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Yes you can set price caps. The cost of a query is understandable ahead of time with the default pricing model ($6 per TB of data processed in a query). People usually get caught out by running expensive queries recursively. BigQuery is very cost effective and can be used safely.

Renting is expensive because people can’t buy, driving up prices. If buying were cheap because of increased supply, rent would be cheap too, and much more appealing for the practical benefits. The problem is housing supply, not buying or renting being expensive, that’s a consequence.

Expanding on my previous comment with an example: I obtained a long term residency visa a few months ago. I was in the country at the time and didn’t want to fly 15 hours back to my home country, and the embassy in the neighbouring country only accepts applications from residents, so I flew to another nearby country which does accept non-residents. The country that I have a visa for doesn’t care where the visa is issued, it’s the individual embassies that set their own rules about who they will process applications for. You just have to look through each embassy to find one that accepts you (which will be documented on their website). Except now for the U.S. which is instituting this rule.

I don’t know about Schengen but that’s not correct for Japan. You can get a visa to visit Japan from an embassy in a country you’re not a resident or national of, there’s no requirement for the visa to be issued in your country of nationality (although some embassies may choose not to accept applications from non-residents or non-nationals).

I think we are talking about different things. I’m talking about a country’s requirements whereas you’re talking about a specific embassy.

An embassy will often have its own requirements based on the locality, whereas the visa requirements are uniform.

The Indian embassy in San Francisco might refuse to process non-resident applications but that doesn’t mean you can only get an Indian visa by going to an embassy in your country of nationality.

Really? Do you have any examples? I’ve had visas around the world (and encountered numerous weird requirements) but never have I been required to apply for a visa from my country of nationality. Even China, which is very restrictive, allows for non-national applications.

(And in fact, in my experience, it is getting easier with online applications becoming more common.)

That’s not an accurate description of the case you linked. No reason was given for the denial. The subject of the story was asked about work by the immigration officers but nothing indicates that he was removed from the country because of work. He seems to have been removed because they wanted to remove him, not because of innocent confusion about his visa.

I’m as cynical about crypto as any sane person but I think you’re hand-waving away the challenges of international business. How can you transact in dollars if you’re a business in Argentina? As you say, if you’re operating in Europe, this is a solved problem, but lots of businesses are operating across borders that don’t have the same payment options. Banks could solve this problem but they haven’t and this is what non-banks have come up with. I’m sure if SEPA was global this wouldn’t be necessary, but it isn’t.

I find it confusing too. There are a bunch of different things that influence pricing (what's "auto" vs. "fast"?) and also "results"? Does that mean if I ask for 25 results, I pay $5 per 1000 requests, and if I ask for 26 results, I pay $25 per 1000 requests? or is that based on how many results Exa returns (which depends on how much data Exa has)? I'm sure if I understood the product (as your customers do) it would make sense, but as an outsider, it's not clear to me how much I would pay for the example searches (e.g: "space companies based in the US") or the demos.

Also minor notes:

* Research link in the footer is a 404 * Changelog link in the footer is a link to the blog

edit: after reading the documentation, there are 4 search types, "auto" and "fast" are 2 options that have been combined into a single column on the pricing table. The "latency" at the bottom is a description of the "fast" and "auto" options. I think I understand it now.

What you’re describing doesn’t make much sense: why would a registrar lock your account? Why would a registrar change your domain’s nameservers? If you have direct contact with the CEO then you’re already far ahead of wherever people here can get you.

You said “backup codes” so I’m going to guess what’s actually happened is you lost access to your second factor, your domain has expired and you’re unable to log in to your account to renew it. Does that accurately reflect the situation?

What’s the rationale behind NextJS for this client? If you’re not using Vercel, NextJS doesn’t make much sense. Something like Astro is likely to be a much better fit.

“I almost always book the minimum flight, basic economy, whether or not I am paying. There is so little to be gained from moving up compared to the price.”

Perhaps I’m too precious but economy class is awful compared to business class. Lie-flat seats are a significant improvement over economy. If you are spending your own money, sure, stick to economy so you can spend your money on other things that are more important to you… but someone else’s money? What conceivable reason is there to choose economy if someone else is paying.

