Reading between the lines of Alphabet’s lawsuit against Uber. I think they are implying (and intend to prove in discovery) that Anthony Levandowski arranged with Uber to:
- Steal LiDAR and other self-driving component designs from Waymo
- Start Otto as a plausible corporate vehicle for developing the self-driving technology
- Acquire Otto for $680 million
Man, I wish all of the culture and law submissions were this well-sourced and written. It’d make me a lot less grumpy. :)
I wish most of the ‘culture’ submissions were not submitted at all. ‘culture’ seems to be a catch-all for anything non-technical where someone wants to boast their opinion as fact.
You can filter out stories with culture tags if you want? https://lobste.rs/filters
That doesn’t really work if you are not completely against all ‘culture’ submissions. I happen to agree. Some are good, maybe most I wish weren’t posted.
I really wish there was a “Startup and SV News” category to filter, since killfiling culture also gets rid of interesting engineering-culture stuff.
There is such a category! It’s called Hacker News.
I understand this worry, both about quality control for Lobsters and when it pertains to the general problem in this industry where too many brain-dead ideas about management get traction. Tech management advice is full of “one weird trick” articles because (surprise?) well it’s corporate software, which is basically the fake news of white-collar world.
On one hand, there’s a need for a tech-culture discussion place that isn’t controlled by fascists and by shills vested in the success of the products of one specific and specifically fascist startup incubator. On the other, there’s a perennial danger of culture/practices submissions drowning out the harder, technical stuff that gets less attention just because it takes time to digest. (Often, it’s days later when I get around to RTFA, which means that I tend to only comment on technical stuff when it’s material that I’ve already read.) That’s a problem that all of these forums seem to have.
I’d challange this a bit–I’m unsure that this is actually an underserved niche compared with properly hard-tech discussion.
EDIT: Not to say it isn’t a good goal, mind you! I’m just thinking that there seem to be very few communities that genuinely focus on tech without devolving into advertising and other stuff.
We also need the culture tag so we can complain about Uber’s treatment of women.