acwan93

> I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.

Or fitness, or messaging, or movies, or TV shows...

Every platform nowadays is a way to lock you in. Strava makes exporting data exceptionally difficult and has API rate-limits. I’m sure there’s a technical reason, but still sucks.

One of the tech journalists I follow has advocated the need for legislation for data portability to avoid shenanigans like Spotify has. Much like the phone number portability in the mid-2000s or interoperability after Ma-Bell AT&T was broken up, it sometimes takes legislation to enforce an open Internet. I think GDPR was one of the first steps towards that.

It’s also the need to monetize everything in your life. The “hustle” life, glorifying entrepreneurship, and the need to “advance your personal brand” were big statements made when I was in college. This was right when LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter were hitting exponential growth (Facebook already had many years earlier).

Either it’s because I personally experienced the Great Recession, the launch of social media and the iPhone, and my worldview expanded greatly as one does in undergrad all at once, or it really is a new phenomenon that your employer has no loyalty to you, so one must rely on their own. With social media, these themes are just further perpetuated and there’s a pressure to start companies.

I’ve already worked my ass off at my day job, and just want my hobbies to not turn into side projects or “side hustles”. I don’t intend on starting companies based on them.

I didn't really believe this back when I was driving a BMW and Honda daily running CarPlay, but now that I'm on the Model 3 I'm hitting lots of software bugs on the Tesla head unit that would've never passed even the most basic of software QA at my previous job.

The Tesla head unit makes the current automaker's head units look super reliable and as solid as a rock. OTA software updates do have their benefits, but it seems like it leads to compromising quality for pushing features of questionable utility out the door.

I get really disappointed when I see Tesla implementing really unnecessary features like Rainbow Road (the over-done SNL "more cowbell" skit) and fart mode. Focus on the reliability before making these features.

It's honestly very reassuring knowing that hitting $1M ARR in 3.5 years is considered a massive accomplishment.

This is speaking as someone who's trying to move an older software shop from a one-time on-premise cost to SaaS. Fortunately the current business's revenues are directly being reinvested towards new products that are on the recurring SaaS model.

I can’t help but think that eventually we’ll hit the “Big X” of brokerages if this consolidation continues, alongside the acquisition (mergers?) of TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab.

Assuming we have an active FTC soon wouldn’t this lead to calls for to “break up big brokerages”, like there are for banks in 2008 and tech companies today? I’d imagine financial services is fractured and diverse enough where it’s hard to say that only a few key players dominate the market.

Makes sense to me. I just find it hard to believe that TV manufacturers will release software updates for older TVs, but then again I haven’t gone shopping for a TV in nearly a decade.

True, that makes sense. I guess my personal preference would be to keep my TV as just a display and hook up an Apple TV/Chromecast/etc. to it for those features.

Genuine question: what kind of updates would a dumb TV possibly need?

I remember hearing this back in high school:

Bachelors are the new high school diploma, cause “everyone” has a diploma

Masters are the new Bachelors, cause you need one to live a comfortable lifestyle

PhDs are the new Masters, to stand out amongst the rest

Of course, I don’t agree with some of that statement, but it does hold some truths.

If they have enough resources. When everyone is busy working on the revenue generating products for the company, taking time away to work on internal network infrastructure immediately becomes a cost center.

> Tell them the truth - even the cloud has outages, but it is certainly more "convenient" to have hundreds of engineers work on fixing an outage at global scale, and all you have to do is wait for it to start working again - then it is to have to fix it all yourself.

Yep, that’s the argument I’ve made, both to management and even our non-techie customers. When we show them our new SaaS product, they get concerned about cloud outages. Our response is “if AWS goes down, you have bigger things to worry about since other things will be down too.”

The plus side I’ve mentioned that our company’s software developers are freed from doing network IT maintenance and infrastructure and can continue focusing on our actual core products instead.

I just finished convincing old-school management to move to Office365/Azure/Teams after we've been doing everything on-premise, saying we can reduce our maintenance and increase in reliability since we're a small operation. Needless to say this isn't a good look for me.

Unlikely. EDI was introduced around the 70s and is still used today with no signs of going away. Those documents are being transferred over FTP.

I’m working on trying to abstract away retailer and sales channels’ methods of communicating with distributors (EDI/CSV files over FTP, REST/SOAP API endpoints), and the number of retailers using FTP, even Amazon and Wayfair, is mind boggling.

And wildfires.

There's also Detroit, MI and Windsor, ON, which is the only land border crossing where you go south into Canada and north into the US.

There's a number of irregularities between the US and Canadian border.

