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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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 ;)

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

When I moved to the bay area working at FB/Google was something I held in high regard and was a career goal of mine. Now I get hit up by recruiters from them often... and I don't message them back. It hurts thinking about how much money I leave on the table by not working there, but I just don't think if I could live with myself if I became a contributing member of their dystopian nightmare machine.

It all starts with the people who work there. If you work at google or facebook, you're part of it. You're culpable. It's not like I don't understand the calculus and not like the right dollar amount wouldn't corrupt my position as well, but I wish more people were honest/forthright about it. You're a storm trooper.