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Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail/Source: iStockphoto AlayaCare had some promising acquisition candidates lined up at the start of 2022, including one worth about $10-million that Adrian Schauer, chief executive officer of the Montreal tech startup, had already budgeted for.

Instead of chasing capital and rapid growth at all costs, many businesses are now getting lean and focused, hoping to achieve something sorely lacking in boom times: profits.

This has hit tech stocks hard, since they’re particularly sensitive to rates – the higher rates go, the lower the current value investors ascribe to the companies’ expected future cash flows.

NELSON MOUELLIC/Handout Jason Smith, CEO of Vancouver business-intelligence software company Klue Labs Inc., began to slow hiring in April and slashed advertising to focus on what he calls the “hand-to-hand combat work” of chasing new clients directly.

When the Toronto investor relations software maker Q4 Inc. revealed in late August that it would lay off 48 people, CEO Darrell Heaps said the company had been hit by a double whammy: Not only was it directly affected by the tech downturn, its flow of new customers began slowing when other companies slowed their public listings.

“Payments is the most important thing for us to get on the path to profitability,” Mr. Chauvet said in an interview earlier this summer. “

Linus Tech Tips is a Youtube channel/network that like many has a merch store. Instead of just putting their logo on existing products they've spent more time and money actually developing products. Their backpack is the most expensive product at $250 and there was some drama when it first launched with a "Trust me bro" warranty. After an outcry they put on an actual written warranty.

Now backpacks have been shipped and OP's carabiner zipper pull broke.

Whole post

OP is accused of intentionally stressing it to see if it would break

Claiming they'll deny his warranty since it's intentional damage

Blaming OP for putting force on the zipper

SRD

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg spent hours touting his love of jiujitsu, wrestling and UFC on Joe Rogan's podcast, which is known for its hypermasculinity. Watching TV was not active enough, Mr. Zuckerberg said. Compared with social media, TV was "beta."

Elon Musk, who signed a deal to buy Twitter seemingly on a whim and is now headed to court because he wants to back out of the purchase, has lobbed "debate me, bro" taunts at Twitter's chief executive in between doling out advice about intermittent fasting and worrying about population collapse.

And Marc Andreessen, the high-profile tech investor, recently opposed a plan to build multifamily housing in the Silicon Valley town where he lives and then announced his latest and largest deal: a residential real estate start-up led by Adam Neumann, the entrepreneur who notoriously incinerated billions of dollars in value at WeWork.

Their actions seemed designed for maximum outrage. Zuck likes to wrestle with his buddies? Elon thinks he's above the law? Andreessen trusted that entrepreneur with how much money?

Tech's most powerful elite seem to be embracing a new tone lately. It is more openly defiant, combative and a turnaround from just a few years ago, when the industry was put on its heels by exposés about its "bro" culture.

Starting in 2017, a series of reports revealed Silicon Valley's rampant harassment, discrimination and culture of silence and settlements. Powerful investors and executives were accused during #MeToo. A book titled "Brotopia" by the journ*list Emily Chang methodically outlined the tech industry's deeply entrenched sexism, connecting history lessons with today's dismal diversity reports.

Industry leaders at least tried to look like they were making an effort to dismantle the systems that had concentrated power in the hands of a few white men. Given how entrenched tech companies and their products were in people's lives, it felt urgent to address the disparities and problems among those creating them. So they made pledges, promoted some women and donated money.

There were some advances, including more women writing checks at venture capital firms and leading billion-dollar start-ups. All Raise, an advocacy group for women in tech, appeared on the cover of Forbes in 2018.

"We made a bit of progress, but I feel like that was almost a smoke screen," said Christie Pitts, an investor at Backstage Capital, a venture capital firm. Now "there's definitely a feeling of backsliding."

Two parallel Silicon Valleys have emerged. There's the ThunderDome of Twitter, where tech thought leaders collect likes by posting edgy memes and spouting flip political takes --- then invoke cancel culture when they are criticized. They troll their way into impulsive $44 billion acquisitions, then back out. They promote an entirely online existence inside the so-called metaverse.

Then there's the day-to-day reality, where women still get just 2 percent of venture capital funding and Black founders get 1 percent, where the largest tech companies have made negligible progress on diversifying their staff, and where harassment and discrimination remain common.

Last month, Estelle McGechie, the former chief executive of Atomos, sued the electronics company for gender discrimination and retaliation. She said she had been fired after she alerted the company's board to fraud. This month, a Vox report about sexual assault and victim silencing at Launch House, a hacker house backed by Mr. Andreessen's firm, went largely unremarked-upon by the tech industry's most prominent voices.

Then Verkada, a security start-up that has faced accusations of harassment of female employees and lax internal controls over access to its surveillance cowtools, raised $205 million from top venture firms. And Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist who was accused of sexual misconduct by five women in 2017, resurfaced as an executive at Kanye West's company, Yeezy.

It is enough to make some question whether the industry can change.

"As far as I can tell, there's never going to be consequences for men," Ms. Pitts said. "It's disheartening."

Launch House's chief executive responded to the Vox article with a blog post this month, apologizing for the company's past safety issues. Verkada said it had learned from previous incidents and had "clear protocols, trainings and people focused on addressing issues related to sexism and harassment." Atomos said in a statement that Ms. McGechie's claims were without merit. Mr. Pishevar did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk's blockbuster deal for Twitter underlines how the tech industry still operates like an old boys' club. The billionaire is part of the "PayPal mafia," a group of founders and early employees at the digital payments company, many of whom have gone on to even bigger successes in tech.

Their successes are often interconnected. Those in the group invest in or join each other's companies and firms, keeping things, as the mafia says, in the family. An infamous Fortune photo of the men in 2007 dressed as mob gangsters does not position the tech industry as welcoming to outsiders.

"All of this is about self-selecting for people just like you," Max Levchin, a PayPal mafia member, told Fortune at the time. The 2007 article contained one mention of a woman; Mr. Levchin said he had hired her even though she was bad at Ping-Pong, which showed a lack of competitiveness. She quit months later.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Levchin pointed to instances he has supported diversity, including leading an industry push for anti-discrimination laws.

When Mr. Musk recruited investors to help with his Twitter deal this year, he contacted many of those friends or their firms. Sequoia Capital, where his fellow PayPal mafia member Roelof Botha is a leader, put up $800 million. DFJ Growth, a firm that has invested in Mr. Musk's companies, such as Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity, added $100 million.

Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle who sat on Tesla's board and has said he was "very close friends" with Mr. Musk, also contributed $1 billion. Mr. Andreessen's firm, Andreessen Horowitz, threw in $400 million.

"Women do not have these kinds of deep, decades-durable networks that these men have had," said Taryn Langer, a founder of Moxie Communications Group, which does public relations work with founders and venture firms. "There's definitely the boys' club that still exists."

Other members of the PayPal mafia, including David Sacks and Joe Lonsdale, got subpoenas for their text messages with Mr. Musk about his Twitter deal, which is now tied up in court. They were quick to express their displeasure about it, sharing memes on Twitter and calling the subpoenas "harassment" on TV. Mr. Musk has also fought the exposure of his private communications through his lawyers.

At the same time, women working at SpaceX, Mr. Musk's space company, have lodged multiple complaints of harassment and retaliation over the last year.

In May, Insider reported that Mr. Musk paid a settlement to a flight attendant who had accused him of sexual misconduct, an act he denied. After the report said Mr. Musk had offered to buy the attendant a horse in exchange for an erotic massage, Chad Hurley, a founder of YouTube and member of the PayPal mafia, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Musk should "stop horsing around and close this Twitter deal" because "we all want a happy ending."

Mr. Musk responded, "Fine, if you touch my wiener, you can have a horse." He has also asked his followers if Twitter should "delete the w" in its name and suggested starting a university called "Texas Institute of Technology & Science" for its "epic merch" that would presumably feature the institution's acronym.

A lawyer for Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Andreessen's firm has $35 billion under management. He has tweeted about blocking people whose opinions he does not like, directed diss memes at the likes of the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and railed against those who support "the current thing," or popular causes. In addition to a board seat at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Mr. Andreessen will be joining the board of Flow, Mr. Neumann's real estate start-up.

When the Flow deal was announced last month, it elicited skepticism from those who doubted Mr. Neumann's business acumen after WeWork's disastrous crash. But it also stirred outrage among women and people of color who saw a man getting a plush second chance when they have had to fight for scraps to get a first chance.

A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

The $350 million that Andreessen Horowitz invested --- the firm's largest individual check --- valued the yet-to-launch Flow at $1 billion.

Diana Lee, the co-founder of the ad-tech firm Constellation, said she has had to fight for a fair valuation for her company by showing investors annual growth of 80 percent, hundreds of customers and consistent profits. With Mr. Neumann's fund-raising, she said, "the execution hasn't even happened yet. He comes out and it's $1 billion."