Outcome-based billing is interesting. I think some people may balk at the idea of trusting customers to self-report their outcomes but self-reporting already happens often in enterprise billing. A customer can defraud their service providers by underreporting but the risk to their relationship with the service provider is rarely worth it (if the service isn't delivering value, drop it, if the service is delivering value, the fees are worth it). SaaS companies are already regularly writing off unpaid bills. That said...

https://www.useskope.com/resources/why-now

"Salesforce, Sierra, Zendesk, and Intercom are a few of the early movers in adopting an outcome based model. Their definitions of a 'successful outcome' vary from simply facilitating a conversation (Salesforce) to completing a customer support query with no human elevation needed (Sierra)."

"Chargeflow is another company that automates the process of collecting revenue and preventing chargebacks for ecommerce, which has adopted this model. They take 25% of each recovery and charge $39 for each chargeback prevention. Their pricing page explains the idea perfectly: success first, pay second."

Are these examples of "outcome-based billing" or just the redefinition of usage and/or fees as an "outcome"? "Facilitating a conversation" and "completing a support query" are not trust-based outcomes, that's just usage. A thing happened within the service's boundary. Stripe's usage based billing (and Orb etc.) can be used for this already.

I guess you are in a tough position because you are trying to provide real world examples of a category you are hoping to define, but in this case, perhaps it's best to wait for some clear real world examples instead of muddying the waters like this. I fear that reading this, most people would conclude that outcome-based billing is just a way to define your usage-based pricing, rather than something that needs a platform like Skope.

The bubble narrative is coming from the outside. More likely is that the /acquisition/ of Scale has led to an abundance of talent that is being underutilised. If you give managers the option to hire, they will. Freezing hiring while reorganising is a sane strategy regardless of how well you are or are not doing.

Lots of companies have great success using GitHub repositories as a marketing tool. Coplay seem to have identified this and decided to invest in the idea without considering strategy.

Owning a popular repository that your audience is engaged with is valuable because they’re using your free software: you create loyal users that you can then sell to. A successful open source project operated by your company is valuable as a lead generator. The repository itself has no value. Open source by business (this strategy) is just freemium for software.

Why they thought announcing the acquisition of a repository would be of interest to anyone is beyond me.

A lot of (talented people in a field) are idiots / irrational in other parts of their life. A very talented engineer with options may buy in to Elon’s public vision (which sounds good on the surface) and may be completely incapable of recognizing when someone is betraying their vision. Very smart people get caught up in nonsense all the time.

They paid about $50k for ch.at. I have a single letter country code domain (3 characters total, x.xx). There are still some single letter country code domains available to register, you could get one for under $1k USD if you want one.

Here’s a reseller with a variety: https://1-single-letter-domains.com/

These guys run a bunch of services on x.xx domains: https://o.ee/services/ like c.im, r.nf, p.lu.

AI safety is focused on AGI but maybe it should be focused on how little “artificial intelligence” it takes to send people completely off the rails. We could barely handle social media, LLMs seem to be too much.

Correct transaction coding is required, sure, but I think you buried the lede a little. Processing transactions for adult content is very high risk because of the increased rate of chargebacks (from fraud) and the exposure to illegal activity (csam, trafficking). Stripe, PayPal etc. are very protective over their standing with card providers and regulators. Stripe could charge more to process these transactions (even enough to cover the increase in chargebacks) but the risk of processing illegal transactions isn’t worth it at any price.

Yes it does. As far as I recall, all major email providers handle inbound email. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, SparkPost, AWS SES.

(I don’t think this compromises the value of AgentMail, just clarifying what is supported elsewhere.)

I argued this in the previous discussion about oxide’s compensation structure: I disagree that sales must be commission based. Yes, finding sales staff that are willing to work for a salary and equity shrinks the pool but the same is true of engineers willing to work for a flat rate across the company.

Sales might seem mystical and magical to engineers but it isn’t. A small company with a small sales team can absolutely work without commission. Yes, it is harder, but it is not impossible. The carve out for sales undermines the ideas behind a flat salary structure. Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts. Sales is as much about the partnerships between sales people and product/engineering, why aren’t all the people who work on a deal getting commission?

