignore it using a treasury account.
But of course, YC being YC will fund another startup which will help other startups manage their stablecoin portfolios...
Also note that in most jurisdictions, you cannot pay employees with crypto, stable coins or not. Nor can you pay suppliers. Or AWS/GCP/Azure.
This is literally a textbook example of, in YC's words, a solution in search of a problem.
I agree, if you just want to not "waste" the cash while it's sitting, keep it very simple with something like T bills or, if you don't need it immediately, maybe a total market fund.
This also makes sense from the investors point of view, they invested in your company to receive growth from your product/business, not from random stocks you bought with it.
That said, I think there is a distinction between trying to be innovative across the company (ex. Gitlab's open employee handbook, CEO shadows, etc.) which is arguably not a bad thing at all, and this specific case of trying to actively invest company funds. In some cases, a more innovative way of doing things may actually be simpler and less complex than the default way for bigger companies, it just depends on the exact scenario.
> if you don't need it immediately, maybe a total market fund
That strikes me as unwise. If there’s a sharp downturn in the total market, that’s precisely when you might need to call upon otherwise unneeded cash reserves.
Not all stablecoins are intended as investments. For many it's just a way to send money internationally without dealing with the SWIFT system, waiting periods, banks losing payments etc.
Yeah but after a series of Big Prints we finally managed to make an inflation spike, a run on Silicon Valley Bank, the US President openly contemplating dollar devaluation, "Sell America trade" working for the first time in 50 years, the marginal buyer of treasuries eliminating the last dove on the path to war, and precious metals whipping around like meme stocks. "Park the money in a USD money market at SVB" used to be not just OK, but universally agreed to be obviously OK, which had value of its own. Now it's just OK. Probably. I hope.
Will we see some pivots into bullshit crypto holding companies? Sure, but VC returns are notoriously lottery-ticket distributed and 0 is 0 however you get there. I'd hazard a bet that the number of otherwise-successful companies who die due to this policy rounds to 0, while the probability of an inflationary wrecking ball that wipes out an entire batch of otherwise promising startups in the absence of such a policy is... north of zero.
To be clear, I don't think this is due to a special property of crypto, just the flexibility to get away from USD in case of emergency.
EDIT: maybe 24/7 trading could be an argument. It would be a meme for the ages if a raft of startups survived because they were up hustling and grinding at 2AM when the boats hit the Taiwan Strait.
You’re describing an event that would wipe out the US economy and trying to protect against that with stable coins, or at least that’s the impression I’m getting.
If the US falls apart, your startup will too. No matter how well preserved your cash reserves are.
The US going to war or entering hyperinflation is probably at the bottom of most founders lists of existential worries. Not a risk to mitigate (it’s a risk you need to accept since there’s nothing you can do - worrying about it won’t help)
Also, worth mentioning that no one lost money with SVB’s collapse. One might argue it was an incredibly smart decision for YC to recommend people bank at SVB since if SVB goes under, virtually all LP’s and everyone in the VC community will go under too (too big to fail, so they won’t, or if they do, everyone else fails too — kind of like AWS us-east-1)
Nah, hedging war is a meme, but I labeled it as such.
Startups that wanted to treasury in BTC or GLD, were told no, and were vindicated in hindsight are not a meme. Startups that were force-fed 10% inflation and a collapsing bank aren't a meme. That happened.
You can complain that it's irrational to hedge against these things which have been happening an awful lot lately, but you aren't the one who gets to decide. If an enterprising alternative VC is peeling away good founders by being flexible on this point, YC's option is to compete or let the deals go.
is this the right comparison? us-east-1 goes down a lot to an extent because everything goes down at the same time, rather than as a collective need to stay up. its one of the worst AWS regions if what you care about is stability and up time. too big to fail does not add extra up time guarantees to that region
No one might have lost their money with the collapse of the banks but with the large amount of new money printed, the value of each dollar will continue to erode.
Inflation and hyper-inflation can wipe out debts with future money that's cheaper more easily in some ways. I forget where I had read or learned more about this in other countries that had experienced it.
The fear is the loss of safe guards and independence of the Federal Reserve. Trump is actively trying to remove safe guards and independence that would allow the Federal Reserve to counteract anything like this. If for instance Trump wants to hold interest rates low regardless of what anyone is telling him, he wants that power[0][1].
The upcoming decision by the Supreme Court on case Trump v. Cook is about this very issue[2]
None. As per the Federal Reserve Act it is an independent agency not under any branch of government.
Trump is trying to change that through judicial means, rather than purusing a legislative one. Dubious at best, but the Supreme Court as of late has not been reliable in upholding important precedent.
Then again, to play devils advocate, doing all the other stuff in a new way might also help your company break out of the cycle that typically impacts startups. It may be that the other things you do apart from your product are what make it successful.
I mean if you have a significant chunk of free cash sitting around there's almost no reason not to put a portion of it in 3-6 month Treasuries or something.
The return won't be much but it's better than letting the cash sit idle and evaporate due to inflation
In a competitive banking landscape the bank would do it for you, then just give you a competitive interest rate on your account. Is that not present in the US?
The question is why you'd use money you raised for anything but the reason you raised it. You've probably raised a shit ton more than I have, but hear me out - when one raises, there's generally a timeline of fund deployment from the startup's UoF, right? That's how it was done in my case - we tell the investor what we need, why we need it, and when we need it, etc. And then if the investor agrees to invest, it's not just a lump sum sitting in the bank - a good amount of that money gets deployed to help the startup fulfill its mission.
I get that if you're running super lean and you've raised enough to run lean for a while and use cash when you need to, but at the same time why raise more than you have need for?
I've seen VC's who care a lot about understanding how their companies are going to spend the money. And other VC's who don't even ask the question, or accept generalities like "hiring, scaling" with equally loose timelines.
Depends on the funding vehicle. If you're on a SAFE, and still a going concern, then I think returning investor funds would trigger a priced round and you'd end up converting at a (hopefully) high valuation
This comment really shows how far the SV VC culture still is from running profitable businesses with solid fundamentals. No surprise that I am hearing this on the same website where people come to act like hard-done-by factory workers whenever [incredibly bloated and dysfunctional FAANG] lays people off after facing the real-world financial realities.
For the love of God, no. Do not do that. The cycle begins when you take the money. How there are still people here that don’t get this, I don’t understand.
That chart is telling about the durability of this business, but do we actually know the precise point at which YCombinator as an entity sold out?
For instance, I know Coinbase may be down -22% from the IPO price, but that doesn't mean YCombinator lost money nor made very little. If they, for instance, sold off during the first few days of the IPO they would have made out quite well.
There's also the whole question of how much money did YCombinator put in vs what they got out.
Without knowing this, about all the chart tells me is YCombinator is not a predicated on building exceedingly durable businesses, but it doesn't mean they lost money on any of these investments either.
YC isn’t the “bigger fool”, their business model is great for them. Of course they made money at IPO. They don’t care about durable businesses. More than likely they sold at IPO.
I realize, but that's my entire point: the durability of the business as represented by these valuations says nothing meaningful about YCombinator startups other than they aren't building alot of highly durable businesses.
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