Having seen and done this transition I can tell you that companies do very little for innovation compared to university researchers. Companies are exclusively focused on profit, they don’t do the five to ten year moonshot project unless they are already a massive corporation, not a startup, and even then the massive companies want the easiest thing to translate to a product and begin making money. At best they have engineers that make scaling up more practical, and while that is a fun and interesting thing, it is also very straightforward and is something a company has to avoid screwing up, not investing in massively to make it right.

I’ve seen several companies that did literally nothing except swap a couple things on their production line and call it a day. The only transition from research to industry was an IP agreement and a few meetings.

Large companies are not looking for innovation by buying startups, they are usually looking to secure monopolies. Sometimes they want the product and to work it into their own product offerings. This is often a way to vertically integrate more, not innovate. They bring in-house because they see a competitor emerging and want to hedge their bets or because they see a way to take over a market by just doing the same thing. Sometimes it is just a way to hire some employees that seem pretty competent and thereby deprive your competitors. Large companies operate with a monopoly mindset. This is also why Google kills every project that they declare won’t scale into a huge money-maker (they really mean take over a market).

Small companies are often started with the plan of actually making and selling their product long-term but run headfirst into the fact that their industry is dominated by just 3 companies that will gladly do the one-two punch of threatening to bleed you legally with nonsense lawsuits while offering to buy you up. Or, on the flipside, just copying your work and changing it just enough that they know they could bleed you legally even though they have broken IP law. Usually, they would rather just buy you out at less than you are worth but enough to make the VCs happy.

The source of their data says they were using it incorrectly, that it simply does not mean what they reported. I have not gone into exactly what their data is, just that it was reported as total new funded startups and the data provider says, “that’s not what this is”.

It also looks like these numbers might not even be accurate: https://nitter.privacydev.net/NuryVittachi/status/1834747250666508679

I would expect a decrease in VC startups based on the way China is tackling finsnce, though.

I think innovation will happen more through universities and existing large companies. Most research and innovation happens through universities anyways and China is currently having an academia boom.

Companies like Huawei are way up, and domestic consumption is slowly rising.

The metrics here are those most relevant to finance, which is not synonymous with innovation. Startups are notorious money sinks that are only invested in due to a promise of monopoly profits later, basically a gamble. They usually fail, and dramatically. Finance is necessary for private capital investment and liquidity but when it grows too large it becomes parasitic and also tries to dictate policy. The real estate bubble that China is now dealing with is a direct result of financialization and an expectation that it would be “too big to fail” and that real estare finance would get bailed out by government.

China is tackling this issue by limiting the impact of finance on its economy, changing its lending terms and what it guarantees, including not bailing out real estate finance. This has the direct effect of making startups and venture capital less common as they simply can’t make as much money from pure speculation. They don’t have a state-funded safety net for their worst gambles and interest rates are higher.

Overall, this is a good development. China’s finance sector absolutely needed to be limited and it is good for the state to take on a greater role in running companies.

I’m holding out for titanium do I can add it to my EDC loadout and totally dunk on that loser Travis at the office.

If you own the copyright then yes this is 100% legal.

There are already apps that are like this. They usually add a couple features to the paid release so that people feel like they are getting something extra for the money. The good ones will eventually move those features to the open release eventually. However, this incentivizes keeping part of the app closed source so that nobody can just rename and re-release the paid version.

It is 100% up to you for how to handle these tradeoffs. Personally, I think so long as you are principled and ready for some criticism - and can handle it gracefully - getting paid for work that builds your open source app is a very good idea. We don’t all have the luxury of maintaining high quality unpaid side projects!

Traditionally, people like myself get killed due to bad opsec.

That’s true! I’m glad I didn’t say anything like, “the system is corrupt because I’m in the minority”.

PS, the ruling class is a minority.

This is a whole lot of conspiracy bs with no sources provided.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s out in the open. I don’t know what claims you would want sources for. Feel free to ask.

But it includes the usual keywords “the system”, “design”, and “ruling class” so you can get your upvotes from like-minded fellows in your bubble.

You might notice that this is a public community on a non-socialist instance. So, the opposite of what you are saying. Personally, I expected a mix of responses.

Have you considered that politics and economics is a little bit more complicated and a lot of gears make the machine?