Johnny Harris, who used to (still is? seems unclear) film the Vox series "Borders", did a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvvicd07zCs

Basically, the border is largely the 49th parallel and some seemingly arbitrary lines on the East Coast and Alaska. But since they were done in the 18th/19th century without regard for existing settlements, it leads to some crazy enclaves and border towns:

-Point Roberts, WA [1]

-Piney Pinecreek Border Airport (K48Y) [2]

-Hyder, AK [3]

-Estcourt Station, ME [4]

-Derby Line, VT [5]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piney_Pinecreek_Border_Airport

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyder,_Alaska

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estcourt_Station,_Maine

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_Line,_Vermont

I'd say it's a mix of increased savings due to near-term economic/political uncertainty, and the fact that large-scale events (conferences, sporting events) that typically bring activity are also cancelled.

While e-commerce data does show that people are indeed spending and there are some pockets of increased spending, it doesn't seem like it nearly matches pre-COVID levels. I think people do want to spend their savings, but because of public health fears there's not much to spend it on.

Isn’t the reason why inflation hasn’t increased despite the Fed’s spending due to the low Velocity of M2 Money?

The Fed’s data indicates that since the 2008 recession, the exchange of money from one party to another has decreased, only to tank in 2020 [1].

Despite the money supply being increased like no tomorrow, if it’s not getting spent and is just sitting in savings accounts the economy wouldn’t get stimulated. This would imply current wage stagnation and the cost of goods not increasing aside from real estate and college tuition. I would think that maybe the S&P 500 has probably also turned into a savings account for some since the ROÍ on any other investment is lousy.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

Reminds me of this I heard/read somewhere:

When you're young, you have the energy and time, but no money.

When you're middle-aged, you have the energy and money, but no time.

When you're old, you have the time and money, but no energy.

It feels like how I treat junk food and snacks: I’m welcome to have as much as I want, but I have to go out of my way to get it every time. Never stock up, which in this analogy would mean never install the native app or subscribe to newsletters or notifications.

For reddit et al, I only view it on the browser. Sure, I get bombarded by popovers and alerts telling me to install the app, but I have to work my way to get to the content if I really wanted to view it.

I agree with this mentality. I was at a FAANG company as well, and some of the projects I worked on had a small impact on the company but a huge impact on a certain group. 4% of a billion users is the total population of Canada.

Now that I'm at a startup, I'm making a huge impact on the startup, but it's having very little impact on the outside world and the industry. I guess the hope is that one day the startup will have impact on the world, but very few ever do.

Don't know why you're being downvoted, but I share the same sentiment with you. My first road bike was also from a Sports Basement and got nothing but top-notch service. They certainly got my repeat business.

Bike snobs are probably like coffee snobs, where the bigger the store, the more it's vilified.

Counterexample: The University of California system, which prohibits considering race, sex, or ethnicity in admissions due to Prop 209 passed in 1996.

The UC system has a sizable Asian population as a result (and my personal experience), but also admits a diverse student body every year.

Loosely quoted by Iris Chang in "The Chinese in America", when times are good Asians are glorified for being the "model minority" and have all the privilege that Whites have, and vilified as foreigners when times are bad.

Given the current political climate I'm worried we're swinging towards the latter.

>1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources, they never had any intent to work with you on.

I've heard this too many times from our existing customers too. This sounds like the "do it for exposure!" line of reasoning for artists.

>2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting.

We had this one customer who always called into our support line (and for some reason got ahold of my personal cell!), and every call ended up being a 2 hour-long consulting session on how to get his business set up for e-commerce and his business strategy. He's went through lots of arrogant Wordpress/website developers that I couldn't stand working with, and still hasn't had a site up after two years.

I was so relieved when he decided not to renew his service contact.

I read somewhere that the Model 3 was intended to be fully autonomous, which was why the interface and look of the car is as spartan as it is. When the autonomous tech ended up not being there (no surprise), Tesla kept the look of the car as if the car were meant to drive itself.

This is probably why CarPlay and Android Auto still aren’t integrated, among other reasons.

Same here in Los Angeles. I think only the Bay Area is available during the beta, and then the other cities will rollout in the fall when iOS 14 GMs.

Tangentially speaking, what does say about Bay Area housing? Anecdotally, I used to look at Google's performance as an indicator on South Bay housing prices.

Reminds me of how someone went to Target to buy an iPod for her daughter, found it full of rocks and exchanged it after getting her refund rejected, only for a replacement iPod from another Target to also be filled with rocks.

https://www.engadget.com/2007-10-09-birthday-girl-gets-two-r...

$1000-2000 seems like the price point I was expecting for a full offline solution. It does seem too high for the mainstream market when 23AndMe kits are going for $99 despite all the privacy concerns.