I’d go as far as to argue that oxide is in the perfect position as a big-ticket long-cycle business to abandon traditional sales commission structures. They take on all the negatives (sales people overselling to get commission) with no benefits. There are other ideas. Company wide bonus based on sales made during the year?

its a stylistic choice, it’s a statement: content is all that matters. Brutalist websites have been around for a long time.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

“As recently as 200 years ago, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology have steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose”

More people today are dying from starvation than people existed on earth 200 years ago. Celebrating our achievements in making shareholders rich is one thing, but to take credit for freeing the people. Yikes. Mark is more out of touch than seems possible.

The most honest version is the company is paying for the tool. The most stretched version I’ve seen is a former employee of a company uses the tool in a personal capacity. Most commonly for newly launched things it means someone with an @company email has tried the tool (even if they didn’t pay). You could, for example, set up a waitlist and then let anyone with a logo-worthy email in.

We're nerds. We understand the nuance, we understand the way these tools work and where the limits lie. We understand that there is web enabled and not web enabled. Regular people do not understand any of this. Regular people type into a textarea and consume the response.

The take away from this article should be that you are vastly overestimating how people understand and interact with technology. The author's experience of ChatGPT is not unique. We have spent decades building technology that is limited but truthful, now we have technology that is unlimited and untruthful. Many people are not equipped to handle that. People are losing their minds. If ChatGPT says "I read your article" they trust it, they do not think, "ah well this model doesn't support browsing the web so ChatGPT must be hallucinating". That's technobabble.

https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health

https://futurism.com/televised-love-declaration-chatgpt

https://futurism.com/chatgpt-users-delusions

You are being unfair and you should be more empathetic.

> Are these the same people that are claiming that AI is all a sham and will have no impact on society?

That is the view of a subset of nerds, not regular people. The author of that piece is a writer not a nerd.

“The conversation” is well understood to mean “the things being talked about in the mainstream”. 80% in favour of a law is so overwhelmingly positive that it is rarely seen. My initial comment, a lifetime ago, was in the context of someone asking why the U.K. is unique when it comes to these laws. I said the U.K. is not and that most people support them. I’ve showed surveying that backs that up. The absence of any mainstream articles about this should be evidence enough it isn’t part of the conversation. Maybe that’ll change in future, but at least for now, nobody cares. Maybe you’re right and there’s a conspiracy amongst the mainstream to suppress the real views of the people, we will see.

(I don’t want to talk to you like a child, but a little lesson: mainstream news is mostly a cynical cash grab by harnessing outrage. Mainstream news loves things that outrage people. If there was any real outrage about this law, it would be harnessed by the dailymail and the Sun and Reach PLC to make money hand over fist. They would milk it so hard they would have to implement age verification.)

My position is very simple. I believe that most of the world is fine with age checks on the Internet. I think that the U.S. free speech laws and attitudes are unique and because English speaking internet culture is U.S. culture, these discussions always end up with an assumption that U.S. values are the values shared by the subjects.

I don’t think my view on the law matters, I haven’t shared it. I am speaking specifically about how everyone here is talking as if people in the U.K. care about “draconian” surveillance. People in the U.K. are not people from the U.S. Age verification is not a philosophical issue for U.K. people as it is for people in the U.S. People from the U.K. are not principled free speech absolutists. Ask a person in the U.K. if porn should require age verification and they will not think nor care about the free speech or surveillance implications of voting for such a law.

And people in the U.K. are not unique. People in the U.S. are. Spend any amount of time outside of our U.S. Internet bubble and you’ll discover nobody cares about any of this.

Whether I care and whether you care is not relevant to the British voters. Not the Australian voters. Nor the Swedish voters. Or the Thai voters. Or the Japanese voters…

The U.S. is the outlier, not the U.K. Go do a Nazi salute in Germany, or Australia. Burn the Quran in Sweden. So on and so forth.

Again, this is a radical internet-libertarian-freedom-at-all-costs view. Normal people do not think that proving you are 18 is notable. We’ve been doing it for decades with credit cards. The system is more mature now but it is not fundamentally different.