Premise: there's people that will try to game and cheat on anything that's important, including democratic elections. No matter your voting method, those people will exist.
Solution: the basic unit (paper ballot in this case) can be understood by any adult with basic education, which means anyone can detect cheating, not just a technical wizard. The only skill you need is reading.
Give me a solution that follows the same principle and I'd consider it.
Nobody cares about results coming faster except journalists that have to fill 2-3 TV hours with nonsense until there's some numbers.
No engineer that's worth of the title would advocate for electronic voting -- unless they're in the business of selling electronic voting. See the Premise.
Im not sure all paper ballets means delayed election results. Sure, it used to take days or weeks 100 years ago, but the only factor now is the counting.
Your advantage in this case, now or 10 years ago, is that this is simply not true.
If your business is "a flashlight app", yeah, eventually they'll copy it (as it happened). However they'll take an unusual long time to do that simple thing (as it also happened).
Why? Because everything at big companies is a political game, full of internal conflicts, multiple priorities, non-collaborative teams, self-interest, promotion games, and a bunch of other things not really related to build the thing in question. It very rarely has anything to do with how fast the code can be written.
If your business is good enough and becomes something more than "a piece of software", and solves a problem, becomes a brand, has great user feedback... that's not something you can "copy in no time".
Don’t worry big companies still can’t copy anything quickly, even with AI. Why? Because before they can ship a single feature, they’ll need to schedule 42 alignment meetings, debate AI-generated slide decks, and log their “strategic pivots” into an AI-curated Jira board.
The real moat isn’t just code it’s speed, focus, user trust, and the ability to actually ship. Those are things bloated orgs struggle with, with or without AI. If you’re solving a real problem and building a real brand, you’re already ahead.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact I think the exact opposite of the original statement might be true: Find a product made by a big corporation that is a great concept but has clearly suffered from an internal shitshow of a team for some time, and copy it. If other corporations are sloppily copying it - even better. That just means the product has actual market fit.
Every single org I’ve seen using teams (sample size of 4-5 orgs) uses it because it came for free. And every one of them also got slack and paid for it.
That says everything about how shitty Teams STILL is. MS still hasn’t improved it much from the steady state turd that it’s been a few years ago.
It’s so funny. My company is basically merger hell and we have both Teams and Slack for similar reasons.
One of the more important acquired companies with a cash cow product basically refused to move to Teams because they hate it and concocted a reason that we just had to keep it.
The reason was total BS but it was crafted to appeal to the higher-ups, and it worked, because nobody was really going to fight over less than ten bucks per person per month.
If, knowing what you know now, you could go back in time and be the one to create Slack would you not do it? Even if everyone is using Teams now (they're not), it took a really long time to show up that Slack's founders were able to capitalize on.
The change in the software landscape today is the apparent ability to develop a competitor faster thanks to LLMs. But, as the parent points out, the bottleneck was never code writing. It was waiting on the people involved to get past their egos. LLMs have done nothing to change that.
Nobody really likes Teams, but it does seem to have more features than Slack in terms of integration with the rest of Microsoft's office software ecosystem. It's nice to be able to open up and edit Word/PowerPoint/Excel documents directly, view the Outlook calendar directly, etc. It is also integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive for file storage. Teams had video calls before Slack as well IIRC.
Teams, Slack and Discord all seem to be built as clunky web apps; but my experience is that Discord seems to work slightly better than Slack, which in turn works slightly better than Teams.
That’s a whole lot of ifs. At the end of this long road filled with if’s, what are the chances that he can have a profit large enough to overcome the opportunity cost of not just working as an enterprise dev in a 2nd tier city and have continuing profits or have a meaningful exit?
There's not a loneliness epidemic, there's a selfishness epidemic. Nobody does anything for anyone anymore (unless there's money involved, of course).
That's the reason people is alone, avoids having kids or dealing with other people's stuff that could disrupt their overly comfortable western way of life.
Even people that's not that selfish is operating in that environment.
