barkingdog

First of all, congrats, this is very impressive. Second of all, I've been thinking a lot about how proprietary GPU computation and especially VR is these days. Any interest or plans for the future in specialized hardware development for VR?

Interesting subthread. I've noticed that it tends to be easier when I haven't been drinking alcohol for a while -- I've had it occur a few teams a couple years ago, but it almost always ended with me flying and waking up. I couldn't sustain it for more than a few seconds. I was also writing music more then -- I'm not sure if that had anything to do with it.

Those portfolios are not even remotely compatible. Hangouts is the only viable product there. Meanwhile, all of Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and FB are each very strong products with extremely, almost worrisomely strong network effects. Clusterfuck is a bit vague and maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but you've got to admit that it's truly hard to think of Google as a company that makes best-in-class consumer software products anymore.

What would that be, out of curiosity? Not asking rhetorically. I would just assume the exact opposite -- they have every incentive to provide a monetized, just passable enough to be consumable experience. The content (and ostensibly the design) is the product, not the load time. Performance seems low on the list.

You should play up the Stockholm factor! Sweden is really cool!

This is a really lucid explanation of something that is often unnecessarily muddled. Well spoken. To continue going with your thought experiment, how would you feel like if certain kind of people were tortured based on how they were different from you, and it was hard for you to even conceive of what that must feel like for them?

I think a lot of well intentioned folks are in this category. I don't think it's helpful for those folks to be skewered (ala extreme social justice style) for their difficulties. But with that said, it's the sum of their difficulties and those of society at large that may create room for these kinds of situations. I mean, for a very long time, we as a society had ethical arguments for slavery. I don't think it's beyond reason to think that later generations will look at the way survivors of sexual assault are treated by society the way we look at how slaves were once treated with society: shame and wonder at how anyone could let that happen, and yet an uneasiness at realizing that in the context of the historical period, it makes total sense. Humanity is capable of some really unsettling things.

I don't know the details of this particular case, and I would hope (although even courts have difficulties with this) that justice is found in the courts. But I must say, the allegations make my stomach churn precisely because they don't seem unrealistic. I've heard stories and seen folks do things like this with the brazen presumption that no one would stop them. Sadly, they can be right to some extent. I've done what I can to put those situations to a stop (you can only really do it if executive leadership is on your side and also not rotten in the same way the toxic individual is), but the fact remains -- it's a problem, even if it's sometime subtle and hard to notice or do anything about.

Yeah, I don't know if this has anything to do with a science degree. Folks with science degrees can end up managing things in a suboptimal manner, and so can folks without science degrees.

Well...let's agree to disagree because I say the hallmark is whether the business model is sustainable, which I'm not sure your heuristic completely fields. Deal? To be fair, it did look like the business model had legs here for a while.

From what I recall, they acquire IP when its from companies in this situation. I'm not a betting person, but I would not be surprised if this situation was a good opportunity for RPX's PR.

Agreed. I get so sad when I see this happen in the JS ecosystem (being used to python), but it's pretty easy to not fall into that trap. Use bower on the browser side, and npm on the server side. At that point, the only fight you have left is finding the stack of components that will play nicely together, which is the labor of architecture anyways.

I think you're going to catch undue flak for this, but yes. I am bullish that BI and blockchain can go a very long way towards this goal. Sometimes, I worry that the barriers standing in the way are societal, not technical; the hard things about the hard things, so to speak. But, then I imagine I am perhaps trying to separate two things that are intrinsically linked. It's going to be interesting seeing how things evolve. I certainly wonder when the time will be that the world is ready for this in a mainstream manner.

Agreed. I had a very similar experience with an AP Computer Science course in high school. Considering the material and range of students, I think my teacher did a fantastic job, though. I didn't feel like I picked up that much, but the exposure of being an enthusiastic peer who could help others -- that was very worthwhile.