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It's the phones dude. It's literally just the phones. Get rid of the phones and you fix it.

Old geezer take: If you're referring to smart phones - social engagement in the US was already headed down 5 decades before those were invented. I blame TV.

Indeed, TV enabled millions of people to laugh at the same joke simultaneously, each sitting alone on their own sofa.


This is awesome! I’ve been looking for a way to batch export my notes out of Apple notes, will this work for that purpose?

I totally agree with you that most notes apps miss the mark. I’m working on one now which I hope satisfies the same requirements as Apple notes(dead simple, iCloud sync, free) but has some things I want (improved search, first class markdown support).

I’ve been using it as my daily driver for a while, but it’s not quite ready for other users yet. I wrote a bit about it in my year in review[1] under the section “Not Another Notes App!”.

1. https://emmettmcdow.com/posts/2025-in-review


What an awesome project! That's a great idea and it could easily incorporate it, I'd love to help out, let's talk(:

Came here to find out exactly this!

This is an awesome tool. Would love to get started in 2026 with all my notes (without an id) being synced to a markdown folder / repo


Is any company actually doing this? I haven’t heard of anyone that has this setup. Maybe contract work, but never a full time employee working 4 days.


It's not unheard of here in Sweden, not common but I know a couple of people here and there.


This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).

Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.


A few things: In tourist areas they will feel comfortable talking about the protests/reprisal because they get inundated by American tourists wanting to ask them about it. "It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for" -> Right, Tiananmen square has no stigma at all, but that is different from the 1989 incident.

If you post about the 1989 incident on Weibo, it will absolutely get removed and you might get the local police visiting you -- depending on how much time they have on their hands and how incendiary your post was.


> many people speak negatively of the CCP

Probably true. Right up to the point where they attract a little too much attention, or annoy the wrong party official. Then all that they said becomes evidence of their crimes.


From the comments here it sounds like most people think the amount Anthropic paid for the company was probably not much more than the VC funding which Bun raised.

How would the payout split work? It wouldn’t seem fair to the investors if the founder profited X million while the investors get their original money returned. I understand VC has the expectation that 99 out of 100 of investments will net them no money. But what happens in the cases where money is made, it just isn’t profitable for the VC firm.

What’s to stop everyone from doing this? Besides integrity, why shouldn’t every founder just cash out when the payout is life-changing?

Is there usually some clause in the agreements like “if you do not return X% profit, the founder forfeits his or her equity back to the shareholders”?


All VC's have preferred shares, meaning in case of liquation like now, they get their investment back, and then the remainder gets shared.

Additionally, depending on round, they also have multiples, like 2x meaning they get at least 2x their investment before anyone else gets anything


Probably not much more than their valuation, which is the key difference since the investor will still get a net return.


Super cool!


Why does Steam/Valve care so much about Linux? I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix. But developer experience isn’t a good business justification.


It's because Valve's entire business model is currently reliant on Microsoft not being emboldened to try and lock down software downloads to only occur through the Microsoft Store.

15 or so years ago, Microsoft started making moves in that direction and Valve immediately started trying to build and sell Linux based gaming machines in order to try and protect themselves somewhat from Microsoft. Those Linux gaming machines (Steam Machines 1.0) were a massive failure because they were expensive, and had very very limited game support.

Valve then spent around a decade improving Wine, building Proton, and designing the SteamDeck, which was a great success for them and is now making lots of people take Linux seriously for gaming. Now they're moving up the value chain and trying to make Linux the go-to place for PC gaming.

They've still got a big battle ahead of them, but already Linux users are around 4% of active Steam users, and the Linux experience is rapidly improving. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems to be bleeding goodwill, and is actively pissing off a huge amount of their Windows audience while simultaneously giving up on Xbox, so this is really perfect timing for Valve now.


They don't want Microsoft to be able to use its control of the OS to push them out. It's not the Valve needs to control the OS, it's that they don't want a company that views them as a competitor to have said control. Linux ensures that they have protection from that.


The business justification is called commoditizing your complement. https://gwern.net/complement is a good article about it.


You can basically tailor the OS specifically for the device and remove unneeded bloat. Also the threat of Microsoft and Windows as mentioned by other users. The introduction of the Microsoft Store with Windows 8 basically kicked off this whole move for Valve. While it took over a decade of work, its paying great dividends now.


Probably to keep MS from locking down gaming on Windows and cutting out Valve as distributor.

Add to that, Windows isn't usable on 10ftUI or really anything that is not fully-controlled (think ATMs) or desktop with kb/m.


>I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix.

That's not true. In the 2025 SO survey, both Windows is the most used OS for developers, for both professional and for personal use.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-operating-...


Lots of devs prefer Linux but are forced to used Windows by their employers. So both can be true at the same time.


The survey accounts for personal use as well. If this was the case, I'd expect the personal Linux use be higher than the professional use.


Used != Prefer


Even for personal use? If devs preferred Linux so much, I'd expect them to use it at least in their own time. But, what the stats say is that people use Win even more when it comes to personal devices, and Linux, not even a tenth of a percent. If anything, that looks like that dev don't prefer Linux. They use when the employer pushes it onto them, but not anywhere else.


The problem is that many games and software still only work on windows.


Is that why developers don't prefer Linux?


Probably because Steam doesn't want to sell an Xbox and Microsoft won't license Windows to be rebranded.


why wouldn't you use linux when you are shipping your own, custom, purpose-built device?


For starters, they can't really customize Windows for the devices they release.


I’ve used both approaches and I can’t disagree more. Writing code first might feel faster but it isn’t. It’s great for surface level issues but just muddies the waters for any consequential feature.

Measure(communicate) twice, cut(build) once.


IMO this is very dependent on the risk of cutting once, so to speak. I'd imagine that at PostHog, the idea is there's little risk of cutting many times - iterating - and more damage is done by the measuring taking far too long.


This is true but there is another cost. If you carelessly write you can end up with a system which is a mountain of bandaid fixes; an incoherent and unmaintainable mess.


I really want to choose Phoenix, but I can't get over the fact that LiveView is front-and-center. The whole web-socket model just seems so brittle to me.


Although I agree that LiveView sucks up too much air in the ecosystem, you can just ignore that and develop web apps the standard ways of you want.


Oh ok. Is it still worth learning without LiveView? E.g. in my case I’m much more proficient in Python. Is it worth the jump, over something like Django?


Yes because Elixir is such a nice language.

In every language there are sharp edges or dirty corners that are just annoying once you hit them. JavaScript and Php are full of inconsistencies, Ruby and Python are nice and the surface but once you dive into meta programming, OOP and mutability complex code bases are just impossible to trust/reason about their correctness. Rust, C++, C#, F#, Java... I could go on.

In my opinion Elixir just hits the sweet spot of good design. After multiple years using it there comes nothing to my mind that I find ugly or annoying.

Sure there are other languages that are quiet nice on paper but often they lack the ecosystem to let you just build production ready stuff. The Elixir ecosystem is also not that large, but large enough for quickly building a web app or composing useful automation pipelines.


Definitely, Phoenix is way more streamlined than Django/Rails. Even if you jump to other language/framework, it'll teach a lot how to built stuff due to good defaults and project structure. Also simpler too. I remember spending hours trying to figure out how to use specific method and where is it coming from in Rails. In Elixir/Phoenix there's very few "import"s in use (single file you can inspect and modify), non hidden state. You see Foo.bar("some argument") and you know you don't need anything else to understand what it does. Rails is very magical in this sense, Django as well, a bit


Depends on how much you value the language you are using. Elixir can be quite a bit more elegant than Python.


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