The tech industry's lack of consequences has even inspired Billy McFarland, the convicted fraudster behind the Fyre Festival, the luxury music festival that famously flopped in 2017. Mr. McFarland recently emerged from jail with plans to mount a comeback in tech. He said he was confident he would find support.

"The way I failed is totally wrong," he said. "But in a certain sense, failure is OK in entrepreneurship."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/technology/silicon-valley-slides-back-into-bro-culture.html

Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/c3p0bb/titlethis_page_is_a_truly_naked_brutalist_html/

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32968597

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32970623

Older photos in my drive have started becoming corrupted. Issue looks like a water stain with massive discoloration and data loss. Is there any way to revert this?

This seems to be a more general issue. Cases found today:

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180787712/corrupted-photos

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180820121/transcoding-artifacts-in-old-images

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180774361/google-auto-editing-old-pictures

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180816597/photos-corruption-occured-on-my-google-photos

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180809368/many-ruined-or-blurred-photos-that-were-stored-in-google-be-restored

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180808395/old-photos-with-white-dots-corruption-now

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180780138/pictures-have-weird-watermark-stains-on-them-that-s-spreading

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180769822/photo-damaged

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180767454/photos-error

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180764911/corrupted-images-from-8-years-ago

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180718432/my-photos-damage

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180745017/photos-getting-corrupted

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180741456/why-or-old-photo-damage

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/180739551/old-saved-images-damaged-for-good?

Might be the coolest shit I've seen all day, holy frick.

Tested and confirmed, who would lie on the internet anyway?

I have been using this tool for quite some time and only recently came up with the idea to use it to write essays, answer questions about movies and books for school projects, and much more. I feel a little guilty about it, but I don't really care that much anymore. For a couple of weeks, I have made $100 profit by "doing" homework for other classmates and now I am looked at as a genius. What are your thoughts on this? Have you done it yourself?

Yes, this post was rephrased by the AI.

^{https://x.com/petergyang/status/1573489316147306496}

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32963549

It‘s not a phase. I am turning 30 soon. I have had this feeling ever since i can remember. I know, often times i am subconsciously aligning my actions to end up alone. Sometimes it seems like i do that to create something like a melancholic void, that i must feel, because otherwise, i would feel empty…

I can‘t summarize it better right now. I have learned the portuguese word „saudade“. That feeling, i believe i know. It seems somehow related, to what I am trying to describe.

I truly can not handle it anymore…

How do you deal with it?

Also I have recently read about „intellectual loneliness“ on here, which i resonated deeply with. It is not what i am describing, but rather a part of it. But the totality is too much for me.

I don‘t even know what to expect from posting here. I just have nowhere else to turn to…

Generated from TLDR This:

Some churches across the United States are using invasive phone-monitoring technology in efforts to discourage “sinful” behavior, a WIRED investigation revealed this week.

Iran’s latest internet shutdowns are significant as the government continues to tighten its grip on citizens’ ability to connect, and the roots of Nigeria’s cybersecurity problem shed light on digital challenges in the country, including how data collection remains largely unmonitored despite strong data protection laws.

Click on the headlines below to read the full stories.

We know that online platforms can be used to cause harm to children, and we have made extensive investments over the last two years to better stay ahead of bad actors and prevent any users who may be under 13 from accessing Twitch,” the company said in a statement to Bloomberg.

It’s unclear whether the attack came from criminal or state-sponsored actors, but Australian officials warned that affected customers will face the threat of identity theft because of the breach. “

We’re so deeply disappointed because we spend so much time and we invest so much in preventing this from occurring,” she said. "

I have pi-hole set up, just wondering if it's worth it to set up aggressive blacklists. Pls no bully

Generated by TLDR This:

Introduction This report has two purposes: first, to present Mozilla's research (both recent surveys and years of knowledge) into consumer interaction with browsers.

O P E R AT I N G S Y S T E M S M I S U S E T H E I R P R I V I L E G E D P O S I T I O N Deceptive pattern practices targeted at consumers Inhibiting Independent App Discovery -All five major platforms today (Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft) bundle their respective browsers with their operating systems and set them as the operating system default in the prime home screen or dock position.

Yet, this theoretical confidence does not mean people consciously choose their software, nor does it translate to action: a large number of people report never thinking about the browser or search engine they use.

