Yes, the most grounded take I’ve read on HN so far
How I wish I could divulge details of what we’ve built, nay, shipped in the last 6 months - it would sound completely unbelievable to this audience and come with a host of accusations
But it’s true - the tide hasn’t risen all ships the same though. Some engineers have become absolute monsters - things that used to take a month get done in days. Features that used to be prioritized on the order of weeks are done way faster.
Some engineers though? Even high performance ones have gone productive to bottom 25% by some measures
Why? Because it is a skill and it doesn’t come naturally to everyone
So many may sayers everywhere talking about more code less software, mistakes by ai with disastrous consequences- yet I’ve seen some remarkable stuff with my own two eyes. It’s a crazy time to be in this business, it’s awesome to be wowed everyday by what someone was able to do
I'll tell you what i wouldn't get - if you have an asus router, i'd steer clear of merlin
They leave a bunch of data sharing options built in and on by default with no warning, acknowledgement, etc and I suspect it's why asus lets the project continue to run
If you've ever worked at a startup, you're probably familiar with the fact that no one gives a crap about this type of stuff early on
The hell with pretty much anything, the only thing that matters is revenue
People only start to care about this after the fact if you've grown to large enough size
If you think stuff like this or right to be deleted stuff is moving the needle anywhere but at the biggest companies, you've been misled
That's the real painful truth of this stuff, most of the time it's just lip service anyway
Wth is anyone going to do anyway? Go through a resource-draining lawsuit against a 20 person company where it will take a year of discovery just to maybe-sort-of prove they've been mishandling your data?
It's going to take some pretty radical new laws for this type of stuff to ever have any meaningful impact
My biggest concern is what are we going to do when these appliances come with their own SIM card
Right now I don’t care, I just never plug anything into my network
I don’t want to have to mod all my shit just to remove data collection stuff this way
Cars already do this and it’s a bitch to disable, can’t imagine having to do it every time I buy a blender, coffee maker, knife sharpener, tv, light bulb, speakers etc etc
On the other hand, when they have their own SIM card, they cannot scan or listen on your local network, so there wouldn't be much analytics to collect, except when you make your coffee I guess. Embedded SIM cards would especially be nefarious for devices like TVs. But I think most manufacturers prefer WiFi by far (more data to collect) and most customers just connect their devices to WiFi without even thinking about it.
I agree with you for sure, but fwiw there’s a simpler alternate explanation, or at least there’s another way of saying the same thing
I’ve asked at rapidlu growing unicorns where I’ve worked “why don’t we ipo” and the big wigs every time just say, “why?”
If the original point of the ipo was to raise money and now you can do that privately, it stands to reason that a simple explanation might be that it’s not worth the hassle until the VC’s say they want their money back
The problem is that this is the entry point to do more nefarious things later
Companies love to boil the frog - introduce something and later jack up the price or take something else away or something like that
I at least am always weary of new stuff like this
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