billylindeman

Chinese investors own ~20% of ByteDance. Mostly own by large funds (State Street BlackRock, Sequoia, etc)

"They could simply have divested"

What an odd thing to say. Why should a company that started the biggest social media app in a decade "divest" it to US oligarchic interests when it's a global application? It makes no sense.

This is the largest affront to American freedom since the patriot act, and the fact that people are celebrating it on some red-scare bullshit is terrifying.

I am personally disgusted that my government thinks it should be in the business of telling me what apps I can have on my phone. I am a grown adult, and a taxpayer, and the US Government has no fucking business telling me where I can watch and/or post videos.

Maybe it's time to build a decentralized alternative so this never happens again.

When the electrical grid begins to collapse under the weight of "migrating to EV," people will be quite happy these legacy companies didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There are massive needs that ICE is still servicing, and will continue to service for many decades to come.

does this work in the background or do you need to run the backup task? I'm setting up a home server atm and curious about this for iCloud

This is amazing. I can't wait to play with it

To be fair, I did leave during COVID and it was actually impossible to get a Uhaul (September 2020).

Moving back to SF in the next month for a new gig (after the startup I was working for ran out of cash and laid everyone off).

So it's the girth that matters?

I also believe that it is flawed, but it is the model that most of valley is built on. It's frustrating. I wish more companies would just focus on building value and becoming profitable. VC funding for growth makes sense, but it shouldn't be in lieu of a profitable business model. If we keep funding unprofitable companies with unproven business models capitalism breaks, efficiency is lost, and someone ends up holding a bag - usually the mom and pop investor in the public markets.

I'm also incredibly bearish on CA and left for good last year. The quality of life per dollar is just so incredibly skewed, and the monoparty culture perpetuates terrible policies that will continue to strangle the state.

I left the city for the mountains (tahoe) in 2020, and it felt much more reasonable, but with the forest fires getting worse every year living in nature there feels even more hopeless.

I'm back in the midwest, and my plan is to buy a huge plot of land and build a house that is off grid w/ it's own water supply. The system is in a slow state of collapse, and every year people just paper over what's right in front of us. I think CA right now is a leading indicator.

Shit is gonna get weird over the next decade.

LOL if you can't get your own employees to want to you use your product you might have a problem .

I grew up in Metro Detroit. Moved to California in 2015, and while it's been fun... I'm moving back to Michigan (Downtown Detroit/Brush Park) next week.

I certainly used to feel the lack of VC activity in Detroit, but that is also what made the startup scene so ridiculously scrappy. I truly believe constraint breeds innovation, and I miss that aspect of the companies I worked with and helped start in Detroit.

Theres a lot to love and hate about California, but for me the dealbreaker was the price of housing. You shouldn't need to be a Founder with a phat exit or Senior Engineer at FAANG to afford a house... While I myself could probably swing it, why would I want to live there long term if that's the case? I miss having friends and neighbors from different walks of life. Theres a perspective you get from being connected to the greater ecosystem of humans, and that is increasingly evaporating in the Bay. Pretty soon it may only be tech people left. Most of my friends who weren't in tech left long ago.

On a different note, what really excites me about Detroit at this moment is the vast opportunity to build and shape a city rising from the ashes. A friend of mine is starting an eVTOL company and getting a 12k sqft hangar at Detroit City Airport (class charlie, international airport) and it's going to cost less than my SF apartment. Theres actually another eVTOL startup already there that has some hangars in the same building. It's ~10 minutes from Downtown.

Ford is building their EV/Self driving HQ in Corktown. GM is going to be manufacturing their EV's (including the Cruise Origin) at the Factory Zero 10 mins from downtown. Theres a ton of VC moving into the area, and an unbelievable amount of housing developments (~$200 million in brush park alone).

The momentum in Detroit is astounding and exciting, and when I'm ready to start another company it'll absolutely be there.

I think in general people don't understand counter party risk

LOL I built the first version of their android app back in the day. Can't speak to why they've been going after modders, but it's likely from a liability / legal standpoint. At the end of the day I still love their products and currently own an XR (may upgrade to a GT next spring!).

At least for the earlier versions all the info was published as standard BLE descriptors, so building a third party lightweight app for that is fairly straight forward. Not sure what they're doing these days, but if you wanted to investigate LightBlue is a great app for digging into BLE devices ;)