I happen to live in San Francisco and I have never heard of Kyte. So, I'm not surprised they failed.
We have so many transportation startups founded here, Uber, Lyft, Getaround, Turo, Shift (RIP), and on and on. But never heard of Kyte!
Crypto is demonstrably NOT a ponzi scheme though. It's decentralized, has no leader, nobody to collect money at "the top", and no rug to pull.
That is why I said "analogous to a Ponzi scheme". In fact, the creation of a "distributed Ponzi scheme" may be the true innovation of crypto.
And haven't you got the memo, crypto isn't a currency anymore, hasn't been for a while. Now it's a "store of value" and an "investment".
Crypto is a trip. It generates no yield, has very little real-world use (beyond facilitating crime), and is a negative sum game.
Crypto requires real money to operate (a lot of custom chips are playing "guess the number" simultaneously), so the net amount of money coming OUT of crypto is necessarily less than the amount of money being invested in crypto.
In other words, the average return on crypto has to be less than 1. You have benefited personally, but that has come at the expense of others who came after (analogous to a Ponzi scheme). Crypto generates no value, so you just got taken out of the trade with new money.
It's all very interesting.
AGI is most certainly jargon. AI first began development in the 1950s and many goals of AI have been achieved. John McCarthy (of the Stanford AI Lab, and one of the field's founders) used to joke that once something was achieved by AI, it wasn't considered AI anymore.
Beating a chess master was once thought unthinkable but it happened almost 30 years ago. Similarly, many key AI focus areas, such as natural language processing and machine translation have made enormous strides just in the last two decades. Of course LLM's are AI. They are a powerful (but clearly overhyped) application of deep convolutional neural nets.
The "AGI" phrase is *more* a marketing term than "AI" is these days. In fact, the meaning of AGI is precisely what is expedient in the moment for whatever snake oil salesman is using it at the time.
I ended up duel booting Mandrake on my home PC and learned a ton.
Who won?
Certainly not me.
This makes me a bit sad, and makes me feel old.
I learned so much attending a few USENIX meetings in the mid 90s. I was late to using Linux on my own (I used HP-UX for my day job and that was enough) but heard so much about USENIX that I ended up duel booting Mandrake on my home PC and learned a ton.
I understand this has been less important as the world moves on, but I do miss the old days when Unix was king of the business and research worlds and grubby PCs and Macs were for the unwashed masses.
Now everybody uses Linux or BSD whether they know it or not.
SARCASM
Just another of the free services I offer.
(sign behind the counter of my local pet store).
Another good one, is an urn behind the counter that is labeled "Ashes of Difficult Customers".
It's wild that when you give consumers a chance to consume legally without squeezing them like a grape, they respond by purchasing your product!
Who knew?
I happen to be a Senior Director and I'm constantly pushing back on my VP about turning the screws on the return to work thing.
There are undoubtedly some tasks that are better done in person, but a "one-size-fits-all" approach is just stupid.
In my own case, I got a lot MORE done when I was remote, because I mostly used my saved commute time to work. I also got more family time.
I was fitter, happier, and more productive.
No we are making people upset and lowering productivity. Managing is hard, but managing by seeing who is sitting in their chair is awful. If you can't manage people on their objectives, then we have no business being a manager.
Her Board of directors was more like a Democrat political appointment group that knowledgable people guiding a tech heavy company.
This is totally disingenuous. There was a mix of Democrats and Republicans on the board along with a lot of CEOs who lean heavily conservative (even though they sometimes go along with performative progressive stuff if they think that is the way the wind is blowing).
Henry Kissinger, William Perry, Bill Frist, James Mattis, and Gary Roughhead? That's a Democrat political appointment group to you?
Some of her biggest investors were Rupert Murdoch, Betty De Vos, and Larry Ellison.
This was corruption and fraud. Not political.
Great, if our oligarchs can't compete fairly, let's criminalize the competition!
Yay for US innovation!
Broadcom doesn't care. The revenue they lose from companies leaving will be more than offset than the revenue they squeeze out of companies that can't so easily leave.
Broadcom knows that VMware doesn't have much of a moat anymore so Hock has decided it is time to kill the Golden Goose.
It's brutal but it will likely maximize Broadcom's return on their purchase of VMware.
Clearly Hock buys into the maxim that the only thing that matters is increasing shareholder value. No other stakeholders matter.
Is that the same Microsoft CEO who blew billions of dollars on the Metaverse?
I got laid off from a mid-level position in a Fortune 500 company during the Great Financial Crisis (my whole team was cut).
I got a generous severance package (5 months) if I signed a document that said that I couldn't disparage the company or sue for wrongful termination.
Interesting, I was technically still employed by them while I was receiving my severance. So, I was getting my salary but couldn't get unemployment. If I got a new job it stopped.
When I finally found a new job (it was tough back then!) I had them put off the starting date to almost exactly 5 months of my layoff, so I didn't skip a beat (and I was technically never unemployed).
Records have been kept since 1850. Please see:
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin
