aluminussoma

On the whole, this is a good thing. There are policy responses that can be enacted as needed, in an easier and more humane way. The goal of the US government should be to protect the interests of the American citizen, as much as the goals of India or China should be to protect their own interests.

If growth rate was really 50% YoY, their investors would not let them sell for $5 billion.

Different businesses. Stripe main business is a payment processor. Brex provides credit.

I don’t think most Americans care about how Europe sees us. Instead, there is a thought that Europe uses America to protect its own interests instead of putting its own resources on the line.

America itself has its own problems. America is spending too much money. America has an inflation problem that led to one of the most unpopular presidents ever getting elected again. Many Americans think it’s time to solve America’s problems instead of being feted in European capitals. If that means the rest of world won’t use Gmail, YouTube, or Facebook, so be it. Those companies can take care of themselves.

To put it differently, Yotta’s customer’s misfortunes are because they are poor and not politically connected. If Fidelity fails, their customers are rich and they vote: they must be made whole.

Kind of like the SVB failure. SVB customers were made whole. Systematic risk and all that.

My mother asked me for a phone recommendation and I told her to try OnePlus. It is a beautiful phone (for an Android) but very buggy. It often fails, at random, at it most basic job of making phone calls without needing a restart. I regret making that recommendation.

I am planning to make the switch this year. As a long time Pixel user, Google's support of its own hardware has been subpar. My phone was only officially supported for 3 years.

They will increase support for new phones, probably because Apple does the same. It is too little, too late for me.

Here is why I find it hard to believe there is a cabal of mods: what is their motivation for shutting down Reddit? If this is true, these fiefdom mods are hurting themselves financially and personally by keeping their subreddits shut down.

The simplest explanation to me is that they protest because they care. It is not just Apollo. They don't like the overall direction Reddit is heading in.

Because they respect your privacy and don't feel the need to plaster your comment in every search engine?

Thank you for adding this perspective. The news reports we receive do not provide this context so it is easy to think it is only about numbers.

0% Interest Rate Phenomena. Much of the funds come from extra capital sloshing around the system, looking for returns. Once bought out, some companies incur more debt (easy because of 0% interest rates) much of which goes back to the new owners as special dividends. Finally, once stripped to the bones, the company goes public again.

I can't wait until this vulturous business model gets smacked in the face by tighter financial conditions.

I'm glad it works for them, and I am a little skeptical whenever someone fawns over Notion (is it a paid placement? Is it someone who is trying sell templates?). To me, as someone who uses Notion for work, it is a dystopian vision, like using JIRA for my personal life's tasks.

I very much prefer simple, low tech solutions to dealing with my life's problems.

If Meta controlled the US Government, TikTok would have been banned years ago!

I feel for the OP. I would just like to plug a good porting experience I had with Twilio recently. I ported a phone number from Vonage to Twilio. They did an excellent job keeping me up to date.

I totally expected something to screw up, especially on the Vonage side.

In house innovation is certainly a problem on the product side. What new Adobe products have come out in the last decade? Every new product or service is from an acquisition.

Adobe has been unable to find technological innovation organically (To their credit, their stock price soared through financial engineering). Adobe has instead augmented its capabilities through acquisitions. Today's acquisition of Figma is no different.

And maybe that is fine. Adobe is not alone. Many big companies can only expand their capabilities through acquisitions. Those big companies are doing fine.

Specific to Adobe, the acquisition of Macromedia was a huge success in part because it injected a lot of talent into Adobe that stayed and succeeded. Maybe Figmates will be able to do the same.

I was probably born long before you. And you are twisting my words.

For as long as I can remember, there has been a vocal group of doomsayers predicting financial catastrophe. Powell's speech is like catnip to that group.

Heroku has had severe security and service outages over the past year. A long time ago, Heroku was talked about in positive terms. More recently, I've only heard negative things about them and plans to migrate off. They poisoned their brand.

iPhone+ iPad revenues compose ~65% of revenues.

Mac revenues are ~10%.

They are allocating people to where they expect to make the most money. I don't characterize that as coasting, just business sense.

Overall, I still agree that Apple needs to do better with Macs.

> I don't believe this is the case as since 2008 the U.S. construction industry has not even built enough units to keep up with population growth. I believe this is a supply problem which is two-fold.

A counterargument to this is that population growth has not been very high in the past few decades: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=SUL3

You certainly have valid points, especially in San Francisco. Nevertheless, looking at the broader market, outside of California, the market appears to be working: builders find a way to build what will sell and maximize their profits. Last week, I drove around a planned community in a middle-America state. Developers started building houses around ~2010 and are still building out the area. These developers had no problem building thousands of homes that were selling well until very recently.

I wonder if persistently low interest rates is the real culprit that led to housing as investment. I have been recently intrigued by FinTwit arguments that an excess of demand spurred by too low interest rates is the real reason for many shortages. As a saver, that argument naturally appeals to me.

This is not quite the subscription based model I envisioned, but it is a big step in that direction. For example, you still need to make payments on the existing phone for 12 months before becoming eligible for a new device.

Hardware is also turning into a subscription-like model. You can't upgrade a component on your iPhone or Android without needing to purchase a new phone. With Macbooks, you can no longer update the hard drive, battery, and RAM. You must purchase a new Macbook. Remember the recent story about BMW charging for heated seats in South Korea, another hardware as a subscription idea.

I read that Apple is considering a subscription model for iPhone devices. That will formalize what is already implicit.

The increased rates make home mortgages unaffordable. This pushes housing demand to rents because people need to live somewhere. Rental prices increase while home prices decrease - bad, bad stagflation.

How does one analyze the gut biome? I imagine it involves running poop through a machine - what kind of machine? I would love to learn more about the technical process.

Netflix has the ability to automatically update the card number after it expires. It is a service that certain credit card issuers offer.

These days, I would not count on an expiring credit card to automatically cancel services.

No you can't. Source: I, too, was at a terminal level at a FAANG.

I would only be surprised if the other manufacturers are NOT doing the same.

We (collectively speaking) do the same at work. We optimize for what gets us promoted rather than what benefits the company. Companies optimize for revenue rather than a good user experience.

This behavior of trying to game/cheat the benchmarks is entirely consistent with human behavior in other areas of life.

> They are given the power to stop deployment. If they can't, they're not SREs

Google is the only place where this is even discussed. I cannot name any other company that does this. Not Apple, Meta's Production Engineers, Netflix, Amazon's SysDevEngs, Stripe SRE, Uber, Pinterest, and more. This must mean that nobody else does real SRE!