> If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a habit of talking about "competitors", run like hell.

Why? Comparing what the competitors are doing can be a great way to come up with new ideas

because comparing yourself to your competitors will get you a faster horse buggy, not an automobile. if you're in a startup, you should be risking making automobiles. if you want to make faster horse buggies, go work for AT&T.

Good ideas need the right timing to line up. AT&T can afford to keep a research project around until the timing is right where a startup needs to find market fit immediately.

i'm not sure that is true about AT&T. you may be thinking about Bell Labs, which effectively destroyed it's culture in the 90s or early 2000s.

but i take your point to mean there are large companies that have budget to maintain projects that do not have an immediate need to be profitable. and agree that for startups, it's a great idea if you're building things for which a market is emerging. everyone talks about how Steve Jobs is a miracle worker. not to diminish his accomplishments, but he was also very lucky. he wanted to sell apple 2's into a market that was just starting to want to buy apple 2's. i'll give him the iPhone, however. i think he was smart enough to understand the forces were aligning to make a product that your average user would like.

but apple didn't spend 30 years making the iPhone. they had to wait 'til the market was there and manufacturing costs were low enough and bandwidth was available. i'm mostly agreeing w/ you, but i think ideas can weave in and out of companies and organizations. CALO jumped from DARPA to SRI to Apple to Quato and motivated several more startups.

Ah, the mythical secret weakness of all startups: another startup doing the same thing.

of course. how else would they get funded?

And the NASDAQ[0]

[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/481872/how_linux_mastered_wa...

The line of defenses are different. All my Linux applications are either installed via Flatpak (which runs in a sandbox) or via the official package registry (which requires programs to be open source, and has a strong track record)

You're all too generous. The first time Netflix didn't display past 720p in Firefox, I immediately cancelled my subscription (which was paying for the whole family) and redirected everyone to Bitsearch[0] to pirate everything instead. I don't agree the moral or ethical arguments against it either.

[0] Bitsearch uses a distributed hash table (DHT)[1] to find all public tracker content

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

Yea.. our startup greatly overestimated how hard it is to make a good agent loop. Handling exit conditions, command timeouts, context management, UI, etc is surprisingly hard to do seamlessly.

I'm curious which startup, if you wouldn't mind sharing?

For reciprocity, I work at Imbue, and we can also attest to the real work complexities of this domain.

Called Ziva[0], we do AI agents for game development. If you want to jump on a call and discuss strategies, my email is in my bio

https://ziva.sh/

Do you mean they underestimated how hard it is?

No, overestimated. You can make a terrible CC in 200 LoC, but after using it for 3 minutes you'll realize how much more goes into it

Gotta admit, the phrasing tripped me up as well. You underestimated the effort that ultimately went into it

You're not alone, I feel like sometimes I'm on crazy pills. I have benchmarks at work where the top models are plugged into agents, and Gemini 3 is behind Sonnet 4. This aligns closely with my personal usage as well, where Gemini fails to effectively call MCP tools.

But hey, it's cheapish, and competition is competition

What's the subset of users with a VPN but no ublock?

NordVPN users sold by the "anti-hacker" ads?

Actual paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19826

So Gerver’s 1992 curved “sofa” (area ≈ 2.2195) is not just a good guess but actually optimal.

The problem asks for the largest 2D shape that can be slid around a right-angle corner in a unit-width hallway.

Here is the perfect fitting sofa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gerver.svg

I think it would be cool to have a sofa in that shape as a joke. It could go in a room tiled with a single shape non-repeatable pattern.

A very functional sofa joke as it's the optimal shape for moving.

Not really, because it's only optimal in 2d.

Not a problem, we can just shape it like the space covered by rotating the whole thing and make the sofa kind of "bone shaped", then we should be set for 3 dimensions. The only remaining issue would be, where to put the actual sitting area on the bone, but that problem I leave for homework.

3dimensions still allows for more freedom than that though since the couch can stand on end.

I would contend that it's still useful since you'd be able to turn the corner without over-complicating it by getting it into some weird tilt position.

> Not a problem, we can just shape it like the space covered by rotating the whole thing and make the sofa kind of "bone shaped", then we should be set for 3 dimensions.

That might give you a feasible solution, but I doubt it's optimal.

If you've ever moved any furniture at all, you'll notice that it's often much easier to get around corners (or through doorways), if you can turn them sideways.

That's especially easy to imagine with tables, but sofas also count.

There are also sofas that can be easily taken apart. Eg one of our sofas at home, an L-shaped sofa, comes apart into two pieces.

You don’t have to move house many times to realise that yes, we do.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42300382

Tor yes. I even recall seeing a rare use of blockchain for domain names (Namecoin) over a decade ago. But I don't see how Monero helps?

Financial freedom and private transactions. It's also mined on consumer hardware making it far more decentralized than bitcoin.

> The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.

Working at BigTech, this is the answer. ICs need to find their own impact. That's how you get things like Material Design 3 which talked about how "Bold" it made a brand look - "Boldness" is something you can measure with user tests, and designers need something they can point to and call success; even if everyone knows it's stupid.

I agree, but this concept of updating a design every year was actually a business decision. Planned obsolescence. You see cars do it when they update every year with a new look.

It is as much of an actual business strategy as it is a method used to stay relevant in the company.

For any bureaucratic system, the system will slowly transition away from the reason it was put into place and towards self preservation.