In the following scenario, a Bing user is displayed an advert at the top of their search engine results page to dissuade them from downloading Firefox and prompted to use the browser which is already pre-installed on their Windows operating system (Microsoft Edge).

Operating system providers, particularly Google, have an extensive range of marketing and advertising resources which can be deployed to promote their brand and products; this effectively serves as constant priming for their browser.

However, very few have recognized the connection between these issues and the importance of browser competition, or studied the role of OCA practices as a way to implement (or thwart) consumer choice and welfare.

Is he correct?

@WindowsShill

Generated by TLDR This:

Toggle Warnings Toggle Notes Please see the disclaimer.

Even though I hate Windows for many reasons, especially privacy, I still make my software work there for a simple reason: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

First, once Windows booted, which took the expected two minutes, it hung and refused to boot Visual Studio for 15 minutes.

That means that the platform now has a viable alternative to the Windows software.

However, the best news is that we, as programmers, can speed up the process.

- 20 votes

Archive Link

Generated from TLDR This:

Speaking recently at the National Conservatism Conference in Miami, Peter Thiel, an investor and intellectual, made a provocative argument.

Mr Thiel made the Equatorial Guinea comparison with tongue firmly in cheek, but he was deadly serious about the tech-curse theory.

Mr Thiel thinks that California’s poverty and prosperity are two sides of the same coin, with state and local governments providing the link.

But there are two big problems with his theory.

San Francisco’s politics today is tame in comparison with the 1970s.

The ratio of California’s average house price to America’s is much lower than in the mid-2000s.

HN

discuss

Generated by TLDR This:

Graphics firm 3dfx was a pioneer in PC 3D acceleration and ploughed a deep furrow in the PC industry from about 1996, until it went insolvent in 2000.

At the aforementioned Comdex event, 3dfx showcased the VSA-100 processor including the products Voodoo 4 4500, Voodoo 5 5000/5500 and Voodoo 5 6000.

The finished full working sample is pictured above.

Original box art - click to zoom The components Anthony used to build his Voodoo 5 6000 sound pretty cheap; each VSA-100 was under US$20, and the sixteen 8MB 166MHz SDRAM modules are cheap or salvageable from old equipment, as were heatsinks, small fans and so on.

Meanwhile, a hard-to-find original could set you back $1,500 or more, as an iconic piece of computer history.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/majority-media/peters-and-portman-introduce-bipartisan-legislation-to-help-secure-open-source-software_

Generated from TLDR This:

The legislation comes after a hearing convened by Peters and Portman on the Log4j incident earlier this year, and would direct the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to help ensure that open source software is used safely and securely by the federal government, critical infrastructure, and others.

“As we saw with the log4shell vulnerability, the computers, phones, and websites we all use every day contain open source software that is vulnerable to cyberattack,” said Senator Portman. “

I am encouraged by the leadership of Senators Peters and Portman on this issue.”

It is maintained by a community of individuals and organizations.

The senators’ legislation to bolster cybersecurity for state and local governments has also been signed into law.

Statement here

Article Archive here

HN

https://old.reddit.com/r/india/comments/xkwgc5/proton_ceo_is_shutting_down_india_vpn_servers_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/xls40l/proton_ceo_is_shutting_down_india_vpn_servers_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/xkwe17/proton_vpn_pulls_physical_servers_out_of_india_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xl12g0/proton_vpn_replaced_vpn_servers_in_india_to_keep/?submit_url=https%3A%2F%2Fprotonvpn.com%2Fblog%2Fservers-india%2F&already_submitted=true&submit_title=

https://x.com/ProtonVPN/status/1572873537081454593

Generated from TLDR This:

The Swiss company behind well-known virtual-private-network service Proton VPN is pulling its servers from India, the latest provider to do so in response to new government rules that companies and rights groups say threaten users’ privacy.

The companies must maintain the data for at least five years and furnish it to authorities when asked.

On paper India is supposedly taking a different path from China and Russia,” where similar rules are in place, he said.

It didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday on Proton’s withdrawal.

New Delhi has in recent years moved to contain online dissent on platforms such as Twitter Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook.

>deciding how to inform users they could be about to deliver a lethal dose of radiation to their patient

>"MALFUNCTION 54"

>refuses to elaborate

>leaves company

Rly tho this is horrifying and a good reminder of why QA and code reviews are important. Imagine trusting your life to a program written solo by some random neurodivergent "code hobbyist."