Let's check in on how Kickstarter's "pivot to blockchain" worked out

3 months ago
David Gerard:

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. You put up a planned creative work, get pledges, and Kickstarter takes a percentage. This is pretty simple. There are very few ways to mess it up.

One way you can mess it up is to go into growth-at-any-cost mode and do stupid things for the sake of funding.

In December 2021, Kickstarter announced that it was pivoting to blockchain! Nobody had any idea what this meant -- including Kickstarter, who couldn't advance a single coherent reason, let alone a plan. Users revolted. [...]

Why did Kickstarter do something so stupid? It turns out that Andreessen Horowitz, through their a16z Crypto unit, promised to buy $100 million of early Kickstarter investors' shares in return for 25% of the company -- if Kickstarter would just say they were adopting "blockchain." [...]

Kickstarter was profitable before this. But they didn't have a path to cancer-like growth at all costs. So they went along with a16z's blockchain promotion.

Kickstarter had refused to recognize a union at the company in 2019 and illegally fired two of the union organizers. Kickstarter finally did recognize the union, but also had massive layoffs because so many creators had left the platform due to Kickstarter's efforts not to recognize the union. They preferred to destroy their profitable company rather than allow a union to gain the slightest toehold.

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Some Andreesen-Horowitz Crypto-Bro bloviates on a vision of Fascist San Francisco

3 months ago
I hesitate to even give oxygen to a story like this, but it's just so fucking whack-a-doodle. It sounds a parody, or an April Fools joke, or a stand-up comic doing a tour with "triggered" in its name, but apparently people like Balaji Srinivasan and Garry Tan are saying shit like this out loud and not getting laughed out of the room.

Balaji Srinivasan, ladies and gentlemen:

Like some mustache-twirling cartoon villain, the main tech figure behind the Network State cult lays out a "roadmap" for an authoritarian future in which San Francisco Democrats ("Blues") and poor people are barred from entire parts of the city.

Tech loyalists ("Grays") will don Gray shirts, carry Gray ID cards (for swiping into the Gray sectors of town). They will also hold weekly banquets for Gray police officers (cops who have confessed their loyalty to tech). And they'll march in "Gray Pride Parades" featuring "drones flying overhead in formation." [...]

B.S., a former partner at Andreesen-Horowitz and former chief technology officer of Coinbase, wrote an entire book called "The Network State: How to Start a New Country." Tech oligarchs like Marc Andreesen hold him in high regard and consider him some kind of genius oracle. His book outlines how tech billionaires can seize more economic and political power by establishing new sovereign territories under their control. [...]

[A] huge win would be a Gray Pride Parade with 50,000 Grays, that would be massive. That would start, to say: "Whose streets? Our streets!" You have the AI Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation ... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers. You have the laser eyes, you know, Bitcoin maximalist ... You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They're flying the drones, they are there and, ideally, you know, you even design the police uniforms. [...]

B.S. is basically using a Civil War analogy to describe his plan for San Francisco. It's the Blues (Union) vs the Grays (tech authoritarians). The Grays wish to secede from Blue society and establish their own form of tech confederacy. This is bizarre imagery to apply to your own political movement, but either B.S. is totally clueless or he's doing it on purpose.

Someone watched that episode about the Bell Riots and thought, "But wouldn't it be cool to be the baddies?"

Sure, podcasts gonna podcast, but when a billionaire tells you who they are, believe them.


Update: More on this monster: The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco:

A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius. "Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met," wrote Marc Andreessen.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Once again, AI is revealed to be three Mechanical Turks in a trenchcoat.

3 months ago
Amazon's Just Walk Out Actually Uses 1,000 People in India:

Amazon's Just Walk Out technology had a secret ingredient: Roughly 1,000 workers in India who review what you pick up, set down, and walk out of its stores with. The company touted the technology, which allowed customers to bypass traditional checkouts, as an achievement powered entirely by computer vision. But Just Walk Out was still very reliant on humans. About 700 of every 1,000 Just Walk Out sales had to be reviewed by Amazon's team in India in 2022.

Update: It's easy to point and laugh at this as "LOL, AI doesn't work", and that's appropriate, because it's funny, and it doesn't, but also consider whether the goals of this project were not what you were told that they were. The "Just Walk Out" project allowed Amazon to replace a bunch of cashiers making the California minimum wage of $16 / hour with a bunch of call center gig workers in India making (I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess) a lot less than that. So if they are shutting this program down, it's probably because the savings they saw from outsourcing retail clerks to a third world call center were somehow not high enough.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve hits 16-year low

3 months ago
Experts link the shortage to both a rise in demand and warmer weather, which has disrupted production.

"The strategic reserve is holding its lowest amount of maple syrup since 2008," Simon Doré-Ouellet, the deputy director general of the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, told the BBC. [...]

The amount of maple syrup in the national reserve - stored in tens of thousands of barrels in several warehouses across Quebec - has dwindled significantly since 2020. That year, the reserve had more than 103 million pounds. Now, the amount in the reserve is only 7% of what it was four years ago. [...]

Canada is coming out of one of its warmest winters on record. Temperatures in December, January and February were the warmest since record-keeping began in 1948.

So many previouslies:

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Identifying Crypto-Republicans by ballot clustering

4 months ago
San Francisco political support data shows true alignment:

San Francisco (and much of the Bay Area) has a curious political idiosyncrasy where brand-name Republican candidates and issues get so little traction among voters so as to be considered irrelevant. Yet, many republican ideals and beliefs do receive substantial support from locals.

