> We're a squad of hardcore builders between San Francisco and Shenzhen working 996 to build the next personal computer. We're upgrading human intelligence with high bandwidth interfaces. We're transhumanist hackers.
> And we're not just here for a job. We're here for a mission.
This is the worst of SV VC bullshit right here and is antithetical to open sustainable software.
"We're here for a mission" - I'm sure all those VC firms involved are there for the the same mission too, right?
If this goes anywhere or becomes anything, it'll be rug-pulled out of open source.
I don't doubt that they claim to feel that way, and that they feel they'll be the ones who push back against VC profiteering and enshittification.
That just confirms to me that they're in the same position as any of VC backed founder. That's why the VC firm backed them: because they saw an opportunity to profit from someone else's dream.
I would really, really love to revisit this discussion with you and the founders in 5 and 10 years time - I'd be happier if you proved me wrong:)
What we have here is a rare thing - an unvarnished account by an insider of what it took to make a deal with the VC sharks during the dawn of the Internet Age and come out of it with something you could take to the bank. You wont find many other tech business books giving such a detailed account from start to finish. Though it is lacking on the technical side, the view from the 'money guys' is pretty detailed. It is pretty amazing to realize the whole arc of the story is only about two years.. To then leverage his proceeds into some constructive social documentaries like 'Inside Job' is a great second act..
"How do the glasses serve as a dumb camera to the phone": just like a USB camera. USB protocol, or USBIP. "yeah, but what OS" - what OS does a USB webcam need to be a USB webcam? That OS.
"What if you want to use multiple apps?" for a headset that's a window to a phone, you see the phone screen, the phone handles multitasking. Want to switch between apps? Then switch between apps on your phone, and you see the result.
"Do you want to make an app that accesses the microphone?" again, the phone does it. What OS do my bluetooth earphones run to be accessible from my phone?
I agree with what the person you're responding to wants: just an screen/audio interface with my phone. MentraOS is obviously not* aiming to be that, otherwise it wouldn't have any apps at all, especially not things like a "notes" app or any other app I already have on my phone.
The issue is as soon as you start trying to build an app ecosystem, you inevitably create the sort of opportunities business loves to exploit, and then all of a sudden I've got another layer for big tech to try extract stuff from me, when all I wanted was to be able to see my phone screen without having my phone directly in front of me - as someone who uses apps rather than develops them, I don't need another app store or more apps!
*Edit: having read some of their work culture, and the people involved, this isn't a project that's intended to be owned by humans, this is going to become the worst kind of big tech, or nothing.
That seems fair, but then it makes it all feel somewhat tautological: what sort of integration wouldn't aspire to be seamless, other than a beta integration.
A different selection of words wouldn't have lead to this debate, which I think is the point being made.
it makes it all feel somewhat tautological: what sort of integration wouldn't aspire to be seamless
VMware or VirtualBox running within the VMware/Vbox window, as opposed to VMware Unity or VirtualBox Seamless mode. Those allow you to have a window from the guest VM appear on your desktop just like it's a native application running on the host.
That's what seamless means in this context. It's a specific feature, not a general descriptor of your experience with the software as a whole.
A different selection of words wouldn't have lead to this debate, which I think is the point being made.
Seamless is a word with a specific meaning within the context of VMs.
> what sort of integration wouldn't aspire to be seamless
That doesn't make sense to me. Seamlessness isn't an essential feature of any integration, just those that would lend themselves to zero-config deployments. I think the vast majority would require some form of configuration, either sharing credentials, or configuring resource limitations, devices, files and folders...
> And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.
A medium to large size asteroid can cause mass extinction events - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.
The risk of the people responsible for managing the platform messing up and losing some of your data is still a risk in the cloud. This thread has even already had the argument "if the cloud provider goes down, it's not your fault" as a cloud benefit. Either cloud is strong and stable and can't break, or cloud breaks often enough that people will just excuse you for it.
Many people have already had their data destroyed by remote hands replacing the wrong side of a RAID. Nobody's already had their server destroyed by a mass-extincting meteor.
There's a reason semiconductor manufacturing is so highly automated, and it's not labor cost.
