I miss Jobs. He was the one all these tech founders wanted to be. And Job, for all his faults always really cared about the product he made.
I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
That depends on the structure and scale of the sale. Our local library sells most of the books at the biannual sales. Granted, many of those sell for very little; prices decline over several weeks so the things discarded wouldn't sell even for pennies.
I think some people are missing the point here. There is an age where it makes sense to get your kid some kind of connectivity device, but you don’t want to get them a smart phone so you either get them an over priced dumb phone or kids phone or you could get them the Apple Watch. It allows them to call you for pickup and maybe text a few friends, but is inconvenient enough they won’t sit and stare at it all day.
Unfortunately it's not limited to the trendy topics. For example there is a huge amount of factually wrong comments on the topic of npm vulnerabilities. I'm sure it's the same on topics I know less about.
I think there are also people who understand the technology but overestimate potential impact. I remember someone at the Apple Vision Pro announcement arguing that this would be one of Apple’s biggest products and everyone would want them for taking photos and videos of their kids birthdays and such because it would be so much more natural than pulling out a camera and they just couldn’t be talked out of it.
Sometimes a technology can be really cool and never catch on. Sometimes a technology can be really popular anbd even world changing and never make much if any money.
One of the reasons my account is so young is that I went through each of those on HN and decided fuck it and nuked my credentials so I don’t have to stare at it.
Effectively it is solely owned by Elon and other people have an equity stake. This is another huge risk. You have to trust Elon not to get distracted and decide to hard pivot to something else.
Look at Tesla and their hard pivot to humanoid robots. He is all in on robots which about a dozen other companies already make and are largely unprofitable in making. He is betting AI rapidly improves in a way that allows robots to become rapidly more useful and there is zero evidence that is feasible in the next 5 - 10 years.
By what metric would you consider the AI market undervalued?
How do you value the AI market? Sometimes inventions change the world and companies struggle to make money. Airlines and the entire aerospace struggle to make money but no one can doubt airplanes are one of the biggest changes an inventions in human history.
I like to look at the memory I bought a little less than a year ago which has gone from $300 at time of purchase in summer 2025 to $1250 to $1500 today. Absolute insanity.
Not an easy thing to gauge. X/Twitter stopped publishing MAUs after the acquisition.
External estimates vary, some point to growth, some to stagnation. We know that revenue suffered. LOTS of partisan and emotional opinions for either.
Google trends does paint a bleak picture for X but I am also questioning how much google itself can gauge that after LLMs exploded in popularity.
Anecdotally I did notice that references and embeds to X are way less prominent and common than before. My usual news used to be filled with them. My consumption of the platform also plummeted after not being able to read threads when not logged, its much harder for me to get drawn into it.
Still without data, I would be surprised if the changes to verification and logged out access did not massively hurt new adoption. With tiktoks prevalence amongst a new generation I would bet its a matter of time before X gets grouped to tumbler/facebook, not dead, but way past its peak and cultural relevance. If that has not already happened.
Anecdata: Mastodon now has witty, un-earnest comments semi-regularly. And I have learned of maybe ten percent of breaking news things in the last three months on Mastodon via links that weren’t just to twitter.
Impact in the zeitgeist. Twitter was everywhere. Regularly referenced on live news television statins. Was considered a major news source. Shows had segments dedicated to it. Everyone and every brand had a Twitter. That is not the case today. Not by a long shot.
I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
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