code4tee

Can occur in a VPC without direct internet access. For the average developer this isn’t usually an issue but in highly secure corporate environments this helps a lot. Can’t just do pip install X in such situations. Even the S3 proxy solutions often require many hoops from the security Jedi council before you can use any packages there.

A lot of people won’t find this useful but for some it’s a big blessing.

Yes, it’s silly. See it all the time. Insist on FQDN and then aparently don’t understand what a FQDN actually is.

“Tammany Hall” is basically the answer to “why” for just about anything that happened in NYC prior to the 1960s :-)

The data for use in model training is worth far more to Palantir. They can spin it as being nice and helping with COVID-19 but in reality Palantir couldn’t buy this data even if they wanted to... so they got the U.K. government to give it to them! Clever.

Not a huge Airbus fan in general real but the A380 was a pleasure to fly.

However Airbus was just wrong on the business side. It was the wrong plane built with old technology at the wrong time.

It’s also not clear why Airbus didn’t focus more on a freight version. The Boeing 747 is rarely used as a passenger plane anymore but Boeing realized these aircraft would have a second life as freighters hence why the nose section is as such (you can chop off the nose and put a giant door there for cargo). The 747 will continue as a freighter for many years to come.

Sadly it’s likely that many of the currently grounded A380s will never take off again.

There’s a difference between censorship and a book publisher deciding they don’t want to publish or sell a book.

This appears to be a case of the later. He’s free to print and distribute his book, but no private company is under any obligation to help him in that endeavor.

This is absolutely at the foundation. Would add to that get regular sleep and enough of it.

At some level our bodies are like machines. Feed it crappy fuel (food) and don’t give it good maintenance (exercise and sleep) and it won’t run well.

Most large corporate environments don’t have the CEO as the sole controlling shareholder in the company.

While CEOs are powerful and have a lot of autonomy on day-to-day decision making they too are generally employees employed at the discretion of the board. The board itself exists and is populated by individuals at the pleasure of a diverse set of shareholders. There’s real accountability. That’s not the case at Facebook. Again not saying that’s good or bad but the model was no secret when people signed on.

Zuckerberg has always made it clear to investors and employees that Facebook is not a democracy. Mark is in charge and has full control of the company to do as he pleases when he pleases. When they IPOed he made it clear that’s how the company works. IPO materials made it clear that if you don’t like that don’t invest in it.

Not saying I agree with his actions (or inactions) and decisions but he’s been very clear about how Facebook works as a company and who’s in charge. Part of the big issue I see here with these “employee protests” at Facebook is that it seems employees didn’t pay attention to what they were signing up for when they joined. Mark is doing exactly what he said he would do in running the company. It’s not a democracy.

At this point in the US most companies will refuse to say anything about you other than confirming that you worked there and what your title was. To do anything more is a potential litigation minefield.

Laws are getting tighter too. It’s now illegal in many parts of the US to ask you how much you made in your previous job when that used to be a fairly common question.

“Unexpected item in bagging area”

They tried this. Was a disaster.

This is a very hard problem and thinking a product could do this without extremely high error rates is naive.

Any implementation should use this as a supplement only, not replacement for humans. For example a human watching 10 checkouts and quickly manually reviewing scenes flagged as suspicious. Any implementation should also account for the fact that loss will still occur and account for that in the RoI.

The fact that the technology is very error prone is not surprising (to anyone that actually builds AI tech). The issue here sounds like poor implementation and unrealistic expectations from management on what AI truly can and can’t do.

Never sure what to think when reading these articles. Sad story but what he did is tantamount to taking your whole net worth and betting in black in roulette. Do you feel bad if the person loses?

Doing this as a side bet with some extra money is one thing but putting your entire life savings into a highly speculative investment is not smart. Save your nest egg for “boring” stuff like broad index funds.

Seems to be very localized ups and downs. In the core of cities prices are crashing and people are trying to get out. Meanwhile in surrounding suburbs prices are rising and people and getting into bidding wars.

It seems that many want to stay in region but not right in the core of things, especially if their companies are shifting to WFH where daily commute is less of a deciding factor.

This may not be nice or demonstrating customer obsession but it is probably a good way for them to make money with business customers.

For better or worse Zoom has obtained “iPhone status” in corporate IT.

What killed the Blackberry was when decision makers had a personal iPhone and a work Blackberry and they finally turn up in the head of IT’s office and say “hey these things you’re making us use really suck, please just make it so we can use these iPhones which are soooo much better.”

I see exactly the same thing happening now with Zoom. I see IT types saying “but encryption” yadda yadda yadda and decision makers tuning up saying:

“This conferencing software you’re forcing us to use really stinks. I had a meeting with our soccer parents group on Zoom and it was so much better. Please switch us to this.”

A product that reaches that status stands to really disrupt the enterprise if they’re smart and take advantage of it.