Humans err. Computers only err when told. But they'll repeat a task reliably without random mistakes if told what to do by a competent (manufacturing process) engineering organization. Yes it takes more than one engineer.
I think I'm not smart enough for it. I can't really take anything new away from it, mainly just a message of "we're smart people, and trust us when we say smart things are bad. All the smart sounding stuff you learned about how to program from smart sounding people like us? Lol, that's all wrong now."
Okay, I get the cognitive load is bad, so what's the solution?
"Just do simple dumb stuff, duh." Oh, right... Useful.
The problem is never just the code, or the architecture, or the business, or the cognitive load. It's the mismatch of those things against the people expected to work with them.
Walk into a team full of not-simple engineers, and tell them all what they've been doing is wrong, and they need to just write simple code, some of them will fail, some will walk out, and you'll be no closer to a solution.
I wish I knew of the tech world before 20 years ago, where technical roles were long and stable enough for teams to build their own understanding of a suitable level of complexity. Without that, churn means we all have to aim for the lowest common denominator.
> Okay, I get the cognitive load is bad, so what's the solution?
Modularity.
Each component in your system should be a (relatively) simple composition of other (smaller) components, in such a way that each component can be understood as a black box, and is interchangable with any other implementation or the same thing.
> All too often, we end up creating lots of shallow modules, following some vague "a module should be responsible for one, and only one, thing" principle.
This is what I'm talking about: this writing is too smart for me, because I can't take any simple answers from it like "modularity" without feeling another part of the article contradicts it with other smart sounding ways of saying don't listen to smart stuff.
Same here, I left NextDNS because I didn't trust it anymore. I started using it personally in homelab and just found it to be randomly a bit sluggish at times. Saw other similar reports. Tried to get support and failed. I saw it trying to sell itself as business capable DNS, and considered if it would fit in at work. Then I got an e-mail giving 7 days for me to disable and move all my logs out of the EU region. I was working at a large fintech firm at the time, and if a vendor had given us 1 week to rearchitect and figure out a new logging solution for DNS, we would have dropped them immediately due to the massive compliance issues they would have created.
The messaging around the change was very much "FYI we're deleting everything in 7 days in that region whether you're good or not, feel free to do what you want", e.g. creating problems with no interest in helping with solutions to those problems. This would all be fine for a free-tier service, but I was a paying customer. Even as a paying customer though, I paid virtually nothing.
Overall, NextDNS felt like it had the worst possible combination startup, passion project and beer money project features: I paid for it for a couple of years and got fed up because the amount talk about it gave the impression to me there was a fair and growing customer base but NextDNS were missing either the capability or focus to grow the service at the time. I'm conscious they'll be reading this - it was 2 years ago this happened, so maybe things have changed.
In the replies to the reddit thread, I'm seeing a lot of people they tell me they moved to Control D. Some people had complaints about latency of the service and other factors, as it seems Control D doesn't have very extensive worldwide coverage.
But, it definitely seems to be the superior option. It's $40 a year more for the full plan, which is unfortunate, but if they offer more options, better customer support and etc it is probably worth it. NextDNS is $20 and standard Control D is the same price. NextDNS does work, but there is seemingly no support whatsoever.
I came across a Stacksocial coupon that offers $40/yr for the standard plan, so I'm tempted between the two options. The standard option doesn't offer changing location via DNS. That may not be important if you're already using a DNS, but it would be nice to have.
I bought a RPi5 with the intention of turning it into a PiHole but never got around to it, and I don't believe you can use your PiHole's DNS outside of your LAN (for example, if you use it on your mobile device and leave your local wifi, it can't connect to it's local IP).
This was a few years ago for me. It also aligned with my personal pendulum swinging back from cloud to on prem.
I switched to local pihole. I didn't really like it though, it felt a bit too toy-like. I then switched to adguard home, and I still use it. I've found it faster, easier and just generally more mature feeling than pihole.
Regarding using it away from local area network, I use tailscale (via selfhosting headscale) and then have adguard home joined on that, with the tailscale IP for adguard set as the DNS server for all my tailscale client devices. The only downside with this I personally face is it can be a little hit-and-miss changing networks on some older versions of Android.