Complexity vs. simplicity means nothing in this topic. What matters is identifying dominant powers and the mechanisms by which they function. Many of those mechanisms are somewhat complex, though not that complex that anyone can’t read about them and understand them if they actually want to.

Have you read any socialist theory?

But “the elite pulling the strings” is much easier to understand and you conveniently get an enemy.

Class conflict is actually something that emerges from base social interactions that constitute the primary economic system: how and why we work. The dominant class does have more realized power, by definition, but it is still subordinate to the mechanisms of the economic system itself.

For example, you cannot simply choose to be a nice business owner that pays everyone as much as they deserve. You will, eventually, get outcompeted by the business owners that will keep pay lower and profits higher. While small businesses are still commonly owned by petty tyrants, their loss to big box stores is an example of how a larger mass of profits can be leveraged to destroy the competition (initial low prices), then using monopoly status to earn even more profit by cutting wages and increasing prices.

The political class is just the functionaries of the state that serves the dominant class’s interests. You can call them elite because they personally get a bigger piece of the pie and have power on paper, but they are several rings lower on the hierarchy.

Learning media criticism, history, political economy, and how past groups have organized takes a decent amount of time. Namely, socialist theory. So does unlearning the ideological falsehoods that cloud our ability to think and investigate. And so does recognizing what builds power, what actions are effective, what cooption looks like and how to counter it, etc. So I don’t recommend just doing one thing, but instead working from where you are to be closer to a stronger consciousness. I suppose the closest thing to a single recommendation I can give is humility and curiosity around all of the aforementioned topics and to give people grace IRL when you begin working with an organization.

If you are interested in reading recommendations and info about your thoughts on politics I’d be happy to think of something you might appreciate. Or if you feel like you’re ready for action and are in the US I can recommend some orgs that are reasonably good to “start” with (many stay in them and that is also fine!).

Congress is an organ of the ruling class and always has been. When they (rarely) do something seemingly against ruling class interests, it is still a strategem to best keep the capitalism boat afloat (it tries to sink every 5-10 years).

Sure, Congress is corrupt, but it always has been. The system is working more or less as designed. And if you want to oppose this design, the system is also designed to fight you to the death. And funneling all of your capacity into sheepdog voting is how your masters tell you you should oppose them. So if you want to oppose this system, you must become informed as to how it functions and join up with like-minded individuals to develop actually effective means of resistance.

Privacy is a shield. It is useful to protect against a threat. It doesn’t have to perfectly protect against the threat. But the important thing is to have a threat model and construct your privacy concerns around it.

Ask yourself what you believe will be a threat to you and then criticize those beliefs. Use this self-critical process to decide on your first idea of a threat model.

Piped should build out better error messages so that users know this is a problem with Piped getting the video from YouTube.

Use something like rclone (that can use file change deltas) when you just need to copy files to remotes and feel free to combine it with an incremental backup solutions like Borg or restic or some custom rsync scripting. Example: keep a Borg repository of your laptop or emails or whatever with whatever retention policy you want. Then copy your repository anywhere with rclone or similar.

The only surefire form of privacy is to not store information digitally in the first place, ideally not at all.

But sometimes we do have information that needs storing. And in that case privacy requires that you control the data at rest and encrypt the data at transit. All free cloud services can snoop your data if they really want to. If you value privacy, minimize your use of them.

You should assume that every social network is ride with spying, both for corporate and governmental purposes. For example, the main reason TikTok is currently getting threatened with a banning is because they have a less fed-friendly algorithm, so large masses of people are actually seeing the horrors in Gaza. If you watch the nightly news, you won’t see that content. If you go to YouTube, you won’t see that content. You also will barely see it on Reddit (which literally hired someone that worked at the CIA to be their community manager person lol). Do your best to dissociate your online activity from your personal identity. Use a good VPN that you pay for with cash or a proxy system like a voucher that can’t be traced back to you. Use burner email accounts. Etc etc.

lmao

If you do run local, properly use a firewall to prevent it from phoning home. Or airgap.

Of course!

I think you are confused. The dismissive behavior was not to just give advice and I pointed out what it actually was. And it is not dismissive to meet people where they are at. I think you’re now reaching for some fairly basic defensive behaviors (straw men and even the “I’m rubber your glue” kind of retorts) so I’m going to disengage.

Please do try to interact with others with more empathy.