Yes, but with caveats. This is what happened with call centers in the US which broadly went to places like India with big outsourcing firms.

That back-fired big time when the quality of service went to crap with companies rushing to bring these services back home.

Similar stories with tech outsourcing. There are things that have been successfully outsourced some functions to places like India, but there’s also a reason why high performing companies actually don’t seem to offshore key IP development efforts. The labor might be cheap but the true cost of bad quality is sky high.

So this will happen to an extent but cost can’t be the only factor driving decisions if the goal is long term success.

Good old Florida weather. Will try again Saturday.

Will admit to bing one of those that watch some of the adverts to the end. It’s certainly compelling and engaging filmmaking.

The content is good. Criticisms that the content is often shallow and more about the person than the topic are fair and valid. Your won’t really learn much actual skills apart from maybe the cooking ones. It’s interesting and inspiring content regardless.

You can find comparable stuff on YouTube if you know where to look and are willing to filter though things (lots of great biographic speeches on there and such) but I get their biz model and it makes sense. It’s basically super premium YouTube. They’ve attracted a very diverse and impressive mix of talent too.

There are some legacy things in place for now, but not building anything new there now. It’s basically off the table for new builds.

Most going this direction are, rightly, treading WFM as people treated travel reductions. Few are saying you never work face to face for any reason ever... but it shouldn’t be the default without any reason. For better or worse the days of just turning up at an office everyday by default are likely over in many places.

Same with travel. Default should be a Zoom (or similar) but if an in person meeting or workshop is warranted then do it and just be prepared to justify the travel cost. Offices are very expensive so rightfully so companies are re-evaluating how much commercial real estate they truly need to execute their mission successfully.

In articles NYT reporters have often shamed their own site for the number of 3rd party trackers the site uses.

I’m guessing a combination of that reporting, a general public shift against this sort of thing, along with serious questions about just how valuable all this tracking data really is led to this decision.

For anyone old enough to remember the old way with visiting travel agents to book a flight and then getting paper tickets in the mail the booking experience is actually quite good at the moment.

The actual travel experience itself though has totally gone in the other direction!

There was a lot of talk and press about how Jet was struggling to integrate into the Wal-Mart way both technically and culturally.

What will happen to the Jet office and team in Jersey? Will that just become a Wal-Mart Office now?

The first time I got in an Uber and saw a Lyft sticker in the window and a driver with two phones on the dash is when I knew for sure this whole “new economy” was doomed.

Both the user and the supplier we’re just gaming multiple apps to find the best deal with no loyalty whatsoever. It basically just boiled down to which VCs wanted to subsidize the transaction the most.

Yes, it’s as if the business models of these companies have forgotten all about price elasticity... especially when the “price” is crazy low (because you’re losing money hand over fist)

Yes, the cost of customer acquisition is certainly part of the current mess. While probably not strictly a gross margin issue, in practice it in effect is since that is very much a direct cost associated with the transaction.

There are certainly a lot of these upside down companies spending $100 to obtain a customer so they can sell a product for $70 that costs them $60 to make.

The first .com implosion was broadly marked by companies that lacked revenue getting crazy valuations.

The current “.com” implosion is broadly being marked by companies that do have “revenue” but only by using VC cash to create “fake markets.”

The whole story of buying pizzas from a normal pizza shop for $20 and selling them for $18 through your “app” is the stereotypical example of the current .com implosion. Anyone can sell $2 bills for $1, but that’s not a business and no you can’t “make it up on volume” because the only reason people are using your app is because you’re selling something for a crazy low unsustainable price.

The take home lesson from the current unfolding implosion is that a great product does not magically just equal a great business.

There’s tossing gasoline on a pile of cash and then there’s tossing gasoline on a pile of cash.

The bogus Adjusted EBITDA metrics popular with financially unhealthy startups and others really does need to stop.

In most cases these metrics may as well just say “Hey, if for a moment you ignore all the things about our business model that make it unsustainable our finances look quite good! Ain’t that cool.”

Of course the creative accounting that goes into these things tries to say they’re just “one time” expenses and other factors that justify ignoring these costs but of course most companies that play these games seem to have tons of “one time expenses” every quarter so...

This makes complete sense and there’s no question commercial restate is turning into a bit of a house of cards.

In some big cities you have many large buildings where their primary tenant was WeWork, which appears to be imploding, and now adding onto that the whole covid WFM shift where companies are starting to cancel and downsize future leases. When you start to dig into the revenue streams behind these buildings and the owners ability to pay the mortgage back it starts to look really shady in some cases.

Most buildings need a fairly high percentage of the floors to be leased out for the building rent to cover the mortgage and moving forward it seems a lot of buildings will struggle to hit that number. It’s going to be an interesting time for commercial office real estate.

On the plus side if you’re looking for office space there are going to be some amazing deals!