Start pressing buttons and you'll see even more weird claims that most sane Brits won't recognise. This is a weird website that probably shouldn't be given much time.
Sounds more like you live in a better area then he does. And by better I mean with less issues, not richer necessarily.
While I admit that I don't live in the UK, I suspect it's similar to my experience from over the sea in Hamburg. I've recently moved there into a district with >50% migrants for roughly 3 yrs - not really expecting anything as I was still positive about everything.
Finding apartment listings in the online portals explicitly saying they will only allow Muslims was surprising to me, but I ignored it thinking, whatever.
Well, after moving into another apartment in the same area was an eye opener for me.
Really, I'm frankly surprised there are people still in denial how bad it's gotten. Well, not really surprised. I mean I was one of them in 2021.
I think this is a fair and valuable comment. Only part I think could be more nuanced is:
> The fact that I wouldn't trust any LLM to touch any of my code in those real world cases makes me think that most people who are touting them are not, in fact, writing code at the same level or doing the same job I do. Or understand it very well.
I agree with this specifically for agentic LLM use. However, I've personally increased my code speed and quality with LLMs for sure using purely local models as a really fancy auto complete for 1 or 2 lines at a time.
The rest of your comment is good, bit the last paragraph to me reads like someone inexperienced with LLMs looking to find excuses to justify not being productive with them, when others clearly are. Sorry.
This makes me want to say "is nothing sacred?!" I get your point from a pragmatic: this is the world we live in, work with it, not against it.
I think you need to scope this approach when suggesting it though, since it's effectively "a policy has been broken by a company, but we can't undo it, so lets just accept it and let them get on with it" which doesn't seem like it'll lead to a better world.
I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue".
> I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue".
I fully agree, and that's IMO the core-issue here: This strong-arm approach of just forcing the problem to be solved in your favor by scaling as fast as possible and then pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course, insisting that the other side should be pragmatic about this.
I don't remember this was a working strategy in the past (imagine a car-company just accelerating sales of a faulty car to scale THEIR issue and avoid having to do a recall), but nowadays it could even be turned into a geopolitical topic...
I instinctively want to agree with you here and bemoan the state and directions of the world. But if I really think about it, it's been happening my entire life. I'm mid 30's now. I assume someone older than me would have had the same experience of it happening their entire life.
You're right though, it's crappy and merits a lot of geopolitical reflection. But I suspect it goes back millenia and is a manifestation of basic evolutionary biology with the business world, rather than anything that can be solved/fixed.
And we've gone full circle about the balance of working for/against humanity in the name of progress.
The EPA is only two decades older than you, and it enforced a bunch of brand new regulation on all the existing companies. There used to be a willingness to actually govern rather than cede everything to corporate interest.
I'm a bit older now, and while there has always been corporate meddling in public decision-making (which is unavoidable and also somewhat needed to help steer the boat a bit in some situations), the economic effort a company has to invest rectify wrongdoing mainly shaped the amount of spending for legal counseling and lobbying, but it didn't directly shape a ruling.
Today, environmental/privacy/safety laws are suddenly not that strict anymore, because now we naturally need to also take economic interests of the violating company into account.
So you might end up in a situation where an official body will officially rule that the harmed party may be right, but needs to be pragmatic about its needs just because of the increased inconvenience it would create for the opposing party if THEY would have to change their way.
In my experience, this was not the case 15 years ago.
It’s the definition of ‘too big to fail’, and it’s been a viable and effective strategy… for ever? Near as I can tell. He’ll, the Fed even got created because of the time the whole US economy cratered in the early 20th century and one man was the one whole bailed out the whole country.
Given that the offending entity is owned by the world's richest man certainly their 'pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course' should be dismissed instantly without a second thought.
> Life at Mentra
> We're a squad of hardcore builders between San Francisco and Shenzhen working 996 to build the next personal computer. We're upgrading human intelligence with high bandwidth interfaces. We're transhumanist hackers.
> And we're not just here for a job. We're here for a mission.
This is the worst of SV VC bullshit right here and is antithetical to open sustainable software.
"We're here for a mission" - I'm sure all those VC firms involved are there for the the same mission too, right?
If this goes anywhere or becomes anything, it'll be rug-pulled out of open source.
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