Sorry but this makes no sense. Socializing is not an act of kindness, generally - people mostly do it because they want to. And people have always been selfish.
All Ring subscribers were surprised with unexpected charges for "AI Pro" that they didn't opt into and weren't accounting for.
What happened: an internal billing migration into newer subscription plans (not unusual) didn't account for proration charges into higher tier plans and overly charged customers.
What REALLY happened: the original engineering team for Ring subscriptions was fully laid off around mid 2025 and replaced by way cheaper "engineering" personnel. This is probably the first "big launch" of that new team.
Amazon will write this off as cost of doing business and compensate "money saved on not having really good engineers" with "money lost because of incompetence", and I'm pretty sure it'll be on the negative this time. Which is also not unusual (as of late at least).
This is making a few statements that aren't in the article (entire users base, layoffs, migrations). Happy to reply to questions privately.
May rampant depression everywhere be caused by not the lack of exercise, but because of life becoming overly sedentary?
30 years ago moving your body wasn't going to the gym, it was part of everyday life. Staying 2 hours nonstop in front on the screen was to watch a movie, and maybe done a couple times a week, tops.
Now we just deliver 3 tomatoes to our doorstep to avoid going out.
I'm kind of with you on this one. 12yo is old enough to understand the rules (assuming they were clearly set) and if he/she was willingly communicating with a stranger, that phone should get the hammer with no replacement whatsoever. I've seen this done, it works.
I am not even sure where you get "smashing a device violently in front of a child" comes from. He said gets the hammer as in he would perma destroy it.
Anyway I tend to agree for the most part anyway. I was just making a guess about your age irl based on what you said. However some other data actually indicates you are likely gen-x.
What I believe the author did was instead of teaching their child that they may not talk to strangers, they believed there just is a magic button to have these strangers not exist.
You can't control or decide what predators will do. And very likely won't be able to imagine the extent of every single of their convoluted predatory practices by yourself.
So instead of trying to cover every possible theoretical danger, setting clear rules and boundaries with your kid sounds like a way more sensible and pragmatic approach.
And nobody said kids should be punished or held fully accountable on their first mistake.
The comment section seems to be divided between "don't police your children" and "absolutely police everything your children do".
Parental controls are absolutely necessary, yet they won't be enough by themselves. Payment systems are really robust but there's still fraud. If there's prey, there will be predators.
Education and clear rules are absolutely necessary, yet they won't be enough by themselves. There's people that's very evil and also very clever. You can educate and trust your 12yo to understand 80% of it, yet for the remaining 20% you have to be there.
And, oh boy, the issue about parental controls being incredibly complicated is 100% by design. Simple and sensible parental controls would make exploitative business models like Roblox go bankrupt overnight.
That's correct. The current state of parental controls is compliance (the option exists somewhere, good luck finding it, maybe it even works), not usefulness.
The author casually mentions this but basically the main reason through history to build communities is the existence of kids, which he literally decided not to have.
I'm the opposite, I don't like or want a social life, I live comfortably, but by having kids I have no other choice than to participate in a bunch of communities just as a byproduct of trying to be a good dad.
Even the communities anyone participates today were likely built around kids in a past time.
The rest of the article is just trying to overcompensate for the decision of not having children.
I thought "The Data Scarcity Problem" from the article is very well known to us engineers?
It's where the pulleys of a very sophisticated statistical machine start to show, and the claims about intelligence start to crumble.
Reason AI is great for boilerplate (because it's been done a million times) and not so great for specifics (even if they're specifics in a popular language).
Solution: the basic unit (paper ballot in this case) can be understood by any adult with basic education, which means anyone can detect cheating, not just a technical wizard. The only skill you need is reading.
Give me a solution that follows the same principle and I'd consider it.
Nobody cares about results coming faster except journalists that have to fill 2-3 TV hours with nonsense until there's some numbers.
No engineer that's worth of the title would advocate for electronic voting -- unless they're in the business of selling electronic voting. See the Premise.
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