code4tee

Another tombstone goes up: https://killedbygoogle.com/

It’s a legit risk to be basing anything on a Google product or service. Know too many stories of people or companies getting burned when Google wakes up one morning and decides to abandon another product.

A lot of companies do things like this where they pretend to be another company to scoop in business as a middleman. Recently googled a tradesperson and called the number on the top result that came up. It quickly became clear that I wasn’t talking to the outfit I was trying to call but someone trying to insert themselves in the middle and collect a fee. When I grilled them it became clear what was going on.

I eventually hung up and found a new number which put me in touch with the company directly. When I told them what happened they were like “yeah (insert name of one stop shop for home repairs) has been doing this... we have nothing to do with them but they keep trying to pretend we work with them and put out adverts under our name.” Super frustrating and I can sympathize with the restaurants where the same sort of thing seems to be happening.

The likes of Google could of course police this a lot better but they’re happy to take the money for the ads.

Clickbait headline. This is how it works with nearly all content you “buy” (music, movies, software, ...) You’re not buying the thing, rather you buying a license to use something. That license has terms. This is nothing new and nothing specific to Amazon.

Go watch that text that flashed up on your old VHS tapes. You didn’t own it, you merely had a license to use it in a certain way. Invite too many people over to your house to watch a movie, you broke the license as now you’re staging a “public showing” and you don’t have a license for that. Schools used to get in trouble for this sort of thing when some kid brings in a home VHS tape and plays it at “school movie night.”

Clickbait headline. This is how it works with nearly all content you “buy” (music, movies, software, ...) You’re not buying the thing, rather you buying a license to use something. That license has terms. This is nothing new and nothing specific to Amazon.

A lot of companies that care deeply about security are moving to this “trust no one” approach which has the added benefit for end users of allowing access to “secure internal sites” over the plain old internet. If done right this can all be a big boost for security and improved end user experience. That said, the old “you need to be on the VPN” approach is going to stick around for some time.

SNS is intended for different use cases. Kinesis and other AWS products provide services in line with Kafka.

Not to sound harsh but the company just seemed to have the wrong leadership making the wrong decisions at the wrong time. Failing with a well capitalized streaming service during a pandemic is a bit like failing to sell ice cold lemonade to people in the desert. Sure there are probably other players, but if you’re not at least doing reasonably well then you’re probably doing something terribly wrong.

This 100x.

The vast majority of what companies brand as “AI” is nothing more than basic BI reporting with some fancy marketing. The disappointment comes more from the realization that the “AI” that was purchased or deployed is just this.

Like other popular terms (“Big Data”, “Blockchain” ...) companies fear being left behind so they scrape up whatever they were already doing and get the marketing team to just say “now with AI” and carry on doing what they always did/sold.

These letters come across as the company being a jerk, but in most jurisdictions one has to aggressively defend your trademark or you can lose it by others showing its in common use without objection. If it’s a legit purpose and not some scam site then often they can just work out some sort of “license” to use the name so all can live happily ever after. Taken out of context these letters can paint a different picture (not saying that is or is not what is happening here but more generally what often happens).

Not sure I’ve ever seen a chatbot that was actually useful. Not taking about things like Slack integrations where I can type commands to make things happen as that’s different. But actual chatbots have only ever left me with a lesser optinion of what ever company that was trying to force me to use their “AI assistant.”

Interesting read. It does highlight though that this style of investing is very much dependent on hitting home runs and grand slams—-whereas you’re typical SPY investment is a series of steady base hits. All is well until you miss a few pitches, then the potential big upside flips to a big potential downside whereas base hit guy keeps truckin’ along.

Just like with hedge funds you tend to hear about the ones that did well, and not so much about the ones that lost their shirt. Also like hedge funds while there are a few recognized skilled investors for many others there’s not a whole lot of solid evidence that the “winner” investors were really smarter than the rest, just probably luckier. (Just under 50% of people betting black in roulette will double their money... that doesn’t make them good investors). Like hedge funds there are lots of, often untold, stories of people getting super lucky with returns, thinking they are “skilled” and then going out and losing a ton the next few times around.

If you read further down the Twitter thread you’ll see others point out that AWS actually DID acknowledge him in the release and thus his original rant isn’t accurate. He acknowledges that later in the thread. Of course the, now inaccurate, headline Tweet remains the thing getting attention.

Guy writes some open source code and puts a license on it saying others can use it as they please. Someone else uses it. Guy goes on Twitter to complain someone used it without credit. In response to rant on Twitter someone points out that there actually is acknowledgement in the code. So in the end, they used it and gave him credit. Guy is like, oops, well that’s cool.

Sigh.

