I agree with Mark Cuban on this. Easy decision and implementation.
1. Taking this money is optional but if you take it you accept the following terms.
2. You will not buy back stock for a period of 12 (?) months after the transaction.
3. For the four quarters following this transaction, you will not reduce your workforce by greater than 5%.
4. Etc.
The article should be entitled "Brave Executive Team is Brilliant."
Brilliant in two ways: (1) they are an ad company that has fairly successfully wrapped itself in a Klingon Cloaking Sheild made up of "open source" and "pro-privacy" atoms; and (2) they did an ICO at a perfect time (peak of hype with BC soaring) and ease of implementation (Etherium). It was so good (bad) that it brought a tear to my eye.
Getting back to the article, I felt that the grade school "Daddy-O" interludes were unnecessary and distracting but I otherwise really liked it. And the illustrations were boss!
In fact, I liked it so much that I wanted to buy the author a coffee. So I clicked the link and...I was taken to some startup payment service that made it a chore to pay $3, so I bailed. I thought that was ironic as that payment site reminded me of Brave. Intermediating a common transaction with useless clutter and therefore foiling it.
So the Brave exec team and founders made a nice chunk of change and have perpetrated a ruse. But, luckily for users, they balanced Karma by producing a mighty-fine browser. Its capabilities rank it among the best.
> I think that “it works but we don’t know why” is appealing to a small slice of well-educated people who are comfortable with complexity and the limits of knowledge, but otherwise off-putting.
Really? So a limited number of intellectual elite are the only people capable of accepting faith-based arguments?
Seems like the opposite of a faith-based argument to say “It works but we don’t know why.” Wouldn’t a faith-based argument typically specify the “why” without evidence. To me what GP is describing sounds more like science in that it wouldn’t be making unjustified claims.
You are missing the point, which, frankly, is exactly the reason business types don't want engineers anywhere near customers. It took me lots of professional coaching and years of experience to stop seeing our products as an engineer.
> The customers of Forth are computer programmers, not carpenters.
Unless the activity being conducted is an academic pursuit, the tools (languages, compilers, editors, etc.) are utterly irrelevant. The customer isn't the programmer. The customer is the one exchanging something of value (typically cash) for a solution to a problem, and usually something that delivers value beyond the mere cost of the thing. The customer is NOT the programmer creating the solution. Far from it. Any software engineer who honestly believes they are the customer ought to be fired as quickly as possible.
> And I, for one, go to Home Depot to buy drill bits (not holes).
The only way that would be true is if you purchase drill bits for display and never use them. If they are used, even once, their purpose is to make a hole.
In other words, the solution one is seeking isn't "I need to own a drill bit", but rather "I need a hole" or "I know I might need a hole in the future".
> If I wanted to buy holes, I'd hire a handyman.
Only if you'd hire a handyman to just come over, drill a hole and go away. Which, of course, would be a very rare and even bizarre use case.
Again, this is missing the point of my parent comment: The discussion of tools and languages often diverts into truly irrelevant minutiae that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what a business exists to deliver: Solutions to customer's problems.
To get back to Forth, it would be like objecting to the use of the language on the grounds that traditional Forth isn't object oriented (in a traditional sense) when all you are trying to build is a simple irrigation controller (or whatever). This is getting lost in the weeds for no reason at all.
What would be a valid objection to using Forth? Oh, there are many, and this coming from someone who loves the language and used it professionally for about a decade. The simplest one I can offer with my business hat on is, the pool of qualified programmers isn't large. Another would be that the library ecosystem is dwarfed when compared with something like Python.
How are these different from objections like "it isn't typed"? Simple: These are real impediments to the delivery of solutions customers need. All the CS theory stuff is irrelevant. The proof is that the language enjoyed commercial application for a very long time, with everything from embedded systems to sophisticated industrial controls and more being developed using Forth. As I said in my parent post, I was involved in a company that sold for USD $20MM and the product was 100% done in Forth. BTW, the first thing the buyers did is convert the codebase to C. Because by that time finding Forth programmers was starting to become very hard.
So, yeah, I would not use Forth or APL today (both languages I love) because this would be a bad business decision. On a technical level you can do anything with these languages, despite whatever limitations they may have. From a business perspective, if you advocate for the customer rather than the engineers, when contrasted to other options, they are not the best idea.
> The real class war is between the 0.1 percent and (at most) the 10 percent—or, more precisely, between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on professional labor.
There is a sharp contrast here, but I don't think it'll be the basis for a war – figuratively or otherwise. But this divide deserves more illumination.
