There are lots of companies that do this. Doesn't make it right.
The real "evil" here is that companies like Meta, Google, and now OpenAI sell people a product or service that the customer thinks is the full transaction. I search with Google, they show me ads - that's the transaction. I pay for Chatgpt, it helps me understand XYZ - that's the transaction.
But it isn't. You give them your data and they sell it - that's the transaction. And that obscurity is not ethical in my opinion.
No, but if I hear you telling someone you have the flu and are picking up flu medicine after work then I have a portion of your medical records. Why is it hard for people on HN to believe that normal people do not protect their medical data and email about it or search Google for their conditions? People in the "real world" hook up smart TV's to the internet and don't realize they are being tracked. They use cars with smart features that let them be tracked. They have apps on their phone that track their sentiments, purchases, and health issues... All we are seeing here is people getting access to smart technology for their health issues in such a manner that they might lower their healthcare costs. If you are an American you can appreciate ANY effort in that direction.
Depends on your goals. If you are starting a business and you see a company surpass the market cap of Apple, again, then you might view their business model as successful. If you are a privacy advocate then you will hate their model.
Well you said "is this any _worse_" (emphasis mine) and I could only assume you meant ethically worse. At which point the answer is kind of obvious because Google hasn't proven to be the most ethical company w.r.t. user data (and lots of other things).
It is clearly the beginning of the end of many small shops in the supply chain. I hope bigger fish buy them so the tech can be more integrated into future AI products, but I doubt they will be smart enough to do that.
I expect you see the world this way because you are a software developer. People who know how to sell and understand the problems to solve do not routinely understand how to build software to solve those problems so they can sell them to customers. Now that the bar for building software is lowering, the world of building a startup is changing. A relatively newcomer to software is able to ship a medium complexity vibe-coded app to a few test customers and kick off revenues.
I agree that the bar for building software has dropped significantly, but I think the harder part still shows up right after the first few customers.
Shipping something workable is easier now, but understanding which problems are actually worth solving — and getting consistent feedback early — still seems to be the main separator between hobby projects and real businesses.
I totally concur. That said, technology is evolving fast, and I think it's clear that the bar for solving those problems with non-technical people will drop dramatically in the next 12 months.
They are absolutely crushing it. I know of a one-man shop that just got notice they were selected for an eight-figure revenue contract. They would NEVER go public with their head count or their product being built by AI.
It's not 2018 anymore, the NRA doesn't have any money to make guns an election issue, and America will have way bigger problems than guns, trans people and abortion in 2028.
Is he? I thought he'd always claimed to be a democratic socialist. What has he said or done that makes him a communist? I only see a lot of other people labelling him as one as a lazy adhom.
It's not communism to support public-owned public services, even public-owned competitive services where no commercial competition exists. Capitalism in tight spaces, creates monopolies and market quirks that harm consumers, harm renters, harms tourists. These harms are toxic to NYC. He's right to address them.
Like Joe Biden? Pro-cop, anti-union DA who deported people more aggressively than Trump?
Or Kamala Harris, who doubled down on support for Israel's genocide, said she wanted the most lethal military in the world, and courted Bush era neocons?
What does a "sane" Democrat look like and why do I suspect it resembles a Republican in all but name?
My wife and I both own vinyl, and neither of us has ever owned a record player. We put them on display for the most part. We have a song we got married to, and we bought a couple of album variations (each with different artwork) with that song; we also like the cover art on some vinyl releases as wall art.
I'm curious - does the music content actually matter to you? Would you buy an album from an artist you've never heard just because the cover art was great?
Not who you're replying to (but I'm in the same camp). I use the album art as decoration, but the music is the first selection criteria. The music has to mean something to me first, and then the album art just needs to "pass".
I have young kids also, so I try to stay away from violent or scary album art.
If you use the records as a display (and though I don't do that, I empathize; CD covers just don't generate the visceral reaction that LP covers do), wouldn't it make sense for publishers to offer record covers without the actual records?
Disney is the same company as it was 20 years ago. In fact, it's the same company as it was 100 years ago. They only care about profit. They do just enough brand management to preserve the profit motive.
