Understandable

15 years ago an Israeli company was able to manufacture fake DNA evidence https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html

I think the backlash was more against everything being sent to a cloud server where Microsoft can see everything you do.

agreed, the backlash was the cloud + always-on , not the idea itself. thats basically why i only bothered building the local version.

If the I in AIPAC stood for Italian they would call it a Mafia organisation.

The new cold war is weird.

Burning through $7m in 9 months? That's an impressive amount of avocado toast.

$7m actually isn't a whole lot, especially if they hired a (larger) engineering team. Assuming their cali based, that's easily 150-200k per engineer, a team of 20 easily eats through that. Idk the specifics, but I don't the organization was fradulent, it could also be that they're going commercial and no longer want to maintain their oss stack

150-200k is also just the employee’s salary, the actual cost to the company is significantly higher, you need to multiply that by something like 1.5 to get the fully loaded cost, people are expensive!

20 engineers would be incredibly aggressive growth for such a young company with that amount of capital, no?

The real number is probably closer to ~13 engineers, because it costs a company the worker's salary _again_ for benefits, payroll taxes, etc., etc.

Our team was much smaller. We didn't spend all the capital.

Tokenmaxxing makes startups even leakier if they don't find token traction.

if you hire 20 engineers with your seed round you are either very confident you'll be able to use them to justify another raise soon

or you're incompetent

> very confident you'll be able to use them to justify another raise soon

That is indeed how the VC funding game is played. If you don't raise another round, you are dead anyway, so you spend down your seed round to try and justify that following round...

I thought ai was writing all the code. What do they need engineers for?

We raised in 2024 and only burned through ~$3m of it, mostly on salaries to support a small team.

And AI tokens

That would be a lot still. That’s a lot of money.

I’d bet on extreme irresponsibility.

> On the contrary, the existence of a mismanaged organization nominally dedicated to a given purpose often prevents its nominal goal from being achieved

This gives rise to another type of person within an organisation. Someone opposed to the goals of the organisation, and who understands this all too well.

It's amazing how Trump and Bibi manage to embody the absolute worst stereotypes of their respective cultures. There's something almost Jungian about it.

Don't say that he's hypocritical

Say rather that he's apolitical

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

Some have harsh words for this man of renown

But some think our attitude

Should be one of gratitude

Like the widows and cripples in old London town

Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

It's from the old Tom Lehrer song, "Wernher von Braun."

I've never seen someone take it as a suggestion before.

It's really hard for me to feel sorry for Disney here. Is it possible for both sides to lose a lawsuit?

It's not about feeling bad for Disney. Disney is tremendously powerful, so if the federal government can coerce them to do whatever the federal government wants, that has massive widespread effects for everyone. It creates an environment in which powerful corporations are expected to act as political enforcers, creating a monoculture of ideas and suppressing dissent.