This dynamic causes practically republican organizations to outwardly re-code and re-brand as something -- anything -- other than GOP. Popular self-descriptions include Moderate or middle-of-the-road Democrat. However, this analysis is motivated by ignoring these pretenses and looking exclusively at indicated issue recommendations / endorsements, and understanding how similar vs. how different each political organization is acting (a behaviorist / empirical approach).

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Freeway murderbots? In this economy?

4 months ago
Waymo can now charge for robotaxi rides in LA and on San Francisco freeways:

Last month, the CPUC's Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division suspended Waymo's application to expand its robotaxi service in Los Angeles and San Mateo counties for up to 120 days to provide extra time for review. [...] The five protests came from the city of South San Francisco, the county of San Mateo, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance.

Just brazenly saying the quiet part out loud, as usual:

"We will, as we did in San Francisco, expand our service before we start charging," she said. "And I mean, we sort of show up and you get to experience this for a couple of months or several months without paying. And then we have that moment of truth, which we went through in San Francisco, which is we start charging, and then we figure out how many people [have] really integrated it into their lives. What's the price point they're willing to pay?"

Let's not forget that these companies are still immune from prosecution when one of their remotely-operated drones commits a moving violation, up to and including a killing. And that Waymo's owner Google have stated in court filings that it is good for business if their competitors' cars kill more people.

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Current Music: Madeline Goldstein -- The Nightmare ♬

Do not drink Musk's Sarcophagus Juice

4 months ago
Ride the Tunnel of Love Canal!
Elon Musk's Tunnel Oozing With Skin-Burning Chemical Sludge:

The Boring Company's scarce output -- which thus far amounts only to driving Teslas around a few miles of neon-lit tunnel underneath Sin City as they ferry convention attendees at no more than 40 miles per hour -- has also come with a massive buildup of waste, the consistency of a milkshake, that's said to burn the skin of anyone who comes in contact with it.

Boring Company workers who declined to give their names on the record for fear of retribution said that in some parts of Musk's Vegas tunnel system, the sludge would sometimes be up to two feet high. If it got over their work boots or onto their faces, they said, it would burn their skin.

"You'd be like, 'Why am I on fire?'" one person who worked on the Hyperloop tunnels told Bloomberg.

At one of the dig sites, which sits underneath the Encore Las Vegas hotel, the chemical sludge was filled not only with the commonplace byproducts of sand, silt, and water, but also accelerants used to set the grout to build the tunnels. As the sludge built up, so too did its associated safety risks -- and as the workers told Nevada's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), people getting burned by the sludge was an almost routine occurrence. [...]

As Boring employees told OSHA, for instance, an intern almost got crushed by some two-ton concrete bins last summer when they collapsed because its metal brackets had become overloaded with the stuff.

The agency ultimately fined Boring more than $112,000 over eight violations it deemed "serious." The company is, as Musk businesses are wont to do, contesting it.

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Current Music: Descartes a Kant -- Raindrops of Poison ♬

Today in Plutocracy Combinator

4 months ago
I love these signs:
"Shear and Tan are Narcs",
"No Killer Robots in SF".

Prop. E foes demonstrate outside Y Combinator HQ:

Proposition E will reduce police accountability, make San Francisco less safe and disproportionately affect communities of color. [...] "We're here today to tell tech CEOs who think they own San Francisco that we need more transparency not less," said former police commissioner Angela Chan. [...]

The measure, which voters will decide on March 5, has raised over $1.5 million, largely from a handful of tech billionaires.

Chan, who is now assistant chief attorney at the public defender's office, pointed out that Y Combinator's headquarters -- a white, nondescript building on 20th Street by Pier 70 -- does not appear to be listed on Google Maps.

"They profit off of surveillance but don't want to be surveilled," Chan said.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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My "device", I am told, might be "unverified"

4 months ago
There's a new trend of sites' CDNs inserting multi-second interstitials that distract you with a spinner to make you think they are doing something.

I find these vaguely threatening. They come with the strong implication that some time in the future, my "device" might not be "verified".

It has the stench of browser fingerprinting, "Web Integrity", and HDCP DRM on it. As in, if they cannot deeply surveil me, they won't serve the plain text document.

Does the fact that they found my browser acceptable mean that their surveillance is working on me? Or does it mean that they just haven't decided to block me yet? Neither possibility is good.

I also especially enjoy that glitch right at the beginning where the text looks stupid because the CSS didn't load fast enough. Kudos all around. Not that I would expect the sort of amoral shitfucks who build this sort of technology to actually be good at their jobs. Is it Cloudflare? It's probably Cloudflare.

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Today in ACAB

4 months ago
California Law Enforcement Agencies Are Spending More But Solving Fewer Crimes:

California is not "defunding the police" nor implementing lenient criminal justice reforms -- just the opposite. State spending on law enforcement has risen sharply, even after adjustments for inflation and population growth. [...]

Law enforcement agencies need to explain why crime clearances have been falling since 1990 despite police agencies being given more resources and personnel. If, as is widely speculated, officers secretly stopped making arrests to protest reforms and coerce public sentiment against "liberal" policies, that would be a criminal dereliction of the police duty and oath that demands disciplinary action. The lawful way for police to protest policy is not to shirk their duties, but to make their case in policy forums or by running for office, like all other community members.

Alternatively, if law enforcement has become less competent in solving crimes despite receiving more money and personnel, or if for some reason crimes have become harder to solve, these matters also require scrutiny so that corrective actions can be taken.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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