To be fair to Walt Disney, he cared about a lot beyond profit and believed in advancing technology and society in a way modern corporate leaders absolutely do not. He was no saint but he's a far cry from modern CEO's.
To be fair, Walt Disney partnered with his brother Roy Disney, and they co-founded and ran the Walt Disney Company (and the iterations before it). These iterations of the Disney Company were never just Walt Disney.
Yes, but if you watch any documentaries about early Disney and listen to those people talk everything was about Walt's vision even after death they would ask "What would Walt want or do?" He was a figure whose influence and vision is on another level in American History (both good and bad) and early Disney was Walt no matter who was in charge on paper or even if Walt was still alive. That only started to change under Eisner. Roy was the one who kept Walt grounded so ambition shrunk but they stayed the course Walt set.
Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.
I think that, given the times, we might rate him a little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at par with the norms of his time, which we could now look back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in society.
He also normalized and romanticized the American Expansion and displacement of Native Americans. He's a very complicated and flawed figured who irrevocably changed the course of this nation. Even Walt recognized that Walt Disney the man and Walt Disney the icon were two different people, and he was flawed in ways as a man the icon who appeared weekly in everyone's living room was not.
Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.
This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.
Yes, perhaps if we deflated Disney’s moral rot by a diversified basket of other morally-rotted goods, I suppose we’d be able to conclude that Disney is perhaps the same company.
Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.
I firmly disagree and think this shallow take dishonors a pretty great man. While not perfect, Disney gave us the bedrock of American children's culture which has been a soft tool for the US for generations. Not to mention technology and other advancements. I'm not a Disney nut, but the man was one-of-a-kind and an impressive industrialist who instilled a great culture of innovation and a deep love of children and play. All things I value.
Yep, Disney was also a leading producer of racist tropes and content during Jim Crow. Historical clips of Mickey Mouse characters putting on minstrel shows with blackface alongside other racist stereotypes like crows can easily be found online[0]. Not to mention Song of the South[1], a film Disney produced based on Uncle Remus stories following slaves who happily live on a Georgia plantation. Disney has, of course, done their best to scrub these entries from history, but they played a major role in depicting racist tropes to kids for decades.
We all acknowledge that Walt Disney was a flawed person, I don't think anybody here disagrees. To me, what sets him apart from other corporate leaders isn't Walt's moral character, but rather his ambition to influence the direction of humanities development, both culturally and technologically. He was about a lot more than just making number go up.
One could argue that the company reoriented itself so purely towards children's art and kitsch because they needed to get themselves into a market segment where they could completely sanitize their output of these kinds of embarrassments.
I read your comment as saying that we should blame the people who create the demand for Disney's products, and the voters who elect the politicians, instead of Disney and the politicians. Not so?
The context is messy, but my comment's in the context of rejecting blame on Disney alone for "losing their way" when they have had the same way (read: $$$) as before and they're delivering products people want.
Fwiw I think the all US presidents since Clinton were elected on a non interventionist/pacifist campaign. Blaming the voters when every one of them (less so with Biden) violated those promises is a bit unfair, if you still believe in democracy.
Almost every one of them was elected again, often by wider margins (the only exception losing to another one of them) after deatroying any illusion innthat direction you might argue was produced by their campaign positions, so I don't think you can absolved the American electorate here, even if one agrees that their campaign before taking office met your description.
Bush sure wasn't anti-interventionist for the second term after entering the Iraq War 2.0. Even Obama campaigned to persist the "necessary" Afghanistan war.
I don't recall George W. Bush ever actually promising to stay out of wars and interventions. It's been standard for the two parties to criticize each-other on grounds of doing interventionism badly or going too far towards one extreme regarding foreign policy, but nobody has run as a real pacifist or isolationist because they would lose in a landslide. It especially doesn't help that pacifism and isolationism are associated with activist fringes in both parties who often lean into crank theories or make friends publicly with adversarial states.
Blaming the voters seems completely sensible when they reelected W in 2004. The man's Vice President was Dick freakin' Cheney. You can't seriously tell me the people voted for pacifism and got screwed over.
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