claw-el

Sometimes, large corporation values consistency above one-off excellence. It’s how they build their brand (the promise of consistency).

I won’t be surprised if the people in rooms tasting coffee is also looking for coffee that is too good for one-off but hard to be replicable in the various stores they have.

Is the reason they reached 2B/mo partially contributed by the fact that their users feel like they get unlimited use of it? If ‘feeling like it is unlimited use’ is a huge part that creates the 2B/mo, this change of limit might jeopardize it.

That being said, Anthropic can be diverting capacity to train the next model, and if it is significantly better, people would start flocking back again.

I wonder if cities would want to create even more short term pick up and drop off points on the road for USPS, UPS, FedEx, DoorDash, Uber, Lyft, Waymo and other similar short term parking needs, this would mean removing some long term street parking options and potentially conflict with some bike lanes in some areas.

Would cities be willing to give up on the parking fines revenue they are generating right now? How should cities be incentivized to change with the changing mobilities needs of the people living inside dense cities?

From my personal experience, Uber had been doing this since before ChatGPT became a thing. It seems like Uber is just experimenting with what number before the ‘%’ sign is going to nudge people to buy more.

Yes, low-end disruption can totally disrupt a company’s revenue source and therefore its ability to continue to innovate and sustain its valuation… Claude Design doesn’t even need to be better than Figma, it just needs to be able to take some of its customers away.

In the US, phone numbers used to be locked in similar to this too. But then regulations changed and now everyone can port their phone number away to some other providers.

A counter example, Bank of America app don’t have functionality to do ACH transfer natively, you can only do it on the web app.

But this may be on purpose by Bank of America.

Wouldn’t the supply of labor for a role or company increase if what the company do, books or video games, is associated to what most people see as good, therefore, they are more willing to build their long term skill sets in?

That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?

Also, certain models are more verbose than the others. We are basically at the mercy of a model who likes to ramble a lot.

I noticed that too, but I wonder if what they are offering is just a proprietary formatting for context store, or is there something more operationally complex than that.

Previously, a lot of SaaS’s valuation was dependent on it being a ‘platform’ where their customers ‘do almost everything only on their platform’, keeping them within that SaaS’s ecosystem.

By making the tools compostable, the valuation from this ‘keeping within’ angle will slowly disappear, but maybe it can be replaced by increase usage as a source of valuation.

There is always 88.9% or 88.89%

Ben Thompson is a content creator. Even if Ben’s content does not directly benefit from ads, it is the fact that other content creator’s content having ads is what makes Ben’s content premium in comparison.

I would say that, on this topic (ads on internet content), Ben Thompson may not be as objective a perspective as he has on other topics.

The American series (House and Elementary) has the advantage of more seasons and episodes, which I think is sometimes required to showcase the challenges of drug addiction and mental health. The fact that these characters having to come back to face the same problem over and over again episode after episode is more true to the nature of the mental health problem itself.

BBC Sherlock has too little episodes to bring audience along a prolonged struggle with mental health.

One reason I like CBS’s Elementary’s depiction of Sherlock (maybe more so than BBC’s Sherlock) is because how Elementary treats Sherlock’s mental health and addiction recovery as central to the character. As great as Sherlock is at solving cases, he still struggles greatly to handle his own mental health and addiction recovery, which makes him more grounded to earth.

> Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty.

This is one part that is rarely properly implemented. We have our bug bash days too, but I noticed after the fact that maybe 1/3 of the bugs we solved is on a feature we are thinking of deprecating soon due to low usage.

How can we attack bugs better by priority?

A regulation being good or bad is not a fixed thing. A regulation that was good when created could change to bad due to circumstances or new innovation introduced.

Maybe something innovators can learn to do better is to involve regulators earlier in the design process of this innovation process, so that regulation does not become the bottleneck for introducing the innovation to the market.

The tricky thing about involving regulators earlier is that it sometimes can be seen as aggressive or unethical lobbying.

Infinite loop detected

I want to clarify that I am not trying to argue but genuinely curious what is the ‘right solve’ here.

If we create an exception for doctors, what about ‘medical lab technicians’, ‘wastewater treatment professionals’ or ‘air traffic controller’? All these jobs faces shortage in US right now. If we leave it up to the executive branch at the time to determine exceptions, we will just end up in a situation in exceptions going to the industry with the ‘best’ lobbyist.

I am not in a position to decide a policy like this, but I have a wild idea. Why not lower the application fee for H1B (or make it free) or even make it super easy to apply. Right now, the companies that are willing to abuse the H1B system will do so because they know the higher the application fee, the less competition they have to get those 85,000 slots. If every doctor, speech therapist, medical lab technologist is applying for H1B, it would totally crowd out the H1B abusers and it might no longer be worth it for them to try to game the system. Just musing on ideas, not that I can implement any of these.

I believe the main ‘change’ of this $100,000 fee is the composition of labor. A doctor applies for H1B too and various other non-tech job applies for H1B too. Startups and hospitals have a much higher chance to not willing to pay for the fee and we will just end up with less ‘doctors’ in the 85,000 H1B visa approvals.

I am curious if you think that the payment processing companies refusing to serve legal yet undesirable businesses to be in a similar situation as this Palantir situation here?

>… should be able to earn money from <activity>…

I wonder what forms our perception of what activity should be able to earn money from and what should not. I know that me being a professional nap taker should not be able to earn money from it, but when does one activity turn into ‘should be able to earn money from’?

> When EC2 launched, it wasn't really clear what people would do with it, but it was very cool and it was clear that it could be a big deal in some form, sooner or later.

Hindsight is 20/20, but how do you spot for “it was very cool” and “could be a big deal”? I often hear these used as justification to build something, but the projects often go nowhere..

I have seen two sides of these artificial constraints people at their work impose. I am still not sure if these artificial constraints are good or bad.

On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy.

On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group.

I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees.

Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.

The other confusion with self driving for me is, is the “self” the human or the car?

Self driving can totally means the human own-self driving.

Having SAE level is clearer.

During a security breach, if the vendor’s brand is more popular than you, you say, they are a popular brand, everyone uses them. We couldn’t have known better.

If your brand is more popular than the vendor’s, it is called, you should have known better to not use such unknown brand. Your choice of vendor is your responsibility.

If both you and your vendors are popular, it’s up to the narrative to place blame.

Thats why most large companies still refuse to buy from small brands.

Isn’t having the name (e.g. Over2gb) easier to understand than just saying v2? This is in the situation where there is breaking changes forced upon v1/downloadFile.

If there is a breaking change forced upon in the future, can’t we use a different name for the function?

> However, a technically-poor product can make it nearly impossible to build an elegant API. That’s because API design usually tracks the “basic resources” of a product (for instance, Jira’s resources would be issues, projects, users and so on). When those resources are set up awkwardly, that makes the API awkward as well.

One issue I have with weird resources are those that feel like unnecessary abstraction. It makes it hard for the human to read and understand intuitively, especially someone new to these set of APIs. Also, it makes it so much harder to troubleshoot during an incident.

One challenge with the government taking large ownership in private companies is that it creates an opportunity to offload the ownership later, and that offloading might happen during a different presidential administration from the one that acquired it, and the offloading process can also be an opportunity to enrich someone else.

One example that comes to mind is the current Fannie Freddie Mac.