The whole ATC system is based on the underlying idea that stuff isn’t supposed to be in certain places at a certain time. For example the system can operate without radar in zero visibility conditions because it can use a “one in one out” philosophy where a certain 3D block of the Sky only has one flying object in it. Random drones, jet packs or whatever turning up unannounced in busy airspace totally destroys that system (irrespective of other issues) hence why when something like this happens you see the FBI rocking up and treating this like they are.

IBM went from a great tech company into some sort of overly financially engineered Franken-firm that has tons of employees and yet nobody on the outside seems to know what they really do.

Throw in there various expensive hand-wavy marketing campaigns about AI, blockchain and quantum computing to add to that “but what do you actually do?” confusion. Case in point if I go to IBM.com I’m presented with a giant fluff PR piece about quantum computing.

This is interesting on several fronts. One because it’s a really cool discovery. But two because the Nobel tends to avoid situations where the full origin of the discovery is somewhat in dispute until things settle down. If you know the history here this is very much an active source of debate and the Nobel clearly picked sides here, which is interesting in its own right.

This is BS. I enjoy these videos and encourage people to keep making them.

It’s a great way to get a better idea of what things really looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage. Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this doesn’t make sense.

There’s this growing reputation that’s Europe has broadly lost the tech race to the US and Asia and so now it’s seeking to be the de facto world regulator of tech as some sort of consolation prize to gain global influence. Not entirely fair, but also not entirely inaccurate either.

It’s not bad, but it also shouldn’t be the basis of your security model either.

There are a lot of parallels with physical security. It’s good to do things to make yourself less of an obvious target but at the end of the day, you should still lock your doors.

A lot of these numbers are misleading. Things like manufacturing have fled the UK to other countries. This keeps emissions low but the UK still utilizes goods, just made elsewhere.

More legit numbers would show the total amount of consumption and trace the emissions back to source, not just look at emissions at source in country.

Also these stats only look at emissions and overlook sequestration, which can be huge in some countries. For example, the UK has long since lost most of its forests which means it sequesters a lot less carbon than more forested countries like the United States.

If student loan debt was treated like any other debt then few if any students would get loans, unless their parents had assets to put up as collateral. So long as the financial burden of education falls on the student first then this is unlikely to change.

From a financial perspective it’s a terrible product to sell... tons of money to someone with little to no financial assets, iffy prospects of sufficient future income and no underlying assets that the bank can put a lien against in case of default. The problem is not the loans, it’s the whole higher education system that needs a total overhaul including the utility and price of higher education. The current system is based on the idea that many people’s parents encountered where a good summer job and maybe a bit of savings was more than enough to pay for a decent college degree!

I honestly don’t get the point of this. It’s nearly as expensive as Prime but gives you a lot less.

Their inability to explain the value proposition when asked that question by a reporter isn’t showing a great deal of confidence in the offering.

No question ML is powerful and can do great things. Also no question a lot of companies where just throwing money at stuff for fear of being seen as behind in this space. When the going gets tough such vanity efforts are the first things to go.

Teams adding measurable value for their companies should be fine but others might not be.

Things will simply evolve. People said the same thing about industrial buildings in cities which are now thriving residential complexes. Lord and Taylor’s flagship store in Manhattan went bust and was going to become a WeWork, then when WeWork imploded the building was bought by Amazon and will become their offices. There won’t be a “property apocalypse” but there will be a “property evolution.”

In cities with diverse economies and a strong talent base this evolution happens quite quickly. Elsewhere it happens more slowly, and thus it’s more painful, but it will eventually happen there too.

We’re going to see a lot of mathematically correct but potentially misleading headlines as things start to tick back up during the recovery.

If you tell the average person “X dropped by 50%.” And then next month “X surged by 50%” they’d think it dropped and is back to where it started, not that in reality “X surged by 50% actually means it’s still down by 25% from where it was.”

A lot of this going on at the moment giving either intentional or unintentional impressions of what’s actually happening.

I don’t see the market being very favorable toward floating another “geriatric unicorn” with this sort of financial profile.

I also continue to not understand what their product really is and if it’s actually valuable. They seem to just throw armies of people at data problems which might produce some results but is hardly a scalable or valuable business model.

I hear you. At the end of the day though a little more effort on front end setup is infinitely better than the time wasted later on when you have to rebuilt everything every time Google decides to get rid of another product / service / platform / setting. Burned by that one too many times and moved on.

As you mention my understanding is that that there’s one service no longer offered to new customers but they are still supporting it for those that were using it. This is a big difference between AWS and Google’s approach to customers. A number of friends’ companies got hit really hard when Google suddenly decided they no longer wanted to do something anymore (regardless of what their customer thought). That list is big and growing: killedbygoogle.com

This is what chaos monkey does.