I think that would lead to society questioning the justification to have them.

And either outcome is a win.

Which is definitely the case for flock and likely for other companies.

Which really makes me sad that no one from YCombinator is speaking up. It’s all about money.

Y combinator has funded a significant portion of the most harmful tech companies of this century. They're profoundly amoral, just like you'd expect from a profitable venture capital firm.

On the bright side, they also hire dang, so that's one against 100 million.

And the few that have gone public have done awful

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...

Most of the bad ones IPOd in 2021, when there was a huge overvaluation of speculative tech companies... Marking performance since IPO is also a bit weird since it's kind of arbitrary date in the firm's history.

They have collectively had a return of -49% when the S&P 500 have had a return of 58%. It shows that all of the value went to the VCs and the public markets were the “bigger fools”.

It's surprising to me that investors have been so wrong about combinator IPOs. I wonder if this has been driven my retail, or by the expectation of a small probability of enormous success.

Oklo seems to have recovered thanks to the AI boom and they made a deal with Meta to deliver power fir their data centers. It looks like the best performing YC stock

Is going public the ultimate goal of every startup?

The goal of the startup doesn’t matter once they take VC funding. The goal of the investors is the exit - either via acquisition or going public.

The most likely outcome is failure, the second most likely outcome is an acquisition. Going public is a distant third

To be honest, I have personally funded almost all of the most harmful companies that are around today, too.

But that's because I funded pretty much all the companies via my investment in an index fund.

YC pretty much takes something like an index fund approach to startups: they finance a lot of them. So naturally they would also have a significant portion of what you deem to be harmful ones.

Given YC's leadership over the past decade or so, I don't think they have anything they'd want to speak up about. This is probably all fine with them.

I used to hold YC in very high regard, but these days I don't think they're materially different from any other investing shop when it comes to values.

Why would they speak up? Have you seen the other companies they support? Have you seen what their CEO says on X? They seem fully down with actions like this.

YC seeming like more and more of a joke since AI took off

YC had been funding Flock for six years before LLMs took off.

He didn’t make a turn. He just started sharing himself out loud.

Billionaires are rarely aligned on any political spectrum. They pray at the altar of Mammon and they are aligned to whatever "side" promises the biggest financial upside.

Musk cosied up with Trump because he saw a way boost revenue with lucrative government contracts and a prez that is buyable wrt whatever other projects he has planned (Orion/Starship, Robotaxi etc)

He had a falling out with Trump when he realized that the winds were blowing in the opposite direction than anticipated.

Their only ideology is money, nothing else.

I think this view is limited. Right now, we can clearly see ideological motivations beyond money in these billionaires. They are going for the crown, they want to reign.

Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, they want to rule the world. I think Musk is just the least competent, most impulsive of them. Thiel is probably the most dangerous, who, besides being completely insane, is able to pull off the long con and can moderate his ego best.

Coherent and correct or merely seemingly coherent and factually incorrect.

This is where we’re at.

Depends on the location. Some are strictly passenger capacity.

Really, the vast majority of them are, the fasttrack ones are in a few specific spots, but almost all bay area freeways have at least a 3+ only HOV lane.

Can GL inet not do that? Genuinely asking.

Can confirm. It also has a mode to jump through the captive portal. I just set it up with the same SSID and PSK as my home wifi and everything we bring connects automatically. It also routes everything through Tailscale.

Yep, I have the same set up. Use GL router to connect to the hotel wifi, and all devices are automatically connected, without captive portal on each one.

Added bonus that I can use tailscale on the GL router to route remote traffic through my tailnet -- including devices where I can't install tailscale client (e.g. corp laptop).

This Unifi device is primarily meant as an add-on to exising Unifi setups as it's all well integrated.

That’s so great! My dad exposed me to computers at a very young age. That lead to a career in software engineering. You never know what a kid will find interesting and what it may lead to later in life.

Scale of the data behind the service likely contributes. This data is fixed. Therefore it’s easily indexed once into a cache or memory. Your Gmail is ever changing which results in some lost optimization without dramatic cost increase.

Two things can be bad. Rationalizing one due to being less lethal